The Tragedy of Climate Change

Earth+at+night

Earth at night

Cal U'Ren, Staff Reporter

It’s currently 10:06pm and as I walk home in the middle of October the temperature reads 72 degrees. Climate change and the overall shift in the way our planet now runs can be correlated back to one thing, us. When many people hear arguments regarding the detrimental effects of humans on the planet we think of the ways in which we act individually to cause a negative impact, but one glaring action is largely being overlooked.

In 1950 the world’s population was a mere 2.5 billion, with that number now being slightly more than 7.5 billion. As the dominant species on the planet it doesn’t take much of an imagination to see why resources we use have drastically affected the planet. Problems arising from climate change include: lack of clean drinking water, shortage of food supply for humans, the deterioration of the planets ozone layer, increases in global temperatures, rises in sea level, and the extinction of a multitude of species. Starting to get the point? Many of these issues can be traced back to the usage of harmful resources from humans as well as the lack of conservation with the resources we have left. While our methods regarding these resources is a problem we’ve started to focus on more as a species, it’s imperative we understand that climate change will only increase as the quantity of human beings does too.

With China being the only first-world country with limits on children it’s easy to see how population growth can get out of hand, which in turn leads to additional need for resources. To put this into perspective, by the year 2050 Americans will consume an average of five million more tons of meat per year due to the increase in bodies. The U.N. also projects that the world population will increase 41 percent by 2050, putting it at 8.9 billion. The idea of simple supply and demand is evident here, except in this case the supply is thinning rapidly and with no source of replacement in sight. When looking at population growth and how it can directly affect climate change world superpowers must act with prescience and decisiveness before the problem is unsolvable. Changing the way we farm, conserve water, and develop new technologies will all be pressing issues within the next fifty years, all of these being done with the expectation of population growth in mind.

Conservation tactics and placing limits on the frequency and magnitude of select resources will surely slow down human consumption and prolong the effects of population growth, but if the population keeps growing (even with the younger individuals still abiding by these rules) the consumption will either level back out or continue to increase since there is now further demand. Visualizing this on an individual level can be challenging since many of us don’t see ourselves as part of the problem, or simply don’t think about it because it doesn’t directly affect us yet. While many of us can see the harm being caused to the climate by smoke coming out of our cars exhaust pipe, or the plastic bottles we throw in the trash rather than recycling, many of us have never even considered the side effects of simply living normal lives and taking up another spot on Earth.

The next time you bite into an apple you are consuming approximately eighty to one hundred grams of water, however, that apple took fifty “virtual liters” of water to be produced. When you realize that every facet of our daily life has a trickle down effect from where it came from it’s easy to see how billions of people all competing for the same resources can become catastrophic.

The health of our planet’s climate has been trending downward for generations, similarly to the way population growth has been growing exponentially; with this issue it seems that the problem is right in front of us, nearly eight billion times.