Climate change is a serious problem. Climate change is defined as a long-term shift in temperatures and weather patterns, which can cause more frequent and intense droughts, storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and warming oceans. Specifically, Florida’s climate today resulted in rising sea levels submerging wetlands and drylands, eroding beaches, and exacerbating coastal flooding. This is all only in Florida yet the whole world is slowly being affected.

       Climate change started in the 19th century from the overuse of burning fossil fuels – coal and eventually oil and gas with it being discovered by Guy Callendar in 1938, this added an ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide into the air and so climate change began.

       In the past 10 years climate change has gotten exponentially worse. Studies say that “The ocean has absorbed between 20% and 30% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades” which means “the ocean holds 60 times more carbon than the atmosphere and absorbs almost 30% of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from human activities.” In other words, our ocean has been affected in ways that cause it to affect us even more. In fact, the decade of  2011-2020 has been found as the warmest decade on record. The global average temperature is expected to warm at least twice as much in the next 100 years as it has during the last 100 years.

       What we can do to prevent climate change from getting worse is to save energy at home. A good amount of our electricity and heat are powered by coal, oil, and gas. A few examples would be changing your home’s source of energy, walking, biking, or taking public transport, switching to an electric vehicle, and, of course, the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. These are all ways to decrease climate change rates/levels.

In conclusion, climate change has become way worse in the past 10 years and needs to be dealt with if not there could be some really bad consequences.