WE ARE ON THE EDGE - THE CRISIS

Human, known to be the smartest living being ever exist on the planet Earth, yet there one more achievement we had earned “THE DESTROYER OF PLANET EARTH”. We spend millions of dollars in energy production, techy inventions, space explorations, and furnishing, and luxury all at the cost of sacrificing the one most important thing we have, which is working 24*7 endlessly just to keep us ALIVE. This is the gamble we are playing, where we exactly know that we are going to lose, and lose bad! One act leading to multiple catastrophical domino effects. The crime that can lead to hundreds of causalities, deaths, and refugees. Something that can lead us to the NEXT MASS EXTINCTION. Can you guess what is it...? if your answer is human or climate change or plastic or all of them you are one hundred percent correct.

We call ourselves “homo-sapiens” which literally translates to “wise-man”, do you really think we deserved the title to be called as wise/smart/intelligent? When we had created the weapons of mass destruction, machines that are exploiting and emitting poison, and a poison that is slowly killing every being (plastic and co2). YES! We are the ones who created nuclear weapons, CO2 emitters, and PLASTIC….yes we don’t deserve the title of wise/smart, because we tried to be over-smart and now we are going to pay for it!! We are losing everything our forests, our ice sheets, species, our oceans, our atmosphere, and so many others to list. At last, we don’t have any legacies to leave behind, except, just an over-exploited planet!

All these might get TRUE but there’s still hope, we still have time but we are on EDGE, we have to act NOW!.. it’s CODE RED for us!.. before it’s too late!... before we lose everything!... WE NEED TO WAKE UP!!

Our current climate status and damage is terrifying!!

Our home planet continues to heat up rapidly and it’s not slowing down, every year there’s at least 0.08-degree rise per decade in the global temperature i.e. around 1.5 degrees since 1850. It doesn’t seem much, right? Just 1.5 degree… but that 1.5-degree rise is the core reason for climate change causing our atmosphere to heat up, increased wildfires, melting ice sheets, dying oceans, increased volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, unexpected weather changes, heatwaves, dying wildlife, droughts, scorchers, climate refugees, drowning cities, global economic crisis, and many many other effects. And we are experiencing these the most during the last few years and it will continue to rise if we don’t act now! Some facts below might help you why –

· The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in our atmosphere, as of July 2021, is the highest it has been in human history.

· Eleven percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by humans are due to deforestation, comparable to the emissions from all of the passenger vehicles on the planet.

· Scorcher, According to NOAA, global temperatures in July 2021 were higher than any other July on record, making it likely the hottest month the world has seen since records began in 1880. Analysis by NOAA shows that average global temperatures in 2020 were 1.76 degrees F (0.98 degrees C) warmer than the 20th-century average, making it the second-hottest year on record. In fact, the seven warmest years in the 1880-2020 record have all occurred since 2014.

· We are losing Mangroves. Just 0.7% of the world’s forests are coastal mangroves, yet they store up to 10 times as much carbon per hectare as tropical forests. If we continue to lose mangroves at this rate, they may disappear within the next century.[1]

· More than 1 million species are at risk of extinction by climate change, it’s been estimated that if we continue every species could go extinct by 2050.[2]

· Sea levels are rising faster today than ever before. Melting ice sheets and glaciers and warming oceans lead to higher sea levels. Since 1900, sea levels have risen faster than in any preceding century in at least the last 3,000 years

· Arctic is in danger. Between 2011 and 2020, annual Arctic sea ice reached its lowest level since at least 1850 and late-summer Arctic sea ice was smaller than at any time in at least the past 1,000 years.

· Average wildlife populations have dropped by 60 percent in just over 40 years.[3]

· Drowning cities, it’s been estimated that by 2050 most of the coastal cities will be inside the ocean.

Not only climate change, the terrible event we are facing but along with it a destructive weapon created by human also leading to extinction, PLASTIC!! nearly 12 million tonnes of plastic are poured into the ocean every year. Every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans. Plastics consistently make up 80% of all marine debris. These are just the visible effects of plastic but there’s more to it, MICROPLASTIC, extremely small pieces of plastic debris in the environment resulting from the disposal and breakdown of consumer products and industrial waste. Studies have shown that, the average person eats 70,000 microplastics each year. Plastic is killing more than 1.1 million seabirds and animals every year. Today there is NO animal left who is free from this poison. Now, these micro-killers also reached deep in the arctic, study. 4

These are only a few things that are happening around us but there are many.

Continue reading in part 2, to get an insight into how climate change affecting us, what are we doing about it, some other benefits in the process of saving nature.

Written by- Shriyash Akulwar

Edited by - Pradyumn

WE ARE ON THE EDGE - THE CRISIS Part 1

https://lifeatliterature.blogspot.com/2021/09/we-are-on-edge-crisis-part-2.html