Week 10

This week we talked a lot about challenges in climate change and what should be done to discourage climate change. We watched a very interesting video regarding climate change as well. In this movie there were several important and interesting facts and ideas about climate that were presented within this movie. An important fact that I knew occurred but was unfamiliar with the exact percentage was that tress absorb about 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions. This is crucial because without these trees, the effects and impacts of climate seen in our world would have the potential to be much worse and at much higher levels. Something that this fact advocates in my opinion is the idea  of how crucial it is to preserve our worlds forests and work extremely hard to eliminate or at least decrease the frequency and significance of clear cutting and deforestation. These processes remove a large amount of trees from a specific area in a short amount of time. A negative impact that this has is the fact that these trees are then no longer available to absorb the excess amount of carbon and other greenhouse gasses that are emitted into the area. These greenhouse gasses now are allowed to go into the atmosphere and this is a huge problem. Another interesting idea from the movie was the idea of pumping large amounts of fertilizers into the oceans in order to promote algal blooms and thus absorb large amounts of carbon. I believe that this is a very bad idea because eutrophication is a very serious problem in bodies of water and I don't believe that we should be intentionally eutrophicating lakes. It can disrupt many natural processes in bodies of water, decrease oxygen available in water, making it harder for fish to survive and many other negative processes. I believe the main and number one thing that we should do is to work towards reducing our overall consumption levels and working to lower these rates. I believe that this is the only way to successfully mitigate climate change is to first change ourselves before we can move forward to other ideas.