Climate change. It’s often the headline title of newspapers. People like Greta Thunberg the minor climate activist are drawing attention by putting the whole society under pressure by saying that everybody is responsible when something irreversible happens, because it is clear that there are going to be consequences. Actually there are clear consequences already; the earth gas warmud up a couple of degrees, the sea level has risen, ice caps are melting, corals are dying and there are animals changing their current permanent location; the super tick emigrated and was found in the Netherlands a couple of times, even though they originally live very far away in Central Africa. There are films that show how the near future will end and one of them is called Downsizing. Downsizing is a film in which a Swedish scientist discovers a way to make humans very small, so their use and needs also become very small. The reduced humans lived in great prosperity; they had big houses (to them because in real life their houses would be considered tiny), great food and cheap and unlimited transportation. That way the Swedish scientist tried to stop climate change, however transforming every human on earth is a very big job. In the end of the film humanity becomes doomed because of the methane gas escaping from the melting sheets of ice. The escaping methane warms up the atmosphere and the ice even melts faster. The tiny people isolate and build a underground community which is closed from the outside; no one can come in or out. Their plan was to have future generations re-emerge from the ground in a couple of thousands years when the earth has restored. In a certain way the climate change is like a disaster in reality, but it is treated already like a death; people process and respond differently. Some get angry, skip class, fly with the airplane to England to sail with a boat to New York and think they have done a great job, while some may try to buy carbon offsets to get rid of the feeling that they are guilty, but most don’t realize that carrying out the these offsets by helping to turn a city to green energy for example often expels green house gases; to make wind turbines greenhouse gases are expelled. Some people rely on the carbon footprint, a rough set of calculations, but their footprint is often higher than they think one of the possible causes is the fact that some people can be helping let’s say a company by donating, funding or paying rent and the company is using their money to engage in all kinds of polluting activities, they could be burning toxic waste and making and burning an Easter fire or they could be paying rent to a bank that supports a petrol station by investing in it. The people who invested in the company don’t know it and they don’t have bad intentions, but in the end it’s their money that helped to damage the environment. The nature really doesn’t care who did it, it doesn’t make a difference if company A did it or company B. Although people knew that burning things produces carbon dioxide and that in turn warms up the globe for a long time, they didn’t stop it. The consequences of an atomic warhead exploding is known and clear, no one will profit from a nuclear war with tons of radioactive debris in the air, but with climate change it’s different. The Netherlands for example will be half under water in 2100 if emissions continue and no higher dykes are built. In that case The Netherlands only can hope to stay safe by building higher dykes. Either way The Netherlands is going to go through financial losses. Greenland on the other hand will benefit. When the kilometers of ice caps melt, the many resources of Greenland become accessible. Greenland is a goldmine, iron ore mine, diamond mine, and many other mines with a timer. That is exactly why Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark. For the same reason Russia also may profit of climate change. Climates change has already killed people by causing droughts, which lead to famine and famine is deadly. I think that climate change is a real threat, but it’s unlikely humanity gets wiped out, it’s definitely not the first huge challenge people have had.
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Here are some of the sources:
Exploiting Greenland’s natural resources | Register | The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk › article › exploiting-greenlands-natural-resource…
https://www.vn.nl/rising-sea-levels-netherlands/