Our planet is currently the only one readily available to host life as we know it, and we have to protect it. For the past 12,000 years, our planet has been operating in the Holocene age, in which the average global temperature has been mostly predictable and stable; we have resettled wildlands, build cities on top of swamps, and industrialized to the magnificent level that we are at today. However, in carelessly doing so, we have almost completely destabilized these ecological systems that have allowed us to develop to this age, and our planet has started to send us some clear warnings; rivers drying up, the melting of ice mountains in Antarctica, increased velocity of hurricanes and the dramatic changes in our global temperature. It may seem hopeless, but there is still hope; humans have created this problem and thankfully we have the brilliant minds, and technological capacity to reverse it.

Firstly, it is important that we understand what global warming actually is, (and that it truly is real). You have probably heard people switching between the two terms, global warming and climate change when discussing the causes of a natural disaster or any other climate-related issues; global warming, simply put, is the increase of the earth’s temperature brought on by increasing levels of greenhouse gasses. While the term “climate change,” refers to the overall increase of our planet’s temperature or a specific area, over time.

Global warming occurs when C02, other greenhouse gases, and air pollutants from fossil fuels, agriculture, and industrial industries collect in the atmosphere, absorb sunlight and solar radiation that bounces off the earth’s surface. These pollutants keep radiation trapped in the atmosphere instead of allowing it to escape into space. The pollutants trap heat on our planet and cause the earth’s average surface temperature to rise…this process is also referred to as the greenhouse effect.

There are many more places heating up than there are those that are cooling down, this is due to the mass dumping of toxins in the air and pollutants such as methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur oxides building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat that would otherwise be bounced into space, here on earth. As we rapidly industrialized our communities and grew in population, we have created a greater demand on the environment and various industries (e.d oil, transportation energy, meat, poultry, and industrial industries), to cater for us and meet our new demands. There weren’t many in-depth studies on how we were impacting our planet’s weather until the seventies, and many local governments such as California have long since started

The average global temperature is dangerously increasing, making the last three decades the hottest, since 1850. The last 16 of the hottest years of NASA’s 134 years have occurred in the last eighteen years, and it is expected to increase by 10% in the next decade, but if anyone can do anything about it, you can. Yes you, you reading this.

The first step is to is understanding what global warming from verified sources such as NASA  (https://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-warming-vs-climate-change) and NRDC ( https://www.nrdc.org/issues/climate-change) and the United Nations ( ( (http://www.un.org/en/climatechange/) learn from