Is it the middle of fall or the middle of summer?
People around the globe are feeling heat rise rapidly. Although the temperature is both dangerous and increasing at an alarming rate, there are people who believe climate change is simply not real. Humans often react to immediately visible problems and threats, and climate change does not happen overnight.
Throwing trash on the ground or forgetting to recycle will not instantly impact the Earth, but over time it will all add up.
Massive amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into our atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. A large contributor to that pollution is coal. Rapid carbon dioxide production from coal burning is not the only reason our atmosphere is being polluted.
Another greenhouse gas is methane.
Robert Goodman, a turtle biologist and biology professor at Citrus College said, “Methane is 23 times worse than carbon dioxide. But carbon dioxide gets all the attention because there’s just so much more of it.”
Goodman has a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in biological sciences, but it didn’t take earning a degree to make him want to help our earth in any way he could.
In California, people are no longer allowed to throw organic waste into our everyday trash bins. It must be composted or put into the green trash bin.
“I got all the aluminum cans and plastic bottles that students leave around. I’ll recycle those.” says Goodman. He has been recycling and composting organic waste properly for around 30 years.
Putting organic waste into a regular trash bin will have it sent to our landfills, which causes those materials to be buried under trash put in an oxygen-free environment.
“We can call this being anaerobic,” Goodman said. “Bacteria that thrive in the oxygen-free environment, break down that organic waste and their byproduct is methane. Our landfills produce lots and lots of methane.”
Earth is home to many living creatures. Simultaneously as carbon dioxide from deforestation is being released into our air, animals are losing their homes. When the climate changes from the carbon atoms heating our atmosphere, biomes with glaciers are melting causing the tides to rise. As the tides rise, beaches disappear and become part of the ocean floor.
According to the world’s oldest sea turtle and conservation group, the Sea Turtle Conservancy, “Increased incubation temperatures could result in more female sea turtles, which reduces reproductive opportunities and decreases genetic diversity.”
Turtles have the ability to adapt to different climates and have proven that over millions of years but with this rapid they are unable to smoothly evolve.
The lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere is called the troposphere. This layer is the same layer of atmosphere in which we actively breathe. It is within it the heat is trapped from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
A common misconception and contribution to the disbelief of climate change is that there are parts of earth’s climate that are cooling rather than heating up. To a certain extent that is true. One layer of our atmosphere is cooling because the heat from our troposphere is trapped and not being released into the other layers of the atmosphere.
“We can look at things individually. But we gotta look at things from a bigger picture.” Goodman said.
Despite popular belief, climate and weather are two different things. Weather is the atmosphere’s short-term physical conditions. Climate is long-term weather patterns in different areas around the world.
Annually, the atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuates and this is because of seasonal changes. Carbon dioxide levels are proven to be increasing around 0.5 percent per year since 1958.
Climate change isn’t strictly about rising temperatures in our climate, it is about the change in it because of the damage humans are actively contributing to the earth.
