What is Global Warming? Simple. It’s the rise of Earth’s overall temperature. This is common knowledge but what’s not common is to see people take it seriously.

People have very different views on global warming. There are those at one end of the spectrum who don’t even believe global warming is real and that it’s actually the government bribing scientists to tell false information so people will donate to Global Warming societies, and then on the other end, you have people who are very extreme on the topic and will convince everyone they know to limit power usage because they’re “killing penguins”. Then there are people like me, in the middle, who acknowledge that the problem exists, but aren’t really proactive in trying to solve it.

However, I’ve recently begun looking into global warming and I’ve realized that it’s not as small of a problem as some may think. It is affecting us and in big ways. According to National Geographic, this past decade has had a record-breaking number of natural disasters due to just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming. Storms, forest fires, droughts, heat waves, and floods, millions of lives lost, all because of a simple rise of 1.8 degrees.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports that a 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit rise could be reached in at least 11 years, definitely within 20 years if we don’t significantly cut down carbon dioxide emissions. Even then, this 2.7 degrees rise is inevitable. You might not notice it, but the ecosystem, economy, and other communities definitely will. And even then, it won’t stop at just  2.7 degrees. The more we continue to use technology, the worse the problem will get.

It’s not just natural disasters either. Global warming can lead to issues like an increase in mosquito viruses, a decline in arctic wildlife, and a dangerous rise in sea levels. Sometimes I’ll tell people this and they argue that it doesn’t matter anyway because we’ll be dead by the time the earth gets to that point but that’s wrong. Just because we won’t be the ones to get the worst of it doesn’t mean we should do nothing. We have the power to halt global warming if we all just try.

So what can we do? It doesn’t have to be anything big. Simple things like walking some places instead of driving or reducing how much time you plug your electronics in at home still make a difference. And to the people who say a single person’s actions won’t do anything, maybe you are right, but I believe that if everyone puts in just a little effort, we’ll see big changes. After all, all it takes is a couple of degrees of global warming to cause devastating consequences on a global scale.