By: Sydney Janeiro
Good human nature seems to come out best during natural disasters. This hurricane season has been a true testament to this. When people are in need, people step up, and it is inspirational. A local store owner nicknamed “Mattress Mack” invited 400 evacuees into his furniture store after Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding in eastern Texas. People turned to Facebook to plead for help, and complete strangers replied and came to the rescue; not to mention the selfless response of our National Guard, saving countless humans and their beloved pets. Helping others in times of crisis is the American way, it is what we do.
I do wonder though, what would happen if we also put this desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves into the prevention of disaster. Although it has not yet been proven that global warming caused this series of hurricanes, the evidence shows that it added to their enormity. The fact that Hurricane Irma, born from warm ocean temperatures, became record-breaking in magnitude, has to make you wonder… is it us? Everything that we do on land has an effect on our oceans. You don’t have to be a NASA scientist (I never will be) to realize that the ocean absorbs heat from the atmosphere. If the atmosphere’s temperature rises, so does the ocean’s. So have we caused this clearly detectable increase in Atlantic hurricanes that wreaked havoc this season? Scientists predict that global warming will cause future hurricanes to grow even more in intensity. So now what?
We all know by now that burning fossil fuels for the last century has not been good for our environment. We also know that our oceans clean up our air by removing this extra Co2 emitted from the fuels we constantly burn. In return, the oceans grow warmer (Again, no rocket science here). So how do we slow this process? Maybe we need to think about what we already know and begin to collect our own data.
I never really thought about our part in the severity of these storms; not until these recent storms erupted, making September of 2017, the record-breaking month for most hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. We were still talking about Harvey when the news broke about Irma. Then Jose was born from a tropical storm, followed by Katia, and soon after, Maria broke the headlines. It will take countless humanitarians and many years to clean up the aftermath. We all should take a closer look at what scientists, not politicians, are saying about the natural disasters occurring in the United States and throughout the world. The argument that “we always had hurricanes” holds true, but never before like the month we just lived through. The data is changing, and so must we.
Sources:
This was really informative. I liked that you brought up the topic of listening to scientists and not politicians in regards to hurricane information. That is a very interesting point, one that more people should take into consideration.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you and while hurricanes will always occur, we can do something about there severity through climate change
ReplyDeletei like how you gave scientific information about distasters but also talked about how the disasters could be caused by us. it really makes people begin to think about what they do and if it could hurt our environment and think about ways to improve our environment also.
ReplyDelete