By: Munaza Kazmi
You must have experienced an unexpected cool day in a burning hot day of summer, whereas a cozy evening in a chilly season. More or less now we are experiencing a new mild June and a dried December. Hasn’t it felt as a change?
“The Earth is under serious threat”!
We have presented our beautiful planet with the disastrous gift of climate change. Rising temperature, reduction of the polar ice caps, deforestation, overpopulation, disease, war, famine, lack of water and decimation of animal species. However, these are all solvable but so far have not been solved.
Global warming is caused by all of us. We want cars, travel and a better standard of living. The trouble is, by the time people realize what is happening, it may be too late. As we stand on the period of unpredictable climate change; it can be reverted, only a responsible and determined will required.
However, the danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not become so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increase the temperature further. Moreover, climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rainforests and so eliminate one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so exacerbate global warming. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus: boiling hot and raining Sulphur acid, but with a temperature of 250 degrees Celsius. Human life would be unsustainable. We need to go beyond the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement adopted in 1997, and cut carbon emission now. We have the technology. We just need the political will.
I believe, as leader the government have a responsibility, to inform the public about the perils that humanity may face and take necessary actions. On the other hand, as a citizen of the world, we all have a duty to share the knowledge, to alert and advice the ignorant and become a helping hand of government in carry out the business.
However, we can be ignorant, unthinking lot, hence on the cost of future, if not the immediate future but the future of the coming generations. Earlier when we have reached similar crises in our history, there has usually been somewhere else to colonize. Columbus did it in 1492 when he discovered the New World. But now there is no new world. No Utopia around the corner.