This world is getting worse and worse, and it's from a problem that everybody knows yet doesn't understand. It is official that the UN has given up on our world's climate change—that the worst impacts are now officially unavoidable. Global warming has exceeded the 1.5°C limit and is guaranteed to stay the same for many, many decades.
Many news already showed the effects of global warming before this report came out. Over 14,000 species are threatened by climate change. It's now so bad that over one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Now that we no longer can support the 2015 Paris climate accord goals of keeping the global average temperature to be 1.5°C and are on the verge of 2°C by 2100, 18% of species on land can face extinction. Smaller and more sensitive animals' extinction rate will be 30%.
Earth's air and oceans are warming at an alarming rate, leaving ice sheets melting to this day. Antarctica and Greenland are losing hundreds of billions of tons of ice mass per year, forcing sea levels to rise. Human activities have increased carbon dioxide in the air, and dark pollution that settles on the ice causes the surface to absorb more heat from the sun. The sea level is rising 4.5 to 4.7 millimeters per year, which can result in more frequent and violent coastal storms, hurricanes, typhoons, etc.
Now, something you might know is about polar bears and climate change, which was reported way back in 2020. The Arctic temperatures are rising nearly 4 times as fast as the global average, affecting polar bears' homes and environment. The decline of Arctic sea ice has been reported since 1979; both the Arctic and Antarctic have been warming up and losing more and more ice. Arctic sea ice coverage has been shrinking by roughly 12.2% per decade, causing severe habitat loss for species that rely on it. This loss also creates a dangerous global impact through a feedback loop: bright ice reflects sunlight back into space, but as it melts, dark open ocean absorbs heat instead, accelerating global warming even further.
Like the Arctic, Antarctica has also heated up a lot, by 3 times faster than the global average since 1955. Many ice shelves have been thinning out, moving faster, and breaking apart, resulting in easier and rapid melting. Each winter, the oceans around Antarctica would freeze the whole area, but studies show that it's been freezing slower and less since 2016. Due to the warming of Antarctica, Antarctic krill are moving in search of colder waters. Many penguin species have now declined up to 80% since 1970 because of fewer food resources.
A deadly flood erupted in Nepal because of melting glacier. Hundreds of people, at least 670, died in the flood. Almost 3,000 people are missing and all because of insane climate change. Glacier in this region has gotten even more unstable and increasingly dangerous all because of human-caused global warming. Many emissions are from burning fossil fuel like oil, gas, and coal. Every life is always and has always been at risk and we may not be able to avoid it any longer.
(I wrote this while reading actual news paper for around 40 minutes)
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