Hearing about climate change catastrophes is exceedingly common in our modern age. Pollution, extinction, drought: it’s just part of our daily lives. Still, our effect on this planet that we call home is often understated, or even ignored. A growing group of people don’t think climate change is real or don’t see how it will affect them. But it is affecting them, and it will get worse. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Earth has experienced five major mass extinction events before. Experts believe that we are in the sixth. It is natural to make the point that the long term rise in temperature is quite small—the temperature varies much more in a single day. The truth is, however, that that small change in temperature isn’t insignificant. Scientists from NASA estimate that the global temperature has already changed by nearly two degrees Fahrenheit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that small change in temperature has led to a global sea level increase of approximately eight inches since 1880. Nearly 30 percent of the population of the United States lives in highly populated coastal areas that could be affected by these changes. The populations of affected coastal cities already reach 25 million, and by the 2070’s (when a lot of damage is expected to occur) will be much larger. According to a study conducted by the European Union, damages from climate disasters could be in the billions, even trillions of dollars at the current rate of inflation. Sea level is expected to rise by three feet by the 2100’s, flooding and potentially submerging coastal towns and cities like Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Miami. Continuing to look into the future, we can see that climate change will cause problems that we are already facing to get exponentially worse. In the next thirty years, 250,000 additional deaths per year will be indirectly caused by malnutrition and heat stress, problems worsened by climate change. The rise in temperature also affects weather patterns. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has measured heat wave frequency, intensity, and duration since the 1960s: the changes are easily noticeable. Since 1961, the number of heat waves in the United States has increased from an average of just over two per year to more than six, and the heat wave season lasts fifty days longer. Today, heat waves in the United States are 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter on average than they were fifty years ago. Between the years 2000 and 2020, up to 70 percent of the United States experienced abnormally dry seasons caused by heat waves and drought. During most of 2012, more than half of the United States experienced drought. Hurricane intensity has also noticeably increased in the last twenty years. Eight of the past ten most active years for hurricanes since 1950 have occurred since the mid-1990s. In the face of these statistics, few can deny that the change in temperature affects the planet and people.
However, we can’t only look at how this problem is affecting humans. It most affects the other species of our planet. Deforestation, agriculture, urbanization, hunting, climate change, pollution, and invasive species have caused biodiversity to plummet. The natural rate of extinction is one extinction per million species per year. That’s about ten extinctions every year. The rate of extinction we currently face is approximately three species per hour. That is approximately 26,000 species every year, more than 2,500 times the rate of extinction from a healthy Earth. An extinction level this high has not been seen in 65 million years —when the dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid. Now, humanity is an asteroid. This destruction of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as flooding or drought. When one species goes extinct, say from destruction of habitat, the species that eats it struggles, and its population declines. Because of that lowered population, it cannot survive an extended dry season, and it dies out. The animals higher in the food chain would be fine if the pollinators in the area weren’t dying out. Because of the lack of pollinators, herbivores and subsequently carnivores begin to die. This doesn’t just apply to other animals—humans are part of the food chain, and are just as affected by how ecosystems around us function.
The honey bee exemplifies this dependency. According to the BBC, “Of the one hundred crop species that feed ninety percent of humanity, over seventy of them are pollinated by bees.” Honey bees are the leading pollinators of our world, and thirty billion dollars a year in crops depend on their pollination. If bees were to go extinct, a significant number of crops that they pollinate would die off, and starvation would be imminent for the entire world. A world without bees couldn’t sustain our current population, and our population is growing, while the bee population shrinks. The reasons for this point towards the destruction of habitats such as flower meadows in favor of, ironically, farmland. Studies also point to a type of pesticide called Neonic pesticides. Neonics are neurotoxins that confuse the bees, making them unable to fly and locate food. Another reason is climate change. The variation in weather can confuse the bees and the flowers, making it harder for bees to know when to come out of hibernation and for flowers to know when to open. This means that bees stay in hibernation far too long or not long enough and it means that flowers open and die or never open—causing bees to starve. These effects could cause pollination levels to drop by as much as fifty percent.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much that any person can do to stop all of this, to save the bees and save human and animal life on Earth. The Climate Accountability Institute and the Carbon Disclosure Project say that just one hundred companies are at fault for over seventy percent of carbon emissions. It is nice to think that people can change the climate problem by recycling, driving an electric car, or getting only renewable energy from an energy company, and while it can ease someone’s conscience, unless everyone (including the companies responsible for the majority of emissions) makes a change, nothing will change.