It seems like every couple days another natural disaster makes the news somewhere around the world. Whether it’s a hurricane, wildfire, or flood, it’ll be at the forefront of the news cycle for a couple days and then the public is off focusing on something else. What we should be focusing on is the fact that the rate of severe weather events has been increasing over the past decades.
The National Climate Assessment, a study done by multiple U.S. government agencies in 2014, came to the conclusion that the rate of severe weather events is on the rise as a direct effect of human impact on the environment. It is projected that the cost of these events, both in human life and monetary damage, will only increase if we do not take decisive action to curb our negative impact on the environment. Coastal communities are the most at risk from these more severe events due to the risks presented by hurricanes, storms, and flooding. Due to the high concentration of U.S. population living near the cost, with coastal counties only taking up 10 percent of land but hosting 39 percent of the U.S. population, this threat is very real for many Americans.
As of November 2018, the second edition of the National Climate Assessment has further shown that we are on a course for disaster. The majority of predictions made in the 2014 edition have been shown to accurate by the additional data collected in the four years since the first report.
The debate about what should be done in response to climate change has been very contentious and tends to skew along party lines, which has limited previous action to proactively mitigate the impact of climate change. Unfortunately, we have moved beyond our chance for proactive action. A recent report by the United Nations found that if dramatic action is not taken in the next decade to reduce our impact on the environment we will reach a tipping point and inflict irreversible damage on the environment, a timeline that is much more advanced then previous predictions.
Now is the time for action. We no longer have the luxury of indecision. If swift action is not taken our planet will become increasingly inhospitable to life. Now is the time to write your representatives and tell them that they need to work to safeguard the future of their constituents through decisive action on climate change. Be vocal in your local chapter of your political party, left or right, and make it clear that they should be supporting candidates that take the threat of climate change seriously. Now is the time to stand up and say something and not let things go forward as they are. It is no longer an issue of saving the polar bears or protecting the glaciers, we need to act to save ourselves. If we do not act soon we will be remembered as the generations that saw the writing on the wall and turned our backs, at the cost of our children and our children’s children.
— By Joshua Eisner