"Look. There's a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know, what the world needs to know, it that we're really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic way than anyone has ever imagined.
I mean, I've seen a lot of the world, the only world we have. There are so many awesome, beautiful things in it. Waterfalls and mountains, thermal pools surrounded by ice and snow as far as you can see. Beautiful beaches with sand like white sugar. Fields and fields of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside, like it's done for hundreds of thousands of years.
I've also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are become extinct right now, in my lifetime. Just recently, I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge, worldwide climate change caused by...us. We, the people.
Every minute of every day, cars belch exhaust. Factories spew toxins into the air, land, and water. We've cleared millions of square miles of forests, rain forests, and plains, which means tons of topsoil is just washing away. Which means loss of animals and plants, and increased fires, floods, and coastal disintegration. Just by stuff people have made, created, we're raising the overall temperature of the entire atmosphere. Well, we only have the one atmosphere! Can we hold our breath until we get a new one?
The problem is here, now. Nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded have happened in my lifetime. I'm fourteen. More or less. There have been record-setting weather extremes across the globe-tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, wildfires, tsunamis. We're warming up the planet, and the planet's ice is melting. If only fifty percent of the world's ice melts, countless rivers and streams will overflow and then dry up, killing hundreds of people from disease and starvation. The ocean water level will rise anywhere from four feet to maybe twenty feet. How many of your favorite vacation spots would be under water? Want to see the Eiffel Tower by canoe? Do any of you own beach houses? Kiss 'em goodbye. And not two hundred years from now. Soon. Maybe withing this lifetime.
We can't reverse this disaster, even if we all pitched in now and did everything we could, which, face it, we're not going to do. A small percentage of us will do stuff, and other people will ignore the problem and hope they'll be dead before it gets really bad. But there are things we can do that would at least help. It would make a difference.
We need to pay more attention to what we do, what we buy, who we buy it from. Use compact fluorescent bulbs. Look into other kinds of power. Windmills, water mills, solar power-every year corporations pay a jillion dollars in legal fees to avoid getting fined for pollution violations. What if they took a tiny percentage of that money and put it toward coming up with with better energy sources?
I'm just one kid, and not even a regular kid. But if I can come up with all this, why can't you? Will you wait until the water is lapping at your feet?" - Max
Way to go, James Patterson!
I mean, I've seen a lot of the world, the only world we have. There are so many awesome, beautiful things in it. Waterfalls and mountains, thermal pools surrounded by ice and snow as far as you can see. Beautiful beaches with sand like white sugar. Fields and fields of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside, like it's done for hundreds of thousands of years.
I've also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are become extinct right now, in my lifetime. Just recently, I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge, worldwide climate change caused by...us. We, the people.
Every minute of every day, cars belch exhaust. Factories spew toxins into the air, land, and water. We've cleared millions of square miles of forests, rain forests, and plains, which means tons of topsoil is just washing away. Which means loss of animals and plants, and increased fires, floods, and coastal disintegration. Just by stuff people have made, created, we're raising the overall temperature of the entire atmosphere. Well, we only have the one atmosphere! Can we hold our breath until we get a new one?
The problem is here, now. Nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded have happened in my lifetime. I'm fourteen. More or less. There have been record-setting weather extremes across the globe-tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, wildfires, tsunamis. We're warming up the planet, and the planet's ice is melting. If only fifty percent of the world's ice melts, countless rivers and streams will overflow and then dry up, killing hundreds of people from disease and starvation. The ocean water level will rise anywhere from four feet to maybe twenty feet. How many of your favorite vacation spots would be under water? Want to see the Eiffel Tower by canoe? Do any of you own beach houses? Kiss 'em goodbye. And not two hundred years from now. Soon. Maybe withing this lifetime.
We can't reverse this disaster, even if we all pitched in now and did everything we could, which, face it, we're not going to do. A small percentage of us will do stuff, and other people will ignore the problem and hope they'll be dead before it gets really bad. But there are things we can do that would at least help. It would make a difference.
We need to pay more attention to what we do, what we buy, who we buy it from. Use compact fluorescent bulbs. Look into other kinds of power. Windmills, water mills, solar power-every year corporations pay a jillion dollars in legal fees to avoid getting fined for pollution violations. What if they took a tiny percentage of that money and put it toward coming up with with better energy sources?
I'm just one kid, and not even a regular kid. But if I can come up with all this, why can't you? Will you wait until the water is lapping at your feet?" - Max
Way to go, James Patterson!
More recently, human activity has undergone what is being called the Great Acceleration: the rapid intensification of resource consumption and ecological degradation. We risk disrupting the earth’s critical systems, and with them modern civilization itself.
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