Climate change has been a topic on scientists’ minds since the 50s, and slowly found its way to mainstream media during the 2000s. As the earth shows increasingly more dangerous effects of climate change, many still refuse to take action against it.

The world’s climate is changing at rapid speeds. In just a hundred years, the Earth climate has risen almost one degree, ten times faster than its been for 5000 years.

“Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history,” David Wallace-Wells, journalist, wrote. “At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat.”

Climate change is not just the surface warming (otherwise known as global warming), it’s the major effects of the increasing greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

According to NASA, “A warmer, wetter atmosphere could also affect tropical storms (hurricanes), but changes to tropical storms are harder to predict and track. Some scientists have speculated that a warmer climate that allows more intense storms to develop would also spawn more hurricanes. Warmer temperatures may also heat ocean waters farther from the Equator, expanding the reach of large tropical storms.”

Mass extinction because of the increase level of greenhouse gases in the air is not a new thing, in fact, it predates humans, mammals, and almost all ancestors of every living thing on Earth.

“The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now,” Wallace-Wells wrote. “Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas.”

There is a bright side to climate change; we can stop it. Although it will take hundreds of years to completely eradicate the damage brought by climate change, it is possible, but we have to start now.

“We can always change the effect of climate; however, it will be really hard because we are already in the terminal state,” Dominique Le, senior, said. “Convincing people to consume less trash will be a big challenge.”