Methane and the Melting of the Arctic

Since 1980, the average temperature on Earth has risen by about a degree Celsius because of the increased concentration of "greenhouse gases" (GHG).

 

Over the last thirty years, the global scientific community has consolidated the consensus that global warming originates from human activity. It is the so-called anthropogenic effect on global warming - human activity is responsible for the uncontrolled increase in Earth's temperature through emissions of so-called "greenhouse gases" (GHG), mainly CO₂, methane and tropospheric ozone.

NASA has warned of the unpredictable and catastrophic consequences this effect will have on life on Earth as we know it today.

 

That is why a number of international agreements on the auspices of the United Nations have been established. The first on a global scale was the Kyoto agreement of 1997, but perhaps the most important is the Paris agreement of 2015, in which 195 countries have pledged to take measures to keep the global temperature rise below 2 ° C pre-industrial levels, but making efforts not to exceed 1.5ºC.

 

Recently, a group of scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Center - whose executive director is Johan Rockströmvem - said in PNAS magazine that the consequences of today's increase in emissions will be felt by decades and that its effects will be irreversible.

NASA is claiming that the Arctic melt is releasing large amounts of methane that was contained by the ice, and is now released, increasing the greenhouse effect.

Our civic consciousness has to rise and overlap with individualistic interests that say "this is not going to happen in my generation or it's only going to happen far away," which leads to inaction.

 

We can not leave our children a planet destroyed and uninhabitable, worse than the one we have received. We have to change the way we produce and consume energy. And we have everything we need "by hand". Available solar energy and technological know-how to transform it into clean and inexpensive electricity, coupled with the mastery of forms of management and energy storage in a competitive and accessible way, as is the case of water storage or batteries, to speak only in two of the most known cases.

 

 

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