The debate about the causes of climate change has emerged as a serious agenda in international forums. For the last couple of decades, governments, political leaders, scientists, environmental activists, and experts in the environmental discourse have engaged in endless debate about whether climate change is a manmade or natural phenomenon ( Trenberth, 2009) . On one hand, there is a faction of political leaders and jurisdictions that have maintained that climate change is a natural phenomenon that cannot be remedied by human actions and that will continue to occur regardless of human efforts to mitigate it. On the other hand, there has been a popular view that climate change is a phenomenon that has been caused by human activities and, thus, it can only be remedied through human actions (UCS, 2017). However, a close look at this debate shows that human activities have been the major contributors to climate change because they lead to an increase in greenhouse gases emissions, destabilizing the hydrologic balance and paving the way for extreme weather, the disappearance of polar glaciers, and rise in sea level. The first indicator that proves that climate change is a manmade phenomenon is that the earth’s temperatures remained almost the same during the pre-industrial age ( Trenberth, 2009) . During the pre-industrial age, people who inhabited the world lived with an abundance of plants and animals. The planet was more habitable than it is today because humans used the plants and animals they had domesticated as their source of food and livelihood. The pre-industrial people, who used wood, a product that thrives from oxygen-supported photosynthesis, stayed in environments that did not emit many greenhouse gases. The pre-industrial people used wood as the main source of energy to warm their dwellings and cook food. According to Hoffman (2020), the gaseous composition of the atmosphere during the pre-industrial period remained more or less the same because the amount of carbon dioxide that human activities released into the atmosphere was less or the same or less than the amount of oxygen that plants and trees released. Though there were natural cyclic changes that occurred in the atmosphere, they did not have a significant impact on the globe’s average temperatures. Among the natural events that have been associated with climate change and global warming include continental shifts, major volcanic events, and el-Niño winds ( Hoffman, 2020) . The natural swings in the oceanic el-Niño winds, particularly, have been the most dominant event that the scientific community focuses on when determining whether climate change is an outcome of man-made activities or a natural occurrence. Though a faction of the scientific community has argued that climate change is a natural thing, there is no evidence to show that the changes that have taken place since the earth’s temperatures increased after the industrial period would be reversed ( Trenberth, 2009) . Some of the notable changes in the earth’s temperatures that have been occasioned by climate change include temperature increases, deviations in cloud patterns, and changes in precipitation. The other evidence that can be used to showcase that climate change is a human-driven phenomenon is that the earth’s average temperatures have begun to rise in the last 200 years (UCS, 2017). This was the period of the industrial revolution that was characterized by industrialization, urbanization, increased use of land for agriculture, and heightened movement of people from rural to urban areas. Since the onset of the industrial revolution, the earth’s average temperatures have increased by about 0.8 degrees ( Höök & Tang, 2013) . In the most industrialized countries in Europe and North America, the average rise in temperature that has been recorded in the past two centuries is 2% of the pre-industrial temperature ( Trenberth, 2009) . The consequences of rapid industrialization and heightened agricultural activities, as well as increased use of fossil fuels in automobiles, mean that more greenhouse gases have been emitted into the atmosphere with serious negative impacts on the stability of the climate (UCS, 2017). The greatest problem in the effort to mitigate climate change has been rapid deforestation and heightened agricultural activities, which means that there are not enough plants to absorb the carbon dioxide that industrial activities release into the atmosphere. What makes climate change a serious global problem is that it destabilizes the Earth’s temperature equilibrium with far-reaching impacts on the ecological balance, human and animal well-being, and the environment. The direct impacts of climate changes include a rise in sea levels, imminent submersion of coastal cities, rise of minimum and minimum annual temperatures, thwarting of permafrost, and shrinking of glaciers ( Trenberth, 2009) . Indirectly, climate change causes hunger and water crisis, loss of biodiversity, the spread of pests and pathogens, and oceanic acidification. Climate change can be reversed if humans refrain from activities that lead to increased emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Some of the measures that humans can take to reverse climate change include reducing the use of fossil fuels and planting more trees ( Höök & Tang, 2013) . The effort to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases should be aimed at making sure that the carbon dioxide and water vapor produced by human activities are lower than what the natural and manmade environments can absorb. Afforestation and reforestation, on the same note, would increase the earth’s vegetation cover and bolster the ability of the planet to maintain a sustainable oxygen-carbon dioxide balance.
References
Hoffman, A. J. (2020). How culture shapes the climate change debate . Stanford University Press.
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Höök, M., & Tang, X. (2013). Depletion of fossil fuels and anthropogenic climate change—A review. Energy policy , 52 , 797-809.
Trenberth, K. E. (2009). An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability , 1 (1), 19-27.
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) (2017). How do we know that Humans are the Major Causes of Global Warming? A web page, retrieved on 30 November 2017, from link www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/human-contribution-to-gw-faq.html#.Wh-0zVWWa1s
