OK, if anyone says that climate change is unreal then they are not stepping and looking outside.
Average global temperatures are up over a degree. Ice caps are melting in the Arctic and Antarctic. The heat domes that settle over Australia, Europe and North America are getting larger and larger every year causing more wild fires and droughts. The question is now whether we can stop the change from occurring or merely mitigate the effects to shorten the length of impact time.
This is a hugely nebulous subject. Industry does not want to change their manufacturing methods due to rising costs so it denies climate change is real and thus extends the damage to the earth. Eco warriors want to change the manufacturing, recycling, energy supplies, and renewable energy usage so fast and so much it could collapse the economy of both the United States and the World. if not managed properly. When was the last time anything the world managed together actually worked for the benefit of all the earth?
The United States government is so deadlocked that nothing of real consequence gets done to help the situation. Fresh water is running out to the point that during the massive heat waves experienced in the world that the crops wither to the point that they may not recover for that year.
What are we to do?
Here are some suggestions:
Build desalination plants along the coasts powered by small nuclear plants to get water to the majority of the population that is within 250 miles of the US costs; 40% of the population is on the coast! (1)
Now desalinization plants may not be the answer either (4) (5). Costs, Plant Emissions, Energy usage and precipitate from the seawater. A lot of factors must be weighed but the bottom line is we have people to keep alive and we should start something now to replace the dwindling fresh water supplies. Only doing nothing is a totally incorrect path.
Start a program to plant trees and rebuild forests. Global emissions are 35 billion tones of carbon dioxide per year and rising. Trees pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere so if every person in the U.S. planted 5 trees every year it would add 1,710,000,000 trees per year pulling 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per tree, for a total of 82,080,000,000 tones of carbon dioxide possible to be removed. That would be a significant carbon sponge and a renewable resource and help with the deforestation issues in the world. (2) (3). If the rest of the world did it as well it could make a change.
Requesting that the rainforests be left alone and a cessation of slash and burn tactics would also help. The more technically advanced countries could offset the loss of income to those impacted by the cessation by having companies invest in green manufacturing technologies giving better jobs and lowering the need to slash and burn.
Lower birth rates throughout the world to reduce resource usage. We can either plan for it or watch it happen consequentially because we failed to understand the needs of the planet. This might appear to go against the inherent freedoms of our society, however, we must remember that along with the rights that we have in this society we also have duties and responsibilities that have purchased those rights. We must provide for the future of our children, and starting now to fix these issues is better than waiting and saying that they are minor and do not really exist. We must also recognize in the United States that we need to understand if what we are doing really matters for the people and the ecosystem or is it just that the government is paying lip service to the voters to get re-elected and are following some unseen agenda that benefits only a few.
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