The universe is massive. It is an ever expanding and shrinking mass of galaxies, stars, debris, stardust, and even the unknown. The universe contains billions of galaxies just like the Milky Way. These galaxies contain billions of solar systems as well each with a host star and orbiting planets. Of these billions and even trillions of planets, humans have never detected life on any other planet. It wasn't until recently that there weren't even any candidates for life on another planet. Knowing this I find it hard to believe that humans can treat the only home of its kind like garbage. The world is an organism and should be treated as such. Earth has currents and jet streams that fuel climate and migration patterns. The Earth can spew molten lava or cause a storm so big that it envelops an entire state of the United States. The organisms of the Earth act as vessels to transport things such as pollen or seeds in order to keep the surrounding ecosystems healthy. It comes as no surprise that the Earth and its organisms are suffering due to the way we humans treat it. The United States may be one of the worst countries to recognize and help with this problem. In an article titled One in Four in U.S. are Solidly Skeptical of Global Warming the author, Lydia Saad, uses the results from Gallup's annual environment survey to bring to light the amount of people who really don't care about the future of the Earth. In the survey 1,048 individuals were chosen from the age of 18 or older and they were asked how they felt about climate change. The results were surprising; with 25% of people labeled themselves as cool skeptics. The remaining 75% was split with 39% claiming to be concerned believers and 36% as identifying as mixed middle. The results were looked into even further and the problem became clear. Over half of the mixed middle had less than one quarter of college experience. Education of this matter in pre-college classes is necessary to helping the American population and even the world realize the problem and even help reverse it. The bottom line of these findings is that "as with many issues in the past decade, Americans' views have grown more polarized" (Saad 306). I believe this polarization is a direct result of the non-education of climate change on all platforms from political to educational. Most people don't know what exactly is happening. These people only hear one effect at a time instead of hearing the domino effect climate change is causing. The goal needs to be to educate the youth and lobby the politicians to finally take action. Over the past two decades climate change has been the biggest issue the world has faced. The rising sea levels, melting ice caps, increased rainfall, longer droughts, and more fires have triggered the alarm of the leading scientists around the world. Only cooperation by the world as a whole can fix this problem.

When an individual looks at a globe they will most likely notice one thing. The Earth is mostly water. Not only is the Earth mostly water, but these waters contain a majority of the biodiversity on the planet. Water is a very delicate substance. The pH of water can change with the addition of even the smallest amount of substance. The organisms that have called the oceans home for thousands of years have evolved and adapted to the current temperature and pH of the oceans. Evolving to these conditions takes millions of years so it would be absurd to think pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which then gets absorbed by the oceans, would cause nothing more than a shift. In the article The Ocean's Carbon Balance the author, Holli Riebeek, details the findings and results of a scientific research team that studied the carbon dioxide saturation in the oceans for a thirty year period. Riebeek writes that the team of scientists did find that "carbon concentrations in the ocean did rise as atmospheric carbon dioxide skyrocketed" (Riebeek). This happens due to a process called liquid gas exchange in which gases can be transported into a liquid. The opposite happens when water is boiled and the gas is then released. This process is the leading cause of the destruction of the oceans. The liquid gas exchange causes a domino effect that then leads to all sorts of destructive processes. The major concern in the eyes of scientists for the oceans is ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is when the oceans become too saturated with carbon dioxide and the pH decreases causing the oceans to become more acidic. The acidity doesn't affect humans in the water at beaches because just like how vinegar and olive oil separate into layers the ocean will do the same thing. There is a layer of carbon dioxide saturated water below the surface which acts as almost a marker for where some organisms can go. The main victims of ocean acidification are the shelled organisms, which create their shells out of calcium carbonate. Unfortunately, these shells will actually dissolve with increased levels of carbon dioxide. In the article Ocean Acidification: A Risky Shell Game the author, Kate Madin, writes of the results of high carbon dioxide testing. When interviewing Justin Ries, a marine biochemist, he states that "'Marine ecosystems -- particularly those based on calcium-carbonate shell-building, such as coral or oyster reefs -- could change with increasing atmospheric CO2 (carbon dioxide)'" (Madin). Justin Ries and his team also found that in tests with high carbon dioxide levels the shells of some organisms dissolved completely, but in organisms such as crabs and lobsters the shell production was increased. The article Ocean Acidification Is Affecting Demography And Adaptation Potential Of Marine Organisms, Study Says by Tyler MacDonald expands on the idea of increased shell production by detailing the work of a team at Plymouth University who were featured in Science Reports. This study states that the increased shell production by some organisms can cause shift in their overall energy budget. The effects of this sort of thing can range from less off spring produced to genetic drift which causes the population to be inhibited from adapting to the change in pH. These changes in population size and genetics can cause a chain reaction through the food chain. Less offspring in general for a whole species means less food for the predators and so on. So far most of these changes affect ocean life more so than we humans, but the warming of the oceans will have one major effect on humans. The melting of the ice caps has been happening for two to three decades now. For the first time in human history it is projected that in about fifty years there will be absolutely no ice in the summers at the poles. This isn't just the melting of ice we are talking about. All of that water has to go somewhere and naturally it just becomes part of the ocean. This addition of tons and tons of water has and will continue to cause the sea levels around the world to rise. The rise in sea levels will basically destroy all island nations that sit anywhere close to sea level and those living in coastal areas will be forced to retreat inland. Without the cooling effects of the polar ice caps through the jet stream the planet will become even warmer leading to a whole new set of problems that could directly impact humans. 

