We Have A Problem
We have a problem.
Yep.
We even have a very serious problem.
And we must do something about it right now.
Since the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution and even more since the second (around 1760 to 1840 and 1870–1910), the emissions of Greenhouse Gas due to human activities have increased way faster than before.
You can even note that this graphic doesn’t show the trend after 2010, but the data we have indicates that the increase is continuing.
Now if we look to the actual concentration of greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, we obtain that:
What we see here lets no doubt: of course, in the past 800,000 years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has varied between about 180 and 280 parts per million (meaning 180 or 280 molecules of CO2 in 1 million molecules of “air”).
And in less than 160 years, we have way more than surpassed these numbers, because as we see it, we are now above 400 ppm. We are breaking new records all the time as we are not apparently stopping releasing CO2 and other GHG: we reached 400 ppm in 2013 and 415 ppm in the first half of 2019.
I could continue on and on with graphs, data and scientific terms because what I just talked about is only a tiny part of the actual overall problem and situation (we only talked about CO2 while some other gases have an even bigger impact on the Climate and we didn’t talk about feedback loops that are going to amplify the increase as the increase goes on… Well, I actually talked about it now :) ). I could continue giving you facts (just to prove to all the old people saying we do not know about the topic, gotcha, heh?) but I don’t think you will continue reading until the end. And old people who deny us are probably not there anyway.
So, let’s move, because not to lie to you, it’s boring for me too.
When I first wanted to write this post, and when I had the idea of the name ‘We Have A Problem’, I wanted to talk about every problem we had. I choose to introduce environmental problem first because the Climate Crisis is the biggest threat we know today as EVERYONE is concerned. Every single human is deeply threatened. But I could have talked about social problems instead because we have a whole lot of examples too…
If I say that our world is not going well, do you agree? Okay, let’s see you do.
As we previously told it, we are all threatened by the Climate Crisis. The increase of GHG emissions are making the average temperature of the Earth to go up (already +1°C in 160 years, and keep in mind that continents warm faster than oceans), that makes a lot of ice to melt, the oceans to become more acidic (killing marine life). We deforest always more surface to make room for breeding and agriculture, that emits more GHG of course and as a result, we have more trade, with more planes, vessels, and trucks everywhere. Due to human activities, we are driving a lot of species to extinction. The French biodiversity watch institute IPBES released in May a new report where we find that our actions are going to make 1 million species disappear. 1 million. And that’s only a sample of all the damages we’re making…
Talking about our society not going well, we can list a whole bunch of social issues: the world in full of inequalities, we have people living with less than a dollar a day even in our countries, people dying from hunger, diseases, and wars while the richest ones have more than 100 billion dollars (almost 275,000,000 years of living with one dollar a day). Far-right movements are rising again faster than ever since World War 2 and our democracies are weakening every day. Due to what “developed” countries have done in the Middle East to find oil especially, the area is now on fire, people die every day due to terrorism or poverty. Not a week without hearing that migrants have again found death at sea while trying to reach Europe, and when we succeed to rescue them, nobody wants to welcome them. And when we welcome them, we let them and don’t include them in our society.
It’s 2019 and women are still not really equal to men. In a lot of countries, they simply don’t have the same rights, but even here they are not paid the same for the same work and often don’t have the same chances when applying to a job.
And also, as I’m talking about the problems of our world, I will add a few points about my generation. I’m 16, and most of the person of my age or so spend their life playing videogames, watching series all the time, only trying to fill their free time as much as they can with shopping, parties, being drunk with their friends. Every day I hear some adults saying that our generation is insane and in some ways, it’s true and it’s not predicting anything great (I don’t include here all the incredible other youth who are not as I described my generation and who I’m fighting with every day for our future. Hopefully, everyone is not like the majority of us).
That makes a lot of issues, heh? Now you see why I say we have a problem… But if it’s the truth, why aren’t we acting right now? I mean, how come we don’t do anything and most people just keep living as if everything was fine?
From what I’ve seen so far in this world, people need to hear about death to start realizing that the problem is real, or they need the problem to be right in front of them. So maybe they just don’t care. These problems are not theirs. Let’s prove them it’s not.
The Climate Crisis is already causing a lot of people to die, especially during heatwaves and especially in developing countries. Far from us, that’s why most people don’t know about it. But some people are also dying because of natural disasters such as storms and floods made more frequent by the Climate Breakdown.
You think it’s horrible, right? Actually, it’s nothing.
If we don’t do anything, according to diverse reports from the United Nations and other institutes, 150 to 200 million persons could have to move in 2050 as environmental migrants. Yep, Trump would die only by seeing these figures.
Entire populations will suffer because of heat, lack of water (coming really soon), lack of food, diseases, and of course, conflicts.
This part is a bit hard to predict because we don’t have any official institution charged to predict environmental wars, but lack of resources will likely lead to conflicts, and maybe, wars. Knowing what mankind can do, it’s not very hard to imagine that if a first person has water or food and a second person is going to die because of not having water or food, the second person will try to steal the resource from the first person…
And there comes another important point: everyone will be impacted, but not the same way and not equally. That will introduce a new form of inequalities, between the ones who will still be able to buy things, even if it’s very expensive (you understood it, it’s “us”, populations from the richest countries) and the ones who will suffer sooner and more, inhabitants of “poor” countries.
So maybe now you realize that our actions, our everyday life is simply creating the problems we have and doing nothing is just making the problems even bigger.
I just realize I wrote way more than I expected to. I’m therefore going to stop here. But only after asking every one of us one final question:
Do we want this future?
If the answer is no, fine, we agree. So, we have only one thing to do. Start. Acting. Now.
Let’s go, together
Clement
PS: Thank you for reading this post, I hope you didn’t find it too boring… You can follow me on Twitter (@ClementFavaron) or Instagram (@clementfavaron) to stay updated for later posts. You can also contact me for comments or suggestions
