Climate Change and Easy Ways to Help Stop It

EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE:

Widely known effects of climate change include rising sea levels, more wildfires, longer and more intense droughts, increasing temperatures, and melting ice caps. But, there are even more effects that probably didn't even know about.

Climate change will be insanely expensive. Asset destruction, forced relocations, droughts, extinctions, and more effects will add up in costs to the global economy. Already the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that the U.S. Climate Disruption Budget (stuff related to drought, storm, and growing climate disruptions) was nearly $100 billion. By 2030, climate change costs are projected to cost the global economy $700 billion annually, according to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor. As climate change continues, costs will go up. Stopping the damage won't be cheap either. For example, putting the world on a path for sustainable energy production will cost $53 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Investment Outlook.

Also, hundreds of millions of people may be displaced by 2050. Climate change may become the biggest driver of displaced people, according to António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2008, 36 million people were displaced by natural disasters. At least 20 million of those people were driven from their homes by disasters related to climate change like drought and rising sea level, Guterres said. He anticipates that countries in the Southern Hemisphere will be most affected by displacement in the future. The Internal Organization for Migration estimates that 200 million people by 2050 could be forced to leave due to environmental changes. Even more alarming, a 2014 study published in Environmental Research Letters predicted that sea level rise created by a temperature increase of 37.4°F would force more than than 600 million people to find new homes.

Another effect is malaria and dengue could spread in the United States if climate change continues. The deadliest vector-borne disease (diseases transmitted by vectors, like mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas that are carried from one person to another through a third organism, like a blood-sucking bug) is malaria. It killed 627,000 people in 2012. Even though malaria sounds bad, it is not even the fastest growing vector-borne disease. The fastest growing vector-borne disease is dengue, a a mosquito-borne, single positive-stranded RNA virus. As summers become longer, temperatures go up, and rainfall patterns change along with species patterns mosquitoes carrying diseases will likely have a longer season in a wider area, according to the Natural Resource Defense Council. "The same is true on a global scale: increases in heat, precipitation, and humidity can allow tropical and subtropical insects to move from regions where infectious diseases thrive into new places," they wrote. Increases in international travel, "means that the U.S. is increasingly at risk for becoming home to these new diseases."

Lastly, western wildfires could burn up to eight times as much land by 2100. For each 1°C (33.8°F) of warming, the area burned by western wildfires will increase by a factor of two to four, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences. Temperatures in the southwest have increased over 1°C (33.8°F) since the 1970s, according to the National Climate Assessment. The major fire increases will occur in the northern Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest, according to a 2012 report for firescience.gov. The fire season could also become several months longer.

EASY WAYS TO HELP STOP IT:

All of these effects make it sound like we could never stop climate change. And we won't if we keep thinking like that. If everyone did there part, we could stop climate change. Below are some easy and new ways to help stop climate change and to do your part.