Imagine your future earth, it’s probably a great beautiful place filled with fun and cool places to go, it may be a paradise by the beach, an amusement park, or even a sports field, no matter what your imagining however this is actually the complete opposite of the real future. Our Earth for the future could be an earth on fire, a place where we can no longer live because of our idiotic uses of fossil fuels, chemicals, and mobile vehicles.  If we as humans keep pumping more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere just as we always have done, the earth’s temperature will continue to increase year after year, this increase in temperature is only possible because of the greenhouse effect. This is basically when greenhouse gasses such as CO2 and other emissions get trapped in the atmosphere collecting solar radiation and heat, this collection of heat then in turn heats up the atmosphere which heats up our earth. This same effect is why so many gasses get stuck inside of our atmosphere, the gasses cannot penetrate through the ozone layers leaving harmful gasses in our air ready for us to inhale. This is why humans are going to ruin the earth with our senseless activities and interactions.

This human activity and interaction can only be linked to a few different causes, the first being the heavy use of cars, buses, planes, and boats. “Cars by themselves are responsible for 33% of the total CO2 emissions in the United States” (planetsave.com Top 10), this is only 7% less than all United States factory emissions combined. Not to mention the emissions of boats polluting our oceans, planes in the air and busses doing just as much damage to our atmosphere as cars. With our populations continuing to grow and estimates for populations for 2030 being around 350 million people (gwu.edu), 35 more million people than today, the greenhouse gasses will only continue to climb along with our temperature of the earth. With an increase in population, the demand for fuel, power, and energy will also continue grow, we will need to burn more fossil fuels, and continue to add more CO2 emission into our atmosphere just to continue running at the same speed we are today. With our consumption and demand of goods also outpacing our advances and discoveries of new technology, we run the risk of polluting our atmosphere too much, resulting in grave consequences, such as destroying the planet earth.

Climate change can also be affected by many other factors, such a deforestation, since “trees account for about 30% of the worlds land area” they are a large part of our ecosystem, they “house 70% of the Earth animals, they filter our air, maintain climate, and they absorb greenhouse gasses” (networklobby.org). “If we continue to cut down the trees as we always have done, in 100 years there will be no more rainforests left” (networklobby.org). Removing these trees also plays a heavy burden on people “we destroy many peoples homes, source of food, water, shelter, fuel, and livelihoods in the process, if we continue to destroy our forest we devastate the lives of the poor in other third world countries” (networklobby.org).  If we continue on the path we are today, we will only start a never-ending circle of global warming, if we cut down trees we have no filter for the growing CO2 emissions we pump into the atmosphere, resulting in an uninhabitable earth just like Wall-E.  Deforestation can also affected the earth’s albedo, “which is how much of the suns energy is reflected and the amount of water vapor released into the atmosphere” (arm.gov). All of those gravely impact climate change if not stopped, we run the risk of living in a never changing, burning planet with no trees left to help us survive.

We as humans also have many other outlets for pollution, one other outlet being the use of chemical fertilizers.  These fertilizers do not release any CO2, so you may be wondering what the problem is, well even though they do not release CO2 they still do release methane, and nitrous oxide, two out of the three main gasses of greenhouse emissions. These fertilizers release 40% of the total methane emission, 62% of the total Nitrous Oxide emissions, and they make up 12.5% of the total greenhouse gas emissions (timeforchange.org). This pollution plays a heavy burden on how our climate changes and how the earth is effected. The chemicals that these fertilizers release are also much more harmful than CO2, “Nitrous Oxide is around 300 times more potent than CO2, and it’s a major ozone depleting chemical, causing grave damage to our ozone layers” (grist.org). Scientists at the university of Berkley have also found a scientific link between Nitrous Oxide in only chemical fertilizers and the effects on global warming (news.berkley.edu). With this new knowledge we now know how harmful chemical fertilizers can be to our atmosphere, we also know that CO2 does not play a ginormous role in climate change, it is only 72% of the total problem (timeforchange.org), with the other 28% being linked to more harmful and potent chemicals. So, if we continue using chemical fertilizers as we always have done, we run the risk of increasing the more harmful and potent chemicals in our atmosphere.

Although climate change is heavily affected by human activity and interaction, it is also impacted by many natural causes, such as volcanic activity which adds CO2 to the atmosphere. There is also solar radiation that adds heat into the earth, along with arctic seabeds releasing methane. Although there are many natural causes contributing to global warming, these only contribute 3% of total causes for global warming.

That is why humans are killing the earth, we add greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere with no care in the world waiting for the day we can no longer survive without trees. We as humans are killing the earth very slowly with transportation emissions, deforestation, chemical fertilizers and many more ways of polluting the atmosphere. We need to eliminate the use of fossil fuels by as much as possible, invest in renewable energy, electric cars, and we need to stop cutting down trees. If we do all of these things we may be able to save the earth just in time. But, if we don’t we run the risk of living in a world uninhabitable by humans and taken over by trash robots like Wall-E.