Can you imagine a world with a blue arctic? I can, in fact, we’re already half way there! And we might be only ten years away. Why? Because we’re altering the climate forever as we know it. Carbon has formed from organic matter over the past 300 million years. Then we dig it up and put it in our cars. Our cars mix this carbon with oxygen, as we burn it, and it becomes CO2. CO2 is fine for the environment, without it, there would be no life! The issue is that we’re adding too much CO2 to the atmosphere and it’s starting to back fire on us. In fact we’ve added so much CO2 through cars, trucks, planes and electrical power plants that the global temperature has gone up by 1 degree. That may seem like nothing in day-to-day life but it only took a change of 4 degrees to start the last ice age.
All this CO2 in the environment, which makes our lives so comfortable, is building up in the atmosphere. When the sun’s rays hit the earth, some of them stay, and some of them leave through the atmosphere. As the CO2 builds up, less and less heat can leave the atmosphere. This is called the green house affect. Therefore, the more CO2, the more heat. Well that’s great, right? Being able to suntan in our back yards and grow mangos in northern Ontario sounds appealing? But with all this heat, the arctic is starting to melt and as the arctic melts, hundreds of thousand of liters of water will go gushing into the ocean. All this water would put coastal areas undersea level. When this happens, fresh water will be scarce. The world will turn to countries like Canada with abundance of fresh water for their supply. Possible food shortages may occur. This will lead to disputes and depravation and when people are deprived, they turn to violence. Not so pretty anymore is it? The good news is that we can stop this process. There are three branches of solutions. There is the technical solution, which addresses what we can do to halt global warming. Secondly, there is a Policy solution. Which...
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