How climate change affects our resources

Global warming has been a problem that has been around long before we were born. This issue started roughly in the 1830’s but only recognized by society recently. Global warming had become a national issue on January 24th 1988 when it had been featured on New York Times magazine. To the right you can view the article together with a graph of temperature rises over the years. Dr. James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Institute for space studies, stated that “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming…In my opinion, the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.” This quote proves how Hansen’s testimony points out the threats of global warming. People didn’t realize this as a wakeup call and resulted in great climate issues in the future, and its only rising.

It has been 30 years since this article was published in that time, climate change has had many destructive effects. These include water shortages, inconsistent food production caused by inconsistent weather, reduced amounts of arable land, deforestation, rising sea levels, extinction of species and many natural disasters including typhoons, hurricanes, flash floods and etc. You may be asking: ‘how does this affect our resources?’ Well, water and food are two of the three essentials of life, you cannot go for long without them. If we have the inability to grow healthy crops and find clean water to drink there is no way humanity can survive this. This will lead into a great conflict. Forty percent of existing conflicts over the past 60 years have been strongly linked with food shortages and crises. The third essential we need is a place where there is a roof above our head. With all the natural disasters our world has been facing many properties were destroyed and wrecked. Climate change has also been responsible of taking many lives including animals, plants and people. A case study shows that climate change is linked with 5 million deaths a year. Extreme weather conditions are accounted for 9.4% of all deaths globally between 2000 and 2019. Yaming Guo, a professor at Monash university says that “In the long-term, climate change is expected to increase the mortality burden” as the death count rises. Since 2000 cold related deaths have decreased and heat related death have risen.

As a whole, climate change has already received lots of attention from the world. However, the attitude the world has been portraying towards climate change is profoundly unacceptable. The situation is at a threshold where there is still a chance at survival.

Word Cited:

Robert Brulle Professor of Sociology. (2021, August 27). 30 years AGO global warming Became front-page News – and both Republicans and Democrats took it seriously. The Conversation. Retrieved September 14, 2021, from https://theconversation.com/30-years-ago-global-warming-became-front-page-news-and-both-republicans-and-democrats-took-it-seriously-97658

Bloomberg. (n.d.). Bloomberg.com. Retrieved September 14, 2021, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-07/climate-change-linked-to-5-million-deaths-a-year-new-study-shows.

Climate change and natural resource management. InterAction. (2019, September 5). Retrieved September 14, 2021, from https://www.interaction.org/aid-delivers/key-development-sectors/climate-change-and-natural-resource-management/