The Earth! Humans are Back on Track: How much progress has been made?

By William DeLucia and Aden Hochberg                    Source: Newsweek

Over the years mankind has evolved from using the wheel to the wagon to the car. In the process of all this, we have subconsciously started a huge problem… climate change and global warming. But here on The Happy Trumpet, we do not share bad news with you. Today, we are going to show you a timeline with events in climate change history. 

According to Newsweek, the idea of climate change has been around for centuries. Climate change first started to come to people's senses as a big problem in 1998, after a warning from James Hansen. Hansen played the role of the leader of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

As Newsweek recalls, In 1824, a French physicist called Joseph Fourier created the term “Greenhouse effect”. The Greenhouse effect is where the sun’s light energy goes through the atmosphere and is made into heat energy, which cannot come out of the lower atmosphere. He thought that there must be something in the atmosphere that is doing the job of a “tight cover.” 

“A few years later, a scientist named Eunice Foote found out that this cover has CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) and Steam,” suggests Newsweek.  The more CO2 and Steam there is, results in more heat in the earth’s atmosphere, thus, global warming. This is one reason why trees are so important. Trees and other plants absorb CO2 and produce oxygen, and that helps cool down the earth.

In 1896, the first “real” automobile was created, the Duryea Motor Wagon. One decade later, Svante Arrhenius, who was a Swedish chemist, thought that the fossil fuels burned by automobiles would be a huge factor in global warming.  It was only in 1938, that a man by the name of Guy Callendar, who was a British Engineer, was able to show that global warming is connected to higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The next step was to put measurement tests and recordings into place. These started in the 1950’s. In the 1960’s, a student named Syukuro Manabe, who was attending Princeton University, was a leader in the creation of the first physical models for climate change. 

Now you may be wondering how to help the environment after reading this. You might not be able to do something revolutionary, but there are lots of small things you can do. Some small things may include turning off lights when you aren’t using them, composting, or even using rechargeable batteries. People have started to come together to help this situation, but we still have a lot of work to do. 

Eco Friendly Product of the Month

By Noam K. Kasher Info from the Good News Network

Heinz Ketchup Bottle

What happened?

Heinz has been working on a recyclable ketchup bottle cap that will make the entire bottle recyclable (since the rest of the bottle was already recyclable before). It took them 185,000 hours or in other words eight years  and a grand total of 1,200,000,000$(1.2 billion$) and 45 different prototypes when they tried to make it. The cap will come into the market in 2023.

What was the problem with the original bottle?

According to the Good News Network, Heinz was the most popular ketchup for many years because of the bottle’s “silicone stop valve that allowed the perfect, consistent stream of uninterrupted ketchup that never spilled out over the edge” , says Andy Corbly. But the problem was the combined waste of the plastic and the silicone were big parts of landfills. Over one billion caps ending up in landfills are still polluting our world.

How is it different and what will happen next?

The cap was made in a state of the art 3D printer. Heinz settled on polypropylene for the material so the valve would work the same way. According to Heinz

“The move will mean a potential of one billion plastic caps, enough to fill 35 Olympic swimming pools, can be recycled, instead of finding their way into landfills.”

Note: ** We will KEEP following this story to see if the caps are actually able to be recycled, since we are finding out that a lot of recycling is a myth. Source: Boston Globe:

New Otter School in Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium

By Noam K. Kasher SOURCE: This Week Junior

At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago two female southern sea otters were rescued from the Pacific Ocean. The aquarium will raise them so they can become foster mothers for future young otters and teach them to survive in the ocean so when they're ready, Shedd Aquarium can release them back into the wild.

BRAZIL'S LULA DE SILVA HELPS!

By Francesco Malcolm Carratelli     SOURCE: MORNING STAR 

The Brazilian president Luiz Inancio Lula De Silva wants to strengthen environmental law enforcement and make “green jobs” that won't hurt the Amazon forest. A green job is a job that helps or contributes to the environment such as renewable energy technicians and operators, solar panel installers, wind turbine engineers and nuclear energy engineers. He will also make wealthy countries with greenhouse gas emissions pay the indigent  countries for “historic damages”. Lots of people now think there is hope to defeat global warming… All thanks to LULA!

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE BY: Francesco Malcolm Carratelli.

Once my family and I went to New York, and we went to the American Natural History Museum. There we watched a beaver documentary and then I thought this is the right opportunity to write an article for the Happy Trumpet about beavers. A couple of days later I found an article about studies on beavers in Colorado helping global warming, and I knew this was the perfect opportunity to write an article on beavers.

“WE ARE HERE TO HELP”- BEAVERS

By Francesco Malcolm Carratelli

SOURCE: GOOD NEWS NETWORK 

Beavers are helping to stop global warming, how? Try guessing… by building dams!

You might be thinking “How can dams help stop global warming?”

It is simple, maybe you know that because of global warming we have more droughts and floods but luckily dams contain water that comes from the river and traps it in a lake so there will always be water there. More importantly, the lake would get cleaner because dams are filters. The dams provide better quality water and one day maybe the dam will fall but the ground will be rich with nutrients from the water that once was there. The ground becomes extremely healthy, and that means that lots of new trees and other plants will grow.  Beavers are non-human living creatures that can modify the environment around them the most (but unlike humans, beavers always do it for the better!).