The Death of Earth

The consequences of pollution

 

For over 100 years, we have been poisoning our planet. Dumping massive amounts of pollution into the air we breath and the water drink. The U.S. alone currently emits approximately 400,000 metric tons of pollution annually. As the population of our country and the world continues to grow, pollution will grow as well, unless we start moving toward a greener way of life. If we continue to destroy our environment without ever thinking twice we will face disasters of an unprecedented level.

The worst of these would be the threat of global warming. Global warming, often referred to as climate change, is the warming of our planet’s climate. Scientists all over the world agree that this warming is being caused primarily by pollutant gases that are emitted by humans, these pollutants create a greenhouse-effect. They are called greenhouse-gases, and they trap heat radiation from the sun in our atmosphere which warms the Earth, just like a greenhouse traps heat inside of itself.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a United Nations scientific research panel made up of the top climate scientists from all over the world. They researched if global warming was happening, if humanity was causing it, and if we were, what the effects of it would be. The IPCC concluded in late 2007 that humanity was causing global warming and that we needed to drastically lower our greenhouse-gas emissions immediately or face grave consequences. These consequences include a global epidemic of tropical diseases, the flooding of continental coast-lines, and the extinction of several of our planet’s plant and animal species.

Diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are prevalent in the tropical regions of the globe and kill thousands of people every year. This is because they, and other fatal diseases like them, need a warmer environment like the tropics to survive. If we allow global warming to happen, our entire planet will be just the environment these horrible diseases need to survive and spread, we will face a global epidemic that will result in the deaths of millions.

The warming of our planet is already causing the polar ice caps to melt into the ocean. Imagine, all of the ice in both the North and South Poles melting into the ocean, sea levels around the world would rise drastically. Scientists say that water levels would rise so much it would completely flood our coastlines. Cities along the coast like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle would suffer a similar fate as the legendary city of Atlantis, they would be lost in the oceans.

If the climate of our planet changes, then many species of animal and plant life will die out. Not only will these species be lost forever, but the natural cycle of the world will be disrupted because of these now missing links. The biosphere of our entire planet will be thrown into complete chaos.

If we do not go green and lower our air pollution soon, every major city will have a giant smog cloud over it just like Los Angeles. Furthermore, the more we pollute our air, the less clean and more harmful our air will be. This means our lungs would pay the price, and deaths from lung disease would skyrocket.

One of the most important effects of our pollution that is already taking place is that it is hurting our ability to grow food. Pollution kills the nutrients in soil that our crops need to grow. Since man-made pollutants have been getting into our soil, the organic materials that plants need have been cut-in half. More pollution will really hurt our ability to grow food, which means less food for a world with a growing population.

The survival of the human race depends on the survival of our environment. If we don’t act we will literally kill our environment, and if that dies, the human race will die along with it.

If we do act, by going green, we will preserve our mother Earth and all of it’s beauty for future generations so that they can be amazed by the natural wonders of our world just as all of us have been. We would save our planet, and ourselves.

Going green is major, nation-wide changes that we need like using more clean, alternative energies to power our cars and homes, or finding ways to lower our greenhouse-gas emissions. But it is also the smaller things that each of us can do that make a difference. Like using the plastic trays at lunch instead of the Styrofoam ones (that will still be trash in 2,000 years) or throwing your trash away in a trash can as opposed to on the ground somewhere. The Environmental Protection Agency tells everyone of us to; reduce how much you use, reuse what you can, and recycle what you can’t. It’s that simple!

We have to love our planet, and we have to learn to live and grow with it, not off of it.

-A. Hellier

~ by rantsfromandy on January 12, 2009.