What to do about climate change
author: jacob nelson | staff writer
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Hurricane Florence took a serious toll on the Carolinas. Over a week ago, Florence ran head first into the U.S., causing major destruction. Reports of over 40 lives being taken and images of mass destruction are surfacing all over the internet. But this isn’t new to us, is it? Over the last few years, we’ve seen storms like Irene and Sandy cause massive turmoil in the United States and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. But even before Katrina, storms like this weren’t all that rare, and neither was crazy climate change. The U.S. has seen big storms and both hot and cold extremes long before we were here. Back in 1913, the U.S. hit a whopping 50 degrees Celsius. During the 1935 cold wave, states like North Dakota regularly saw temperatures like -50, and in 1971, Alaska hit a record low of -80. So, this weather isn’t new to us – but it soon could be.
Climate change is being brought on by external factors, but I don’t believe it can be traced back to anything specific. It is part of the overall impact we as a species have on the planet. Yes, creating an environmentally friendly society could help us for a little while, and it would probably increase our quality of life considerably. But, the problem is something we can’t fix that easily. The reality is that our population is growing tremendously large. In 1800, we were barely below 1 billion, and 200 years later, were already over 7 billion people! We as a species cannot fight climate change. The earth is going to decide what is best for itself and will act accordingly. We need to protect ourselves against it and continue to adapt, which isn’t exactly difficult seeing as we’ve been doing it for thousands of years already.
Massive climate change is only one of Earth’s techniques for protecting itself from overpopulation. It doesn’t matter if we adapt to extreme weather, because the Earth will continue supplying new diseases or famine that will still decrease the population.
If we want to continue growing, then we need to find the space to do so. Cities are getting bigger and consuming more and more countryside. While there is still a lot of space left, we need to be looking at the bigger picture. Soon we will see visions, such as Elon Musk’s of humanity living on Mars, becoming more and more realistic. Older generations are always going to believe that things they have never seen couldn’t ever happen, and I think a lot of our generation feels that way about long distance space travel and colonization. But to be completely honest, if we don’t start trying harder to make those things possible, then we are going to simply run out of room to live.
I, for one, look forward to seeing the advanced ways we come up with for defending ourselves against climate change and other natural disasters in the future.
