Something we all need to think about

Oh, climate change. The thing that everyone knows about, but either doesn’t talk about or refuses to believe is happening despite scientific evidence.

Some individuals refute the existence of climate change the way they refute the existence of wizards, dragons or fairies. I once worked at a broadcast news station with a meteorologist who not only said climate change did not exist despite her extensive knowledge of changing weather patterns which included colder winters and hotter summers but she claimed that even if it did exist, humans did not contribute in any way.

According to new scientific research by NASA, however, extensive greening in vegetation has been found across Canada and Alaska. The information was gathered from 29 years of data from Landsat satellites. NASA also included the fact that temperatures are still rapidly increasing in the Arctic, which can be evidenced with ice falling into the Arctic Ocean in large chunks on an hourly (if not more often) basis, thus raising the sea level. Eventually, as we all should know, this will lead to a rise in sea levels around the entire world which could devastate our way of life, if not for us, for our children or our children’s children — unless we start thinking about what we can do differently to affect climate change and terrestrial ecosystems.

For anyone still leery about whether or not massive chunks of ice are falling into the Arctic Ocean as a result of climate change, Italian pianist Ludovcio Einaudi composed and performed an arrangement to raise awareness for Arctic preservation in collaboration with Greenpeace. Einaudi plays his beautifully haunting arrangement on a floating platform in the Arctic Ocean in Norway while huge chunks of ice from the Arctic disappear into the sea. Watch the video to see for yourself, and visit voicesforthearctic.org.

Scientists believe that climate change is caused by the “greenhouse effect.” By definition, the greenhouse effect is “the trapping of the sun’s warmth in a planet’s lower atmosphere due to the greater transparency of the atmosphere to visible radiation from the sun than to infrared radiation emitted from the planet’s surface.”

What does this mean? Humans amp up the production of carbon dioxide, nitrogen from fertilizers and the use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions which in turn warms temperatures and enhances plant growth.

To put this in even simpler terms: gas emissions —> warmer temperatures —> longer growing seasons —> happy plants.

So the world is getting greener and maybe momentarily more attractive, however, even pretty things break. Scientists may not have clear cut measures to reduce our effects on the climate and the world in general as of yet, other than finding alternatives to fossil fuels, using renewable power, wasting less and getting involved by informing others of what we are doing to the very world we need to survive. But we do need to recognize that this is happening and we can try to do something about it — even if that something is simply making others aware.