What Can We Do To Stop or At Least Slow Down Climate Change?

Finding a way to slow climate change is one of the most vexing problems facing mankind today. If our current pace of CO2 emissions continues then there is a very strong possibility that we will leave our grandchildren a world bereft of natural resources, and damaged to a point where life as we know it today will be something our children’s children read about in their social studies textbooks.

What is the culprit behind climate change? In essence, manmade climate change results from a distortion of a beneficial natural process. The earth is a finely tuned machine and for centuries the greenhouse gases (including methane and CO2) that were released from the earth collected in the atmosphere and helped keep the earth a temperate, liveable place. The majority of these greenhouse gases came from volcanic eruptions and animal flatulence. The earth experienced a slow climate change.

Over the last 200 years the production of these greenhouse gases has exploded exponentially. In fact since the industrial revolution the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased from 200 parts per million to close to 460 parts per million today. This massive increase will likely cause the mean temperature of the earth to increase from 3 to over 7 degrees above 1990 levels by the end of this century. This is the kind of drastic change that will have catastrophic impacts on the earth.

This is extremely bad news, but there are some ways people can help slow climate change at home and within our spheres of influence. The key is to re-use, reduce and recycle. If people begin abiding by those words and applying them during their daily lives then the amount of CO2 used will begin to slowly decrease. If these efforts are multiplied by individuals and companies worldwide, then there is a chance that a climate based ecological tragedy will be averted.

Re-using is the first easy step. Think about a case of bottled water. It takes a certain amount of CO2 emissions to create the plastic used in the bottles and to purify the water inside the bottles. The bottles can be recycled, but few people actually follow through and subsequently, millions of plastic water bottles end up sitting in landfills for hundreds of years. The easy solution is to purchase a stainless steel water bottle and use it over and over again. Just a single month of this kind of conservation will have extremely beneficial impacts on carbon usage.

Reducing is another key behavior. Many people take trip after trip to stores all over town at various times of the day. If shopping trips are lumped into one single trip then the car will emit much less CO2 and this will be beneficial. People are also beginning to realize the benefits of reducing the size of their car. It makes much more sense ecologically to purchase a hybrid car rather than a gas guzzling SUV.

Recycling is critical. If people are going to slow climate change, they must make recycling a habit, not just something that is engaged in when it’s convenient. It is shocking how few people recycle despite all of the information that has been thrown at us through the media.

It is clear that we are facing a climate change emergency. The only way out of the current emergency situation is to slow climate change. This can be done through smart ecological practices such as reducing and recycling.