Burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gas and petrol is adding huge amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, causing the global climate to break down.
It is becoming increasingly hotter, the sea level is rising, extreme weather events are more common, and the future of human civilisation and life on earth as we know it is at risk.
These trends are set to become increasingly worse unless we take rapid action at an individual, national and global level.
Climate Change & Human Activity
Although the climate has always changed, scientists are agreed that there is no doubt that the rapid rise in temperatures seen over the last 150 years is caused by human activity. This has caused levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to rise higher than at any point in the last 2 million years. As a result the global climate is destabilising.
For example, the sea is absorbing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which is making it increasingly acidic, threatening the stability of the entire marine food chain. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps are melting, causing the sea level to rise and threaten the world's coastal areas. Extreme events like floods, hurricanes, wildfires, heatwaves and tornadoes are becoming more common, and global rainfall patterns are being affected causing devastating droughts.
It is vitally important that we all understand what climate change is, what it's impacts are, what causes it, and how we need to change our behaviour in order to prevent it from happening and bring stability to the global climate.
