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A Vehicle of Destruction: What’s fueling Climate Change?
By: Bjorn Del B. Deade ​
THERIAN GROENEWALD/SHUTTERSTOCK
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) defined climate change as the long-term change in the Earth’s average weather patterns, affecting the planet’s overall climate system. They added that this causes, “rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in plant blooming times.” It should not be confused with global warming, which is the long-term increase in global temperature.
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According to Riedy (2016), the impacts of this crisis will endanger the natural and human systems, and ultimately, will pose an existential threat to human civilization. Additionally, The United Nations (UN) said that climate change will affect the people’s health, ability to grow food, housing, and livelihoods, which are all detrimental to the communities already vulnerable to climate impacts, such as those living in small island nations and other developing countries.
Climate change is a vehicle of destruction. And we’re not only its passengers – we’re also its active drivers,
fueling and driving it until we crash and burn.
Many people argue, especially skeptics, that climate change is a natural process, which in a sense, is actually true. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (2022), these natural processes include volcanic activities, variations in solar activity, and changes in the Earth’s reflectivity. However, their recent records of the Earth’s climate and its indirect measures, together with their studies about the Earth’s orbit around the sun, suggest that climate had been changing naturally through the years until the 1950s.
Since then, climate change has been driven by human influence. The increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), over the industrial era is the result of human activities (EPA, 2022). And when these gases get trapped in the atmosphere, they blanket the earth and the heat is absorbed and re-radiated, slowing outgoing heat in the atmosphere and warming the planet. This is called the Greenhouse Effect (NASA, n.d.).
ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
This high emission of greenhouse gasses caused by human activities, the root cause of global warming, is responsible for approximately 1.1°C increase in temperature since 1850-1900, which is problematic for the nations’ collective goal of limiting the global temperature to 1.5°C or even 2°C as per the 2015 Paris Agreement (IPCC, 2021). These activities include the burning of fossil fuels, generating electricity deforestation, manufacturing of products, and overconsumption (UN, n.d.).
Nevertheless, whether it is natural or man-made, climate change is here and it is real. This vehicle of destruction is going to crash and burn – and no one is safe from the impact.