Climate change is happening now, not 50 years later

In our daily lives, it can be easy to put off dealing with important issues because the consequences seem so far off. There are always signs that something is going wrong, however. In a previous piece, I compared climate change to not improving a bad diet until it’s too late. Even if you’re not having heart attacks yet, eating unhealthily can still cause you serious problems now.

It’s the same with global warming. Though scientists are warning us that the worst case scenarios could happen sooner than they expected, it all feels so distant. But we don’t have to be at the point of worldwide catastrophe to see the damage that climate change is currently causing for us, in both obvious and subtle ways.

Some of these effects can still feel distant to us because they don’t affect our daily lives directly. You already know about the melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, for example. You’ve most likely even seen pictures. There are also other effects, such as increased ocean temperatures and decreased melting times for snow in certain parts of the world.

But it can be easy to downplay these things because most of us aren’t living them.

It’s harder to ignore deadly heatwaves though, such as the one that swept Europe this summer, leading to thousands of deaths and health complications. Even in places that aren’t seeing outright heatwaves, the average temperature is noticeably increasing. 2016 was the warmest year on record, and eight of the twelve months of that year were the warmest they’ve ever been.

This is all happening to us now, in ways that hit us directly and are very hard to deny.

Other effects are somewhat more speculative but still based on solid research. For example, one study implies that droughts brought on by climate change were one of the factors that helped spark the Syrian Civil War. While it was far from the only reason and pre-existing tensions and social issues in the country certainly played more of a role, these issues were likely made worse by problems caused by climate change.

In this case, the link is not 100% conclusive, but the study was not mere guesswork. Examinations of the data involved show how these droughts could not have happened due to natural factors alone.

And that’s possibly one of the worst consequences of climate change, the indirect but grave damage that it can cause in people’s lives. We are only going to see more of this in the future, with another example being an increase in climate migrants fleeing extreme weather conditions. Still, when people say we need to take action against climate change now, it’s not only to create a better future. It’s to fix the very real problems that we are already experiencing.