This book has fascinated me tremendously about what is going to happen in the next century, and how we can prevent that from happening.
It explains a lot of interesting facts about global warming and its effects on our planet. It first talks about the changing Earth and what caused this transformation. The cause is not natural, but reflects our indifference towards our own planet by the sorry ways we treat our environment. These ways include the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and, most importantly, greenhouse gas (primarily CO2) emissions. It also explains how global warming occurs.
I also made a diagram on Paint in my computer explaining how this happens.
As we go on, we see the effects of this climate change by looking at comparisons of past and present pictures of places such as the Swiss Alps, Glacier National Park in Montana, and Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The snow and the glaciers have partly, or even completely melted, making a clear difference in the pictures.
The impact of global warming at the North and South Poles is explained as well, stating that parts of those areas are showing unmistakable signs of global warming. Chunks off the western Antarctic shelf have broken off from the huge continent made of ice. Natural species, such as the emperor penguin at Antarctica, or the polar bear of the Arctic, are facing certain extinction unless we are able to reverse these effects.
Because the sea level might rise 20 feet if Greenland’s entirety or the eastern Antarctic shelf had melted, maps might be redrawn, especially in the case of coastal areas. New York City’s Manhattan streets might be underwater if that happened, and so would major world cities like Miami, Amsterdam of the Netherlands, Calcutta of India, parts of Bangladesh, and most of the low-lying Oceania.
Global warming can cause infectious creatures/carriers (along with their diseases) to spread to areas previously a “Do Not Enter” zone. Take the West Nile virus in the US, it completely spread through the Lower 48 in just 5 years. Also, the season for most animals to hunt has changed.
With all this, you may think it’s impossible to reverse this effect. But you CAN. It won’t be immediate, but we can do it, but only if we don’t keep on doing these things.
Facts to know:
The USA is the area that produces the most CO2. Our Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) use has dipped from 1987 onward, preventing new ozone holes from forming.
Two advanced countries haven’t ratified the Kyoto Protocol yet: Australia and the USA. Many US cities, however, are abiding to the Kyoto Protocol.
This transfers a message throughout the reading world: global warming is devastating, but with cooperation, global warming can be reversed.
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