Week 94 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2019-08-12.
Whatever your thoughts about climate change might have been, there should be no doubt that it's a real now.
Our rapidly changing climate has either caused or exacerbated several of the other crises on the list — Syria, Ethiopia, infectious diseases, the global refugee population. This isn’t stuff that’s going to happen…it is happening, it has happened. And it’s going to get worse.
How climate change is already affecting our lives
A few weeks ago, Axios took a look at climate change's crucial moment and how it's affective us already:
- Hitting the bottom lines of all sorts of companies, whether it’s BP worried about leaving its oil in the ground or Big Pharma poised to profit off the additional drugs we’ll need in a warmer world.
- Intensifying our temperatures, storms and wildfires.
- Altering what we eat. New meat-like foods are on the menu and beef sellers are searching for ways to satisfy red-meat diets without the carbon footprint of cows.
- Exacerbating global conflict as the disparate impacts start to shift geopolitics.
- Supercharging our politics, with a president who mocks it and a Democratic Party that calls it a crisis.
It's criminal how we've sacrificed so much to over-satisfy ourselves gastronomically. I really wish everything we bought had a price that truly reflected it's cost and that quality was the most important ingredient.
Agriculture might be something to be celebrated but the extremest we've taken it to for not only crops but for farming is embarrassing. As I find myself saying on an alarmingly regular basis now, it always comes down to money.
I'm hopeful that the automotive industry does whatever it needs to completely cut it's reliance on fossil fuels and the more we rely on renewable energy, or creating more innovative energy storage techniques, the better.
The bottom line: We have been driving climate change for decades, and we’ll be dealing with it for centuries
No one should be at ease with how we have and continue to impact the world around us.
Climate change certainly is a talking point at the moment, and this year's demonstrations by the Extinction Rebellion were fantastic. I very much doubt I'd have felt as kindly about them had I still been working in the heart of London but their cause is worthy of every inconvenience they cause.
There's also the small matter of what Europe or, more specifically, Britain could be doing to help fight climate change had it not been so occupied by the shambles that is Brexit.
What am I doing to combat climate change?
Sadly, very little and arguably the bare minimum. I drive a hybrid and have tried to gamify my driving by trying to achieve the highest mpg I possibly can. My last tank of fuel took me 436 miles, the furthest ever and that equated to about 53mpg which is fantastic. That's more than double what our second car is capable of.
Would I go vegan? No, but I've never had a problem with vegetarian food and I've been trying out vegan alternatives for meat when there's been an opportunity and in many cases the alternatives have more taste which has been a nice surprise.
I would like to walk more on the weekends and if public transport didn't take at least twice as long as driving, I'd certainly use it more often.
The main article photo is by Bob Blob and I'll leave you with a reminder of this tool to see how much hotter it is now from the New York Times.
Tags: climate change, earth, global warming, climate change, earth, global warming