Climate Change: the problem

 

Human beings are killing the planet. In less than the last one century, we have belched out an unpardonable amount of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere. The following graph from NASA’s website makes the picture abundantly clear. “It is undeniable that human activities have warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land and that widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred,” says NASA.

Graph from NASA

The earth’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.18 degrees Celsius since the late 19^th century and human activities are the cause. The warmest years in the history of the planet were 2016 to 2020. Our oceans have absorbed a substantial part of this heat. Consequently the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are decreasing in mass. Greenland lost an average of 279 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2019. Antarctica’s loss was 148 billion tons per year.

Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world including the Himalayas. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased tremendously in the recent past. With all this melting away of ice, the global sea level is rising menacingly. In the last century, the seas rose by 20 centimetres. The rate keeps increasing. That is a serious threat to a lot of lands. Some countries may just go under water. The Maldives, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands and six other countries may not exist in the next century if the planet continues to be heated at the present rate.

This rising heat is affecting other countries too in various ways. For example, let us recall the extreme events like floods and hurricanes that wreaked havoc in many countries recently. The human species seems to be digging its own grave with its utter disregard for the planet’s health and wellbeing.

Writing about this problem two decades ago, philosopher-scientist Fritjof Capra blamed the greed of capitalism as the primary cause. “Most of our present environmental and social problems are deeply embedded in our economic systems,” he wrote in his 2002-book, The Hidden Connections. He pointed his finger explicitly at the “current form of global capitalism” which is ecologically and socially unsustainable. More environmental regulations, better business practices and more efficient technologies are not enough, he said. “We need a deeper systemic change.”

The current system keeps on creating more wealth for the already affluent while leaving the vast majority in pathetic conditions which force them to engage in practices that are not conducive for the planet’s wellbeing. The practices of the affluent are even more hazardous as they produce more pollutants than all the livelihood struggles of the poor people.

One of the first things to be done if we wish to save the planet is to change this game called global capitalism, argues Capra. How do we do that? We can look at some possibilities in the next post.

PS. This post is part of Blogchatter’s CauseAChatter