As global warming is getting more severe, it poses huge stresses over both human beings and the nature. Even though the impacts of global warming are rising and some of them might have been underestimated, it is still a good thing that people have recognized the adverse effects of global warming, and have been trying to reverse the trend.
The most important thing to do is to correctly and comprehensively identify the impacts before taking real actions. There are without doubt some positive outcomes such as the rising temperature might give people who are living in subpolar areas a better living environment, but the negative impacts definitely outweigh the positive ones. Human beings have been affected the most by climate change in various ways. So here I want to examine the impacts climate change has on human beings.
Food supply
Agriculture is very sensitive and vulnerable to climate change. Some countries might benefit and increase productivity from a very small increase in temperature, but that is not the case in the long run. And it is also detrimental for many other countries, especially the ones that have already been suffering from shortage of food. Factors that influence agriculture productivity include, but not limited to, change in precipitation patterns, rising carbon dioxide amount in the atmosphere, extremely weather conditions such as droughts and floods. All these factors will only have a negative impact on agriculture and probably reduce the productivity substantially.
Moreover, with increasing percentage of carbon dioxide in the sea and lakes and worsening water pollution, it is very likely that aquatic population will get greatly reduced.
Human’s health condition
With global warming and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, insects and rodents may carry and spread diseases that it can be fatal if humans got infected.
With very unstable temperature, a large number of people, mostly elder people, cannot make it through extremely cold or hot weather. A great example of this would be the heat wave happened in summer 2003 in Europe. It was one of the hottest summer in Europe’s history and it was estimated more 35,000 people died because of the heat. Global warming also causes other different kinds of extreme weathers such as storms and droughts by which human lives are greated threatened.
With high carbon dioxide concentration and different kinds of particles caused by it in the air, it is very likely to make people have lung or heart problems. A study showed that around 700 to 800 deaths in recent years were caused by human-generated carbon dioxide emissions.
Rising sea level
Even with a very small increase in sea level, it could bring a huge impact. Higher temperature would raise sea level by “expanding ocean water, melting mountain glaciers and small ice caps, and causing portions of Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets to melt.” It was estimated by IPCC that the sea level would rise between 0.6 and 2 feet in the next century. Rising sea level poses a huge threat on human’s daily life in various ways. Firstly, coastal areas are being greatly threatened by the sea level. Coastal areas tend to be economically prosperous and popular tourism sites. There are over 600 million people living in those high-risk places. If the rising sea level began to affect those areas, not only the economy would be hurt, but also people’s lives would be threatened. Secondly, with sea water flows into both surface and underground water, it will make the level of underground water rise and the surface water salty. A large aspect of people’s everyday living depends on fresh water, and this will definitely reduce the fresh water supply. With growing economy and population, some countries cannot find enough fresh water supply already, and it will only get worse if sea level kept rising.
Right now, global warming is already inevitable, the only thing we can do is to alleviate the impacts it has on not only human beings, but also the nature to maintain a livable environment.
Tags: Climate change impacts, Global warming, Sea level rise
