A Few Effects of Climate Change Today

/ 15 October 2009

This post could effectively go on forever given how many things fall into the realm that its title opens us up to for discussion. But I promise that I’ll only touch on the bare minimum so that it doesn’t take you an hour to read, more like just a maximum of twenty minutes to read. I regularly talk about either the Apple universe or post about school, so this post will also be a far cry from what you normally read here. But, that’s one of the fun parts of being an annual participant of Blog Action Day.

Anyway, the first and oh so obvious effect of climate change is the change in weather patterns on the global scale. Here in Minnesota mild summers (only one week of true unbearable heat) and warmer winters are one sign of this. So was the weather he had this past week. To put it bluntly, it snowed. Snow on Halloween isn’t necessarily out of the ordinary here, but snow 2-3 weeks ahead of Halloween is. None of us were really expecting it or prepared for it. That’s just locally, globally there are huge examples to draw on that climate change is behind. Pretty much any natural disaster in the past few years, arguably including Katrina, was caused because of a change on the global weather systems.

Most of the many other effects that we see today because of climate change all stem off of the change in weather patterns. Take natural disasters, due to them there end up being death tolls in the thousands and homeless numbers even higher (which gets amplified at the moment due to the economy). As a side effect of this whole towns and cities can be leveled (China earlier this year…). Overall its very bad news.

Sadly, though lots of the effects come from the natural features and systems of our planet, the true cause of global climate change (formerly known as global warming) is us. Humans. Most of you fully understand this, but way less of you think about it every time you think about climate change and its effects on us. These effects hit us hardest, and in ways because of the very dependencies that are why we have caused climate change by hurting the planet. Fossil Fuels. AKA Cars. The single biggest way any individual is consistently causing their part of climate change is by driving to and from work or school. Then, on the turnaround, some of the changes in weather patterns put a damper in the traffic conditions, and hey, more fuel is used up and more climate change will ultimately occur. One endless cycle.

The hybrid technology that Toyota and others are picking up on at least minimizes this for owners of their cars, but doesn’t eliminate it all together. The electric cars that made just a blip on the scene years ago, and those mods that are being developed today truly eliminate those single cars from adding to the climate change crisis. Retooling all the factories is a first step to overhauling the industry that controls the cars we drive today into cars that will heal, not hurt, our planet. But taking the local Ford plant in Saint Paul as an example, that won’t happen easily.

More needs to be done, more has to be done, to stop the declining outlook of climate change today. Speak up! There are multiple ways to do it, and today is the one day that worldwide bloggers are uniting in order to make a dent in this issue! Have a blog? Even though you aren’t registered still writing a post on climate change today will be helpful. Don’t have a blog? Then either commenting on the thousands of entries on the topic today, or tweeting with useful links is always great. Live in the United States? Then consider adding your name to those across the world calling on President Obama to lead on climate change is one way to help. The point is there are endless ways to help, just take this issue into your own hands by taking action and speaking up! If you do it today then you’ll be part of the millions focusing on the issue in the same 24-hour timeframe. Thanks, Alex.

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