assignment #2

I am Victor Alonso, a student for LaGuardia Community College and for my second blog of my ENG 101 composition class I am to talk about climate change. To do so, I will explain two essays written in the book “The Global Warming Reader” by Bill McKibben. The essay “The ‘Anthropocene’” by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer talks about how the world has change by the influence of human civilization creating a change in the earth’s lands and also admosphere. The other essay that’s mentioned in the book is “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Naomi Oreskes which focuses on explaining that climate change is still uncertain and baseless, in other words climate change is not really happening.

            In the essay “The ‘Anthropocene’” by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer the focus is on the modification made by human action, which means that the climate that we are confronting nowadays was made by us and our forefathers because of the land modification, taking down natural air filters, in other words threes and plants, whose jobs is to filter part of the carbon dioxide that’s on the air we breathe throughout their photosynthesis. Therefore, in our present time as more than half of the earth’s land has been modified throughout mankind’s history, we are now facing changes on the earth as a result of what we had done to mother earth. For example, mankind population has increased more than tenfold to 6 billion in the past 3 centuries, making urbanization to increase as well for about tenfold in the past century, increasing cities and decreasing the natural land.

            As for the next essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Naomi Oreskes which talks about the “nonsense” of climate change, or in other words climate change is not happening, as her reason states that ‘climate science is highly uncertain.’ Though, the intergovernmental panels on climate change (IPCC) created in 1988 says that “the consensus of scientific opinion is that earth’s climate is being affected by human action,” meaning that the urbanization on the earth’s land is changing the earth’s climate to another direction from its original course. Another hot topic is talked in the essay is that greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, causing the air temperatures and ocean temperatures to rise; which means that greenhouses are another reason that the temperatures have been rising little by little over the past few years and will keep increasing on the years yet to come.

            In conclusion, it is not whether it is climate change or not the main point, but the way we treat our mother earth. These two essays that I’ve talked about here are just an approach to the issue that our planet is changing and we can’t do much to stop this unwanted change in our climate in general. Though, the issue of saving our planet sounds not too complicated to do it, looking on the reality that we are it is much more complex and difficult that our thoughts, even I thought that saving the earth might be easy and I could make a difference alone but the small difference isn’t enough at all. My point by saying this is that acting alone won’t get us anywhere, but if we act together as one we can make a big difference and a big step on saving ourselves and our planet.