Regulating Fear: Understanding the Causes of Climate Change

byAnaRego

94 followers

4 years ago

Understanding the causes of climate change, can help parents regulate their worry, and get ready to act upon true valuable solutions.

What is Climate Change?

In order to understand the causes of climate change, we must first understand what is climate change. Let us begin with weather. We all pretty much know that. Weather is a rainy or sunny day. It is a warm or cold season. Weather is the normal way in which we describe the climate of a particular place.

For instance, it is normal to rain just about every day in Scotland. It doesn't snow much there, nor in Denmark. When it is normal to be shoveling snow in North America, people in Australia have their air conditioner systems full blast to cold, because it is so very hot.

In Florida there was a hurricane season that started by the end of September, in Portugal extremely high waves started during the last two weeks of August, and Olives were ready for picking in October. This is weather and climate is the weather of a particular place. When you combine, all the Earth's various climates, you get what NASA calls Earth Climate.

Now that we got that understood, let us embrace the knowledge about climate change. What is climate change? This thing that every media channel talks about and that scares people around the World.

Climate change is just that. A change in the norm in the climate of a particular place. Weather changes from day to day, and sometimes it changes two or three times a day. In the Portuguese Azorean Islands locals like to say that they get all four seasons in a day. It might rain in the morning, you can sit for lunch, in the beach front, in the sunshine, you need a sweater during the afternoon and a blanket at night. These are small changes in weather and climate in a particular place. So, weather changes daily.

Climate takes a very long time to change. It can take hundreds or millions of years to change. When climate changes, unusual weather events start happening in a particular place. For instance, we don't have a hurricane season in Florida anymore. Where there were rainy winters, the climate might become dry and hot. In places where was unusual to have tropical storms and hurricanes or tornadoes, it becomes usual and a worry. Climate change is also the change in a places usual warmth levels. You might have been pretty sure, most of the time, that you would get lots of nice sunny, warm days in the summer, and now you might notice that it is not so sure anymore, and you get some real cold days in the summer, with even some dramatic unusual events. This is climate change. The climate of a specific place changes from the normal and usual way of being. It becomes unpredictable.

What Has Caused Climate Change?

Remember we spoke about the Earth Climate being all the local climates combined together? Well if local climate changes so does Earth Climate. This takes thousands or even millions of years to happen. Earth Climate is always changing somewhat, but now it has become a cause of real worry for our future generations.

Some changes in Earth Climate might seem very small but small changes in Earth Climate can have major effects in the planet's ecosystems, the life of human beings' and other animals. Some of these effects are already happening. Warm sunny days in Finland makes the ice and snow to melt. The oceans are rising are soon to be expected to steal some of our coastal properties. Agriculture is starting to show that some crops do not grow as usual, and the lack of fresh water is starting to become unsustainable, where before there was abundance.

The temperature of the Planet changes. It has gotten warmer. When we see the degrees rising we might think that they are not very high, and that they might not make a big difference but indeed they do.

Scientist around the World think that temperature will continue to rise, and that with that more ice and snow will melt, which will make our oceans rise even more. Some places will get colder, others hotter, and storms become stronger and dangerous.

Today we know that CO2 emissions are a major cause of Earth's Climate Change. CO2 emissions are positively related with human development. This means that countries who are well-developed are larger culprits. Underdeveloped countries have much less CO2 emissions but many will suffer devastating effects due to climate change.

How Did We Get Here?

As we think about climate changing, we can feel very powerless. That's why we need to understand how we got here in the first place.

The CO2 levels in our atmosphere today are probably the highest in the last 800,000 years or more, according to the American Museum of American History. So, how did we really get into this mess?

Humans on Earth have always focused on becoming more developed and have more comfortable lives. A friend of mine says that a human beings' goal is to be comfortable and happy. Since our presence on this Earth, humans have traveled to learn with each other, settled within communities, and try to flourish. When things got tough in any particular place humans fought for their understood rights, or searched for better places to settle.

Life when on, and tools to make life more sustainable and developed took place. We made adjustments and developed an amazing curiosity for discovering. Everyone wanted a better and easier life, and so they searched for it.

Let us jump ahead a bit into the 1600, or this article will become a book. We discover coal and we started to replace the burning of wood with the burning of coal. This is where we started.

We are specialists at searching for advantages, and so coal was an available material, and it took up less energy to produce the equivalent amount of heat as wood.

In the 1800 we invented boilers that would pull trains and steamships. We were moving into progress. Then, we got wheels, and by 1915 Ford was selling over 500,000 cars a year, mostly powered by oil or ethanol. By the year 2000 there were more than 700 million cars all over the World. We kept focusing on comfort and happiness, and we just kept going.

Appliances that could do anything. Faster and more luxurious cars. Airplanes that could take us anywhere. Food production without limits, and factory production of all kinds.

This is not the first time that Earth's climate has changed. The difference about this particular climate change is that it is the first time that human activity has caused it. This is so important to understand, because it is with this understanding that we can find real solutions to protect our children's future.

What Can I Do As a Parent?

By understanding that human activity is causing climate changing, we can think of what we need to change. We cannot stop climate change, but we can surely stop it from getting worse. With our solutions we can buffer some damage and effects of climate change, but most important, if we act now, our children will know that we left them a legacy of hope and action for a better World.

So, here are some things that you can do right now:

1. When machine washing clothes or dishes, make sure that you have a full load;
2. Save water, and try to recycle used water in plants, or sanitary devices like the toilet;
3. If you are not watching TV, shut it off;
4. Use the stairs, instead of the elevator;
5. If and when you can, change to green energy all around the house, and replace the use of oils, carbon and gas;
6. Drive less and walk every time that it's possible;
7. Fly less and change to a green energy provider;
8. Try to travel by electric bus or by electric train;
9. If you must use heating or air conditioning devices, make sure that you have good isolation, and make sure that you switch to a green energy provider;
10. Change your diet. You don't need to stop eating meat but you should reduce it. If you reduce it by half, you will cut by 40% your CO2 footprint, and your body will thank you for it.

Conclusion

Although we face a terrific bad crisis with climate change, we can be active participants in this struggle. We can protect our children's future, and we can teach them to adapt to the new challenges that they will face. Each individual act might not seem much but together as a collective group of human beings' we will make an amazing difference in our children's future.

Stay well!

Ana

climateparenting.com