Humanity’s Last Stand: Saving Earth
We need Earth more than the Earth needs us. Saving this planet is saving ourselves, but why are many still rejecting this idea?
We often hear phrases along the lines of “be kind to Mother Earth.” That statement, however, comes with a major presumption. It assumes that humans actually can control Earth.
We simply can not.
The Earth has survived blistering temperatures of more than 2,000 Celsius (3,600F), yet we can’t stand to be outside for five minutes when it’s only 35C outside.
The Earth trudged on bearing freezing temperatures as low as -90C for millions of years, yet we quickly become unconscious by hypothermia in cold water.
The Earth withstood hellish storms of meteors with asteroids that measured more than 100km (62 miles) in length, yet we get injured by some falling ice chunks we call “hail.”
The Earth has seen climate changes and disasters that would have wiped us off the map a hundred times over. When our climate changes, Earth will survive. Life will eventually rebound. But humans? Humans will be gone.
We need to protect the environment — not just for our morals or our beliefs, but literally for our existence as a species.
Despite knowing this, we hold utterly no regard to our future livelihood on this planet when we start chopping down trees, burning fossil fuel, and churning out a seemingly endless supply of non-biodegradable trash that all contribute to the dangerous levels of greenhouse gases like CO2 that is choking the Earth by trapping heat in.
People are constantly asking “can the Earth survive the nightmarish consequences of what we are doing?” — Which is the wrong question to ask because yes, of course the Earth can survive the consequences. It has seen so much worse.
The question we should be asking is, “can we survive the possible consequences?” The answer to that, which many are unwilling to accept, is no. We won’t stand a chance.
So how do we save humanity? Well, the problem is, we are not even united in trying to save humanity yet. Climate change by human activity is a topic so controversial many choose to avoid addressing it. Others also go to the extreme and deny its existence altogether.
So let’s get one thing out of the way first. Climate change is not a hoax.
Some skeptics attribute global warming as just “hot summer weather.”
Yes, we know that summer can be hot and it’s a reasonable argument. However, it isn’t just some “hot summer weather” when in 2003, the European heatwave had the highest recorded temperatures in Europe for the past 500 years — killing more than 70,000 people. You read that right. Seventy thousand.
It wasn’t just some “hot summer weather” when 1,877 people died from the hottest summer recorded in Argentina in 2013 nor when temperatures reached upwards of 48C (119F) in 2015 in India and Pakistan — highest recorded temperatures in their respective history and killing 4,200.
What’s worse, climate change doesn’t just mean heat waves — it packs a lot of unforeseen consequences.
Warming oceans over the globe cause polar vortices, which are changes in convection that cause temperatures in some U.S. states to drop to as low as -40C for weeks (that’s the average temperature of Antarctica).
Increased heat also causes dry-ups of natural water sources in states like California, which have to resort to some extreme water-rationing measures.
The warmer climates also mean that organisms previously unable to survive in North American weather now can, like the mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus.
Addressing The Misconception of the Permian Period
Still other skeptics point to a period in Earth’s history known as the Permian period (a period around 250–300 million years ago).
They would say cite scientific evidence of climate change on Earth during the Permian period where the globe grew so hot even the oceans had an average temperature of 100F. So if lifeforms were able to survive that, wouldn’t that mean climate change isn’t too big of a deal?
Good logic, but it has one crucial flaw. Lifeforms were not able to survive that. No, life stopped dead in its tracks — more than 90% of all life on Earth went extinct during that period of climate change.
Scientists assigned the next five million years after the Permian mass extinction as a “dead-zone” in Earth’s biological history — quite a fitting name as Earth was basically devoid of any life.
So yes, you can point to that Permian period and say that the Earth survived, but life didn’t. It’s easy to imagine how humans will go out should we continue hurtling towards a neo-Permian extinction.
At this point, you may be asking: “What can I do?” Plenty. But I won’t go into much detail because there are already a million other sites that go into much more detail of all the ways you can contribute (check out these links: here, here, and here).
I wanted to address a fundamental question of our battle with climate change: Why are so many of us in denial or disbelief of the phenomenon?
Scientific Theories: Not Just Random Guesses
One of the key players in the widespread disbelief of climate change is the belief that science is not “proven.”
Indeed, the elegance of science is that it’s always open to change. If you can draw up a mathematical proof showing that gravity doesn’t exist, then Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation can be rejected — yes, even gravity can be rejected if a scientist can provide enough evidence that it’s false and other scientists verify and peer-review the work.
So why hasn’t it been rejected? Because there has been no one able to prove that gravity is false and there’s has been thousands of experiments, trials, data, and calculation that show that gravity is real.
When a scientist put forth a theory or law, it’s not something they thought up while eating brunch with a friend on Saturday morning. No, it’s an explanation of a particular phenomenon formulated after months of trials, testing, retesting, cross-testing, experimenting, observing, calculating, and analyzing.
And even then it’s not enough for that explanation to become a theory — the result has to be reproduced by hundreds of thousands of scientists worldwide, with the result all pointing towards the same conclusion.
This is the case for climate change. The global rise in temperatures has been studied by countless bright scientists and ecologists for the past 50 years, and the leading theory from all their experiments points to human activity causing climate change.
So when someone says “climate change by humans is just theory with no evidence,” they are grossly misinterpreting the scientific meaning of the word theory.
Disagreement Leads To Insults
Before I go, I also wanted to address how to raise awareness about climate change.
When someone who believes climate change is real meets someone who completely rejects it, arguments over the existence often decompose into an insult match.
That is the worst strategy to raise awareness. Instead of helping people understand what the issue is, it only polarizes them as an outsider.
Instead of insulting, you can:
- Expose the misinformation/myth/lie
- Engage in a conversation that is civil and be persuasive and explain the evidence that points to climate change.
- Correct their false sentences about climate change.
So we can clearly see that climate change is real. It’s coming, and the future looks bleak if we continue to charge toward destruction.
Sooner or later, we will cross the point of no return — and by then, even if we wanted to save ourselves, we would be doomed.
It may be already too late to revert all of our damage, but it’s still early enough to stop worsening the situation. To realize that our posterity may soon not know what an unpolluted sky looks like. To recognize that we need Mother Earth to live, and we are biting the hand that feeds us.
Eric Jing is a freelance writer and blogger. He writes about science, technology, and biotech. He loves to read novels, nonfiction on biology, and occasionally indulges in some self-help books. In his free time, he likes to run, catch up on the latest news, and enjoy some time out in the sun. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter, or sign up for his newsletter.
