Climate Change Is Directly Related to Our Lifestyle - Essay Example

Climate change is directly related to our lifestyle Global climate changes are manmade, so people should change their lifestyle to protect the environment. The most obvious cause of climate change is the pollution created by the carbon dioxide emission from our use of fossil fuels like gas, oil and coal that provides us power and energy to support our lifestyle. Much of carbon dioxide emission comes from our energy use ranging from the electricity that lights our houses to the to the carbon emission of our cars and industrial plants.

Another is population explosion as people now have higher life expectancy resulting to an increased in population that burdens the planet as too many people emits carbon dioxide that is beyond her regenerative capacity (Pollan nd). Climate change is manmade and it induces global warming which is a phenomenon that arises from the heating up of the temperature of the earth. This happens when greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapor traps the heat from the sun into the earth’s atmosphere (Massawe, 2012).

The heating up of the earth’s atmosphere causes the sea level to rise as glaciers, permafrost and sea ice as begins to thaw and this phenomena called climate change is a result of global warming. Global warming or climate change has been attributed to be one of the causes of shifting extreme weather pattern that cause heat waves, droughts, excessive rainfall and changes in crop harvests (Miller, nd). And as the temperature in our waters heats-up, it harms and kills the algae which serve as food to other living organism in the ocean.

When that happens, it inadvertently destroys the ecosystem and balance in the ocean (Massawe, 2012). The result? Lesser fish harvest because their source of food are diminished. Storms, hurricanes and floods will become fiercer due to changing weather pattern that as more heat is emitted in the ocean, the fiercer the storms will be (WWF, nd). There are several causes of climate change and it is all rooted to man’s lifestyle and that everybody should be involved to protect the environment. There are however several quarters in society who thinks that it is only big business and industrialized countries that makes pollution that causes climate change.

Many still thinks that it is only China and United States and other industrialized countries that should worry about climate change because they are the ones who pollute our environment. This argument is myopic because pollution is borderless that even if pollution came from China or United States, it will travel across countries and will still cause climate change that will affect everybody. In a research conducted by Massawe, he identified the determinants of global warming as the population estimate, birth rate, death rate, hydropower consumption, geothermal power consumption, nuclear power consumption, solar power consumption, wind power consumption, bio-fuel consumption, coal consumption, oil consumption, gas consumption, defense spending, GDP, greenhouse gases emission estimate and forest coverage estimate which are all linked to our lifestyle.

He concluded that the solution to the mitigation of global warming is possible by changing our lifestyle which drives industries and governments to pollute. In effect, the research suggested that global warming and climate change cannot be solved by individual countries and that it can only be addressed by international cooperation with all countries, both developed and developing, to really make an impact in protecting the environment. Thus, climate change is everybody’s concern and we all should take part in protecting the environment because it is our common environment, our common planet.

To protect the environment, we should change our lifestyle. It is our lifestyle that propels the industrial plants to create more products that we do not really need and in the process emits a lot of carbon dioxide that pollutes and cause climate change. Also, the wastes that we throw also cause climate change. And it is not only limited to the gadgets that we throw away to replace them with newer model but also includes the light that we forgot to switch off to products we throw away because all of them require energy to produce and that energy emits carbon dioxide that causes climate change.

Miller, Nick. “Nick Miller Presents: An Inconvenient Truth”, Availabe at [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_mr9EqJg18]