2050: Ceasing to Address Anthropogenic Climate Change

By Mohammed Aldulaimi
 
The year 2050. People have stopped recycling their waste since 2024. Factories are throwing their waste into the ocean. Governments succumbed to economic pressures, and they’ve abandoned the international environmental agreements they once had. Plastics are still being used, now more predominantly, and are not being recycled. Fossil fuel is still our only major source of energy, continuing to pump greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. Despite the early concerns about global warming, no action has been taken to reverse the effects, and now, the temperatures around the globe are 6˚ F higher than they were in the past century. With some countries having reached as high temperatures as 115 degrees in 2018, many of these countries are on the verge of turning to real-life furnaces and may eventually become ghost towns.

IOP Publishing
 
Where some cities and villages are experiencing deadly droughts and famines, other cities are on their way to being completely flooded and submerged under the ocean, succumbing to the drastic sea level rise, another product of global warming. On the other hand, animals are quickly becoming extinct. As we continue to cut down forests and fuel global warming, many animals are losing their habitats and experiencing deadly temperatures. For instance, red wolves, Bornean orangutans, and Hawksbill turtles have vanished and haven’t been observed since 2030, they’ve gone extinct. We’re slowly losing our planet, not in a thousand or million years, but it’s happening now, in real-time.

Public health has seen better days. Many, once known as, healthy adults, are now frequent patients in hospitals. Our diet has been enormously affected by the drastic environmental change we ceased to address. Now, it is very hard to find food that is clean of plastic particles. The microplastic ‘epidemic’, being untreated for years, has become part of our daily diet. Plastics are known to cause damage to our cells, slowly degrading our overall health and our life expectancy.
 
Today, wildfires have become very frequent and have been worsening our air quality and destroying our forests. Air pollution is a global health hazard that seems to have become an intrinsic character of our cities. For instance, cities like New Delhi have become so extremely polluted, they are now unsafe environments for many people. Air pollution, partially caused by wildfires, may potentially contribute to cancer occurrence in global populations. The age expectancy around the world is quickly shrinking, and so is the life quality of people. Whether it’s because of our food or our environment, the Earth is on its way to becoming another ghost planet in the universe, vacant of the once-thriving creatures that walked on it.
 
Global environmental conditions seem to only worsen. It is not only a simple rise in temperatures, but a global loss of the quality of life. Is it enough of a wake-up call for us? Our world is no longer our envisioned utopia, did we really give up? Is there still hope for change? In reality, it’s never too late. Now, government entities have realized their mistake. Cooperations are joining hands again, in an attempt to reverse the impact we humans are contributing to. In fact, you can become part of the change. It’s now only one click away (and possibly a few thousand miles away).
 

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