Our planet has not yet reached that level of disaster where climate change will completely destroy it. We still have a few more years to live normally. However, everybody noticed the effects climate change already has on Earth. The bad news is that those effects are only going to become increasingly visible. Over the last twenty years, the rate of sea level rise increased with about 50%. Also, in certain areas, this year, the temperatures have reached historic values, never before seen. Moreover, this last three years were reportedly the ones with the hottest temperatures ever.

Climate change is real

The generally-accepted explanation is that global warming is human-made. It became so threatening because of the high levels of carbon dioxide and methane emissions in our planet’s atmosphere. And experts are worried that no program to reduce emissions is efficient enough to stop climate change. Not even the Paris Agreement from which Donald Trump withdrew the United States because he thinks it’s useless. The main problem is that even if each country would reduce these emissions at the accepted level, global warming would still continue. By 2050, our planet will still become over 2 degrees Celsius hotter.

As unimportant as two degrees might be, this event will have serious effects. Especially in the areas that are the main suppliers of food for the entire globe. The South of Europe and a great part of the Middle East will face severe drought by the year 2080. And because sea levels will rise, the big cities on the coasts will face an imminent flooding danger. Apart from the already growing number of extinct species, the melting of the ice in Antarctica might set free a series of ancient and long forgotten diseases. Because of them, the humanity might even face extinction.

Disastrous consequences

Experts are saying that it’s a nearly impossible task to maintain the temperature of the Earth below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Some are saying that for this to happen, people might need to reach a negative emissions level. This means that we would need to actually extract carbon from the atmosphere. Those changes would require an enormous amount of united effort. And in a world where one of the most important leaders doesn’t believe in climate change, this becomes almost impossible.

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