We continued our discussions on climate change.
Finding 4-Widespread Impacts:
Everyone is impacted but especially the children, elderly, sick and poor. With
unpredictable weather it is hard to have the right technology in emergencies.
Places that are not used to hot weather are getting warmer and hot weather
causes their systems such as electricity and air conditioning to break down and
not work. This increases deaths because when it is hot out and people do
not have AC they can have heat strokes. 75% of coral reefs will be damaged by
ocean acid which is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide. Caribbean coral
cover has decreased 80% in less than 3 decades; this will minimize shelter and resources for animals that live in the ocean. This is due to warmer temperature by
bleaching the coral and killing it by disease. Agriculture is affected because of
the higher temperatures and less water due to more evaporation. With electricity
demands at an all-time high, we need more power from water and we are producing
less. This also increases prices for energy which impacts families across the world.
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Finding 5-Human Health:
Climate change threatens human health in many ways. Ways that it threatens life is by creating wildfires, decreased air quality, threats to mental health, sickness obtained through food and other resources. Wildfires affect people throughout the U.S by decreasing the quality of the air in all areas and not just the immediate region. There will not be as much food.
Finding 6-Infrastructure:
Basically, This part is about the infrastructures of buildings and cities being compromised by extreme weather. A failure in something like an electricity grid going down, would result in hospitals power turning off, which wouldn’t help the patients much, and businesses would be out of power and lose production time.
A major downfall of the Infrastructure of many urban cities is that most are linked together. for example electricity is essential to a lot of systems, and a failure in the electrical grid can affect water treatment, transportation services, and public health. Another example: say a subway floods, this would effect a huge portion of transportation for cities, and would take a lot of expenses to fix.
Statistically, Summers are getting hotter, and with the longer, hotter summers, Electricity use will sky rocket. causing supply disruptions of varying lengths and magnitudes and affecting other infrastructure that depends on energy supply.
Finding 7-Water: Surface and groundwater supplies are running scarce because of the demand and the reduction of runoff and groundwater recharge, and the pollution of water because of heavy rainfalls causing sediment and contaminant concentrates to get into the water making it undrinkable. The climate changes the water cycle. Floods and droughts would intensify, and since the air and water temperatures increases, there would be more intense precipitation and runoff water. It would change the demand of water. Not many people would be able to get water in different places, and people would have to reserve the water. There is going to be an increase in demand for water by 2060.
Finding 8-Agriculture: The climate change is good, but also very bad for agriculture. It is good because the days of frost are going down, enlarging the amount of growing season creating new opportunities to plant crops more often. Rain amounts will decrease due to warmer weather, causing droughts especially in the Western part of the United States. This will cause strain on the crops and animals, which will in turn produce less goods for over 3 billion to feed by the year 2050. Crop yields decrease with higher temperatures, which is a recent trend with many people to feed.
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