Blog Post 4

 Logan Deacetis

Will we ever be able to correct climate change

https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-climate-change/ 

Humans have been emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an alarming rate for a pretty long time now. This rise in temperature is causing an extraordinary amount of problems around the world. Some of which include sea levels rising, droughts, storms, heat waves, glaciers melting, and rise in ocean temperatures. All these problems are linked to cause other other problems. An example of this is warmer oceans can contain more carbon dioxide, resulting in more acidic waters. Ocean acidification is a phenomena that kills corals, clams, snails, and a variety of other marine species by dissolving their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons. You may be curious on why the rise of greenhouse gases is an issue, but this is quite simple to answer. There is no one thing that is causing it, it is today’s age all put together. What I mean by this is that it is a combination of clearing forests, generating power, manufacturing goods, using transportation, producing food, powering buildings, and even consuming too much. One common factor you may see in all of this various types of emissions is th use of fossil fuels. The real issue comes in to changing lifestyles in order to fix this. Finding alternative fuels and changing people’s mindset on climate change are some of the biggest obstacles that we face. In order to change the type of fuel we use would mean people would have to change their entire lifestyles and the government would have to spend millions of dollars in order to change everything that uses fossil fuels. Despite this being nearly impossible with changing everything and spending all this money, we would also have to set in a legislative plan in order to fix this. However with the change in viewpoints of government every 4 years it would be nearly impossible for anything to stick. One government would set their plan for the first four years then if someone else gets elected, and if they have an opposing viewpoint, everything they did in the first four years would be a waste of time because they could go back and change everything for the next four year. Not only this there is another issue due to the emissions. Even if we quit all emissions right now, yes the temperature increase would plateau, but the issue comes in after that. Despite the temperatures stopping to rise, the temperature would remain this high for centuries. One reason for this is something called a time lag. A time lag is a delay in doing something and seeing the results. Since everything we’ve done is nearly impossible to fix and that there is a lasting effect for centeriues, and the time lag, the effects are nearly irreversible.