Climate change is more than just polar bears and ice caps. Human-induced climate change includes both global warming driven by emissions of greenhouse gasses and large-scale shifts in weather patterns.

A lot of us don’t know about the seriousness of climate change. Global warming is happening on a global scale, so everyone is feeling the effects of it. Some examples being Hurricane Ida, the great lakes changing, and the California wildfires.

Let’s start with the storms such as Hurricane Ida. 90% of the heat that has been added over the last 100 years is in the ocean and is causing storms to be more and more severe. Also, warmer temperatures cause more water to evaporate from the oceans, transferring energy and water vapor to the atmosphere.

Hurricane Ida, which destroyed Louisiana over the past couple of weeks, went from a category one to a category four more quickly than almost any other storm in history.

A category one hurricane is a storm with winds from 75- 95 mph. It is strong enough to tear shingles off of roofs and tree branches to fly. Ida went from that to a category four, which is 130-145 mph, in three days. That leads to catastrophic damage to homes and also causes trees to tear out of the ground.

So how did it get so big so quickly? Well, there has been a 4% increase in the amount of water vapor in the Caribbean since the 1990s, and bringing up the point from before, the vapor in warm water from the ocean was used as fuel to make Miss Ida stronger.

This all originated and intensified in the Gulf of Mexico. Specifically the western Caribbean where the air and water are hot (Prime hurricane condition).

The main place it hit was Louisiana; the roads were turned into rivers, and hundreds of rescue boats and helicopters set out to find people trapped in their houses or their cars. It made its way through Cuba, and tornado warnings stretched throughout coastal Mississippi, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Hurricane Ida led to a total of 95 people dead.

Some of the intense storms fueled by climate change and high water levels moved their way to the Great Lakes. This caused flooding and homes to be destroyed and ripped into the lakes.

The director of the Center for Water Policy in Michigan said that the drinking water for Milwaukee is soon to be contaminated with sewer water. They have already spent three million dollars on rebuilding the roads that were eroded by the lake and are soon to be reconstructing the concrete channels for the sewers.

Next up on the “climate change is leading our earth to dying” list is the wildfires, mainly in California. This topic was popular last year when most of them had media attention and has only gotten worse.

Before I start on this topic, I would like to state that 5.4 million acres were burned from 2020 to now. All are either caused or fueled by global warming and drought.

According to the Wall Street Journal, The Dixie Fire is the second-largest in the state’s recorded history. It started in July and has burned over 963,309 acres in California since. It started in July of this year and is now only 59% contained. No one’s sure where this fire originated, as all the websites I visited gave me a different answer, but the main response I saw was actually by PG&E’s equipment. A repairman who saw the fire first stated that a power line was down, and a large tree and some equipment were leaning into it, which sparked the fire.

Although this is human-induced climate change, the high winds and temperatures fuel the fire more.

A different large fire that started in California is the Caldor fire. That fire was started by extremely hot and dry conditions experts say are symptomatic of climate change. It destroyed 200,000 acres and 1,000 structures from August to now.

Greenhouse gasses and natural influences on the climate will, in my opinion, and pretty much everyone else on the internet, do no good to the planet and the future of our earth with climate change will only get worse. The atmosphere and oceans will become warmer, there will be higher sea levels, and larger changes in storms and such.

I am not going to yell at you to go plant a tree, and go buy one of those plug-in smart cars but there are things you can do to help with global change and help the people that have been affected by this. This article is only a small bit of what is going on with our Earth. Feel free to check out the links below to read more about climate change and global warming or how you personally can help.

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/climate-change/changing-atmosphere/intense-storms-more-common

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/climate-change-increases-risk-fires-western-us

https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/how-you-can-stop-global-warming

https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation.html/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/climate/nyt-climate-newsletter-donations.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/podcasts/the-daily/climate-crisis-resilience.html