Have you ever gone out into the snow and made a snow man? Maybe throw some snowballs at your friends! Once all the fun has calmed down, you go inside and turn up the heat in your house. You most likely also go on your TV and lie down or take a nice warm shower. Everything that you are using is supplied by factories that transport these privileges to your homes. Heat, electricity, even water, is all sent to your home or made through factories.
These factories operate and are highly reliant on fossil fuels. You might recognize a factory from the smoke coming out of the top of the building. This is because the factories rely on burning fossil fuels and the smoke is let out through the top. Due to all the smoke being released into the air, this causes the gas to keep the heat inside the planet and, effectively, cause climate change.
What are the effects of climate change?
Due to the rising temperatures, the rate at which water evaporates has increased significantly. This causes there to be droughts for long periods of time, even longer than the ones that have been seen before. Because of water evaporation, our climate is becoming more and more dry, allowing for even stronger wildfires. The number of these stronger wildfires have been recorded from 1984 and 2015 and have doubled! With the amount of water vapor in the air, this causes more natural disasters to occur, like storms, tornadoes, and maybe even hurricanes. Even the North and South poles of the Earth are not safe from climate change. Maybe glaciers and ice caps have started to melt. When the glaciers melt, they turn into water. This will cause the sea level to rise dramatically.
What can I do at home to reduce the effects of climate change?
There are a multitude of things that you can do. First, you can try to limit energy consumption in your house. Try air drying your clothes outside instead of the dryer. Turn off the water while you brush your teeth, turn off the lights when they’re not being used, or wear more warm clothing instead of changing the heat on the thermostat. Of course, not everyone reading this article is able to do some other things, like changing your energy provider. It’s understandable to be limited to what you can do, but to fight climate change we do not need perfect people. We just need the majority to do the best they can.
