School students across the world, including India, are staging a global climate strike. Swedish teen activist and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg has called for the movement, urging students to skip school every Friday, to call leaders' attention to the need for policies to reduce the threat of climate change. But why should a common man sit up and take note of this global Fridays For Future movement?
Here’s a simple example from Bengaluru to explain why one must be worried when environmentalists say, “Climate change is real”. While August 2018 was a bit chilly, the same month this year was slightly warmer. The city, which is known for its pleasant weather for the most part of the year, has been facing erratic weather in recent years. That’s one of the results of global warming or climate change.
Another recent critical instance to explain global warming is the floods in Kerala, which claimed thousands of lives and houses. The state saw extreme rainfall for two consecutive years. In an earlier interview to TNM, Venu G Nair, a meteorologist at the Centre for Earth Research and Environment Management, had pointed to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said that all tropical countries will lose their boundaries because of flooding caused due to warming of oceans. While warning that global warming is a reality, he also noted that the solution to this is to reduce the carbon emission on a global level.
That’s why environmentalists have been rallying for public transport, reducing plastic usage and increasing green cover, among others. At the heart of these concerns is the growing carbon emission.
Carbon emission refers to the carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) emitted by vehicles, aircraft and factories. According to Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), an autonomous intergovernmental organisation, due to the higher energy demand, the carbon emission rose 1.7% in 2018, a historic high of 33.1 gigatonnes and the highest since 2013.
Power plants have been dependent on fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas, to meet the energy demands of industries, transport and service sectors, thus increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Add to this, particles called Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) emitted from air conditioners and refrigerators, and other pollutants. With these pollutants being trapped in the air, the end result is global warming.
The high concentration of human-added greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, gradually increases the overall temperature of the earth’s atmosphere, and this is global warming.
As a result of high atmospheric heat, it melts glaciers and ice sheets. The oceans also start absorbing the heat, which translates in the increase of the global sea level. As one might have learnt in Physics lesson, heat expands water. This culminates in erratic changes in storms, and even cause floods and shoreline erosion.
Did you know plastic is also a prime culprit in the climate change phenomena? According to a report by Center for International Environmental Law’s (CIEL), in 2019 alone, the production and burning of plastic release more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which is equivalent to the pollution from 189 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants.
The components of plastic - ethylene and propylene - are derivatives of coal, gas and oil. So when exposed to heat, plastic breaks down and emits methane and ethylene, which are greenhouse gases.
It is important to also note the impact of climate change on human lives and health. Apart from the changing floods and cyclonic patterns claiming lives and destroying livelihoods, it also causes deaths due to heatwave and diseases, such as influenza, pneumonia and bronchitis.
For these reasons and even more, climate activists of all age groups have been asking their leaders to change climate policies to keep the global temperature below 1.5°C, and urging the public against deforestation, plastic use and other practices that threaten the environment.
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