In a scene of the popular sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the protagonist Jake is on an undercover mission with his partner and girlfriend Amy, who is in a parked car at a distance. For his disguise, he is only wearing a green hoodie with the words Earthvironment.org printed on the front, and Amy is skeptical of the effectiveness of the disguise. When she asks him if he is sure he will not be spotted, Jake replies that his cover makes him invisible. He then asks a pedestrian if she has “two minutes to talk about the environment?” The woman promptly turns the other way and starts walking at full speed. Jake then tells Amy, “Now no one will make eye contact with me.” 

This scene perfectly captures the level of care people are willing to show towards the subject of environmental awareness and climate change. Climate change and global warming are issues that grow more pressing by the minute, and the above Brooklyn Nine-Nine scene, though meant to be comedic, is an unfortunately accurate portrayal of the grim reality that humankind faces today. People live in blissful denial of the fact that climate change is affecting everyone all around the world, because they are not yet ready to believe that climate change is as serious an issue as it has become. 

The impacts of climate change and global warming are much more severe than appears to the eye. Islands like Maldives and Fiji are slowly becoming uninhabitable due to rising sea levels and may sink completely underwater by the end of this century. Polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate of 13% per decade, and according to www.worldwildlife.org, 95% of the Arctic sea’s thickest ice has been lost to rising temperatures in the last thirty years. Extremities and unusual changes in the weather are becoming more and more common in various regions of the world, as are droughts and frequent heavy rainfall.

In February of 2021, the state of Texas, US saw the worst snowstorm it had experienced in more than a decade. Due to the sudden drop in temperatures in a state where summer temperatures cross 90°F on the regular, electricity production across the state froze - literally, the equipment at coal plants and electricity infrastructures began freezing. Simultaneously, Texas residents were turning up the heat in their homes in all ways they could. This unforeseen surge in electricity demand paired with freezing infrastructure caused the Texas power grid to malfunction, and the result was a power outage which lasted four days and left dozens dead, hundreds injured and millions without power. Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin, had the following to say about the situation: “So we have a water problem—freezing water, become a gas problem, become a power problem, become a bigger gas problem, become a bigger power problem, become a water problem and a humanitarian crisis.” 

Residents, wildlife, and vegetation of the state of California, US have been on the receiving end of blistering heat waves all summer. Just on 6th September, 2022, temperatures in Petaluma, California reached a record-breaking 109°F, marking the longest and hottest heat wave the state had seen in all time. As a result of the heat waves, multiple wildfires are being set off, and state residents are being urged to conserve power as the state is at imminent risk of rotating power outages. Sadly, this is not the first time California has experienced something like this, as wildfires and droughts have become commonplace in the state in the last several years. 

California is not the only region where wildfires are burning. The Amazon rainforest has been on fire for years now, affecting both the wildlife and the vegetation. The Amazon rainforest is home to one in ten of the world’s flora and fauna species, and each year they face the brunt of global warming as temperatures rise continue to fuel these fires.

The worst part? All of the aforementioned climate and energy crises have been brought on by human activities. Excessive CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere cause a blanket layer to form in the air. This traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere, resulting in the rise in earth’s temperature, which is what global warming is. This rise in temperature is what has caused the melting of glaciers and ice caps, subsequently leading to the rise in sea levels resulting in the potential sinking of island countries - and the impacts could be detrimental to the environment. The population of 561,293 that Maldives currently houses would lose their home, and the nation could be wiped off the world map by 2050, experts say. Polar bears, already an endangered species, could reach the verge of extinction at the rate their natural habitat, the Arctic, is losing ice. Farmers living around the Amazon Rainforest region cut down the forest and set fires to the land every year in preparation of new crops, and the increased dryness is all the more conducive to wildfires on top of already rising temperatures. 

The situation might look bleaker than ever; however, there is a silver line. Although the damage done to the climate is irreversible, there is still hope as it is not too late to stop and prevent any further climate calamities from occurring. If greenhouse gas emissions were to be completely stopped right now, the rapidly rising curve of global temperatures would flatten significantly in a few years’ time. Despite the fact that the consequences of human activity on the climate of Earth to date are irreversible in the timeframe of humans alive now, every little bit of future temperature increases avoided results in less warming that would otherwise endure for virtually forever. NASA suggests a two-tier approach for responding to climate change, involving ‘mitigation’, a reduced flow of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and ‘adaptation’, adapting to and learning to live with the already existing climate change.