Essay on Human Impact on the Environment

Is climate change real or are the scientist wrong? People think that it's real but some skeptics think it's a myth. Even scientists are split into two groups of believers and non-believers. According to USA Today by 2080, Global warming will make New York City feel like Arkansas.

Throughout history Earth climate has been changing but in the past century it has drastically changed. In the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glaciers advance and retreat according to studies by NASA. The planet’s average surface temperature has gone up by 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century. The temperatures highs have also been slowly rising every year. The oceans have a absorbed much of this increased heat. According to studies by NASA The top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of more than 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969. The amount and thickness of the Arctic sea has declined at an alarming rate over the past several decades. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass over the past decades as well due to the increase in temperature.

Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost an average of 281 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2016, while Antarctica lost about 119 billion tons during the same time period. (NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate experiment 2016)

Due to the increase in temperature scientist have said but the rate of ice being lost has tripled in the last decade. All the gases that have been damaging our atmosphere is mostly caused by humans. From using cars and releasing gases like CO2 and methane from factories is destroying our atmosphere. If we reduce the amount of deadly gases we release into our atmosphere we could potentially reduce the effects of global warming and try to save our planet.

Pollution is one of the biggest killers, affecting over a hundred million people. The amount of people that are affected is comparable to the disease like Malaria and HIV. Pollution is a big problem on our planet ,for example, a quote from DoSomething.org states that, people who live in places with high levels of air pollution have a 20% higher chance to die from lung cancer than people who live in less polluted areas. Pollution not only affects humans but affects our environment and animals that live in it. Millions of animals all over the world get their environments destroyed because of pollution caused by humans. Humans dump trash everywhere like in oceans, jungles, forest, and even in our own cities. We also destroy our home planet by polluting our Earth with trash and deadly gases. Ecosystems are being destroyed because they're being littered with trash and killing the animals that live there. A quote from DoSomething.org states that, over 1 million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals are killed by pollution every year. Factories all across the world release tons of deadly gases into the atmosphere, polluting the air that we breathe every day. Humans are basically killing themselves by polluting the air and the environment that we live in, slowly killing us each day. Some people are blind and don't see what we are doing to our Earth. Some people do see what's happening to our Earth but aren't doing anything to help it because they are making money or just simply don’t care. Luckily there are thousands of organizations all across the world like The Ocean Cleanup and EPA trying to help save our Earth. But soon the damage we cause may be irreversible if we keep up with polluting the place we call home.

Over the history of mankind our population has been rising at a very fast rate. With our advances in technology we have been able to save more lives and make better medical treatment. This also means that we have extended the life expectancy of a human and slowly increase our population. Over the the past century the amount of humans has been increasing dramatically. The death to birth ratio had been able to balance out in the past, but in recent decades it has been very unbalanced. Even though we've had many wars and great disasters that have killed millions of people, it has not been able to even dent the population of humans. Because of the increase of in people we've had to increase the amount of resources that we need to use to sustain the amount of people we have on Earth. The world only has a limited amount of resources and we are slowly using them all up. We also destroy our resources by cutting down forests and other environments. Cutting down forests and other environments is also causing pollution and numerous other problems.

A major problem that we are barely beginning to have is the shortage of food. With more mouths to feed we need to produce more food, but soon enough we will not be able to produce food fast enough to feed everyone. Another major problem is unplanned parenthood. People all over the world have a unplanned pregnancy and just add to the number of humans in the world. A solution to this major problems is better education to help educate the problem at hand, better education about planned parenthood and sex education to help prevent unwanted pregnancies or what to do if you do have a child.

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