A Disaster Avoided By Naomi Klein - 1401 Words

A Disaster Avoided One day while traveling on the Hyperloop home from work, I found myself looking out upon the Californian countryside and thinking about the climate data I was poring over at work. It indicated that in 2015 the earth was heading in a spiral of destruction due to climate change and I found myself imaging how I would be looking at an arid desert right now if not for the intervention of both politicians and citizens. This subject piqued my interest and I decided to do a bit of follow-up research on the subject. I quickly found evidence that policy makers in 2015 read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate as well as other environmental texts and took the key lessons to heart. As I began this†¦show more content†¦(Kevin Anderson - Delivering on 2 °C: evolution or revolution?, video) The subsequent melting of ice at the poles would have created a domino effect in which the water in the oceans would heat and cause more turbulent weather. T his change in weather systems would have been felt globally as many environments would have completely shifted many becoming dry, arid regions absolutely vacant of life. At low latitudes, 4 °C would result in reductions of around 30-40 percent in the yields of important staple crops such as corn and rice, at the same time as the population heads towards 9 billion by 2050. (Climate change going beyond dangerous, pg. 16-39) In 2015, the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere reached over 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human history. This was recorded setting and spurred policymakers to do research themselves and read about climate change rather than just listen to industry reports and forecasts. After reading This Changes Everything, policymakers understood that the amount of carbon had to be drastically reduced in order to preserve the earth for future generations. One way to do so was to get off of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, and get off them fast because the time to take action was quickly running out. The burning of these fuels releases carbon dioxide along with many other hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, where in turn, they trap heat trying to leave our atmosphere. The rise in