As stated in the introduction, the Earth acts as a living organism. To better understand the Earth's oceans imagine them as an equivalent to the core body temperature of humans. In other words the oceans moderate the temperatures all across the world and the currents even dictate the direction and speed of the jet streams. The World Wildlife Fund's website has a couple of articles that preview what could happen in the coming future if nothing is done about this problem. The first article titled Rising Temperatures gives data that can make a person worry for the future to come. The article states that in the last 200 years 2.3 trillion tons of CO2 have been added to the atmosphere, half of which came from the last 30 years. The year 2004 showed the biggest addition of fossil fuels with 28 billion tons being added in that year alone. Since the Industrial Revolution in 1750 the CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by 31%. Scientists around the globe have agreed that trying to keep the temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius, or 400 ppm (parts per million), is essential to stabilizing the surrounding ecosystems. Despite this, people still don't know what these effects entail for humans; humans are extremely self-centered and only react to situations that affect them directly. Well, projected reports from WWF show that annual rainfall in the southern Mediterranean could decrease by 20% and even up to 30% in the northern Mediterranean. The decrease in rain will cause droughts and there will be water shortages in North Africa, Spain, France, and Italy. The decrease in rainfall will cause major heat waves in these areas causing an increase in forest fires as well. Projections for Canada include the extinction of the Atlantic salmon due to warmer oceans. The fish won't die but instead will try to migrate even farther north to cooler waters where unrecognizable predators will likely eat the salmon. Of course the biggest effect will be in the Arctic where a 2 degree rise in temperature will actually feel like somewhere around a 3-3.5 degree increase. This is due to the fact that the white ice sheets reflected sunlight, but now with dark waters the sunlight will be absorbed and cause more warming. The habitats of polar bears and seals will be destroyed and polar bears will be forced to migrate south just to have something to stand on. Recent studies have already found big changes in rain events over the past half century. In the article U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods the author who is a writer for the New York Times, Justin Gillis, reports that scientists have seen major changes in the precipitation across the United States. The report found that "the eastern half of the country is receiving more precipitation in general. And over the past half-century, the proportion of precipitation that is falling in very heavy rain events has jumped by 71 percent in the Northeast, by 37 percent in the Midwest and by 27 percent in the South" (Gillis). These massive rain events are causing huge floods which are destroying property and uprooting homes. Just like in the oceans these fluctuations in temperature are causing a domino effect, which if left unchecked may spell the beginning of an extinction event. 

 The history of this planet is riddled with extinctions. There are extinctions of species all the time, but there are 5 events that forever changed this planet. The 5 mass extinctions in the Earth's history have led to the majority of all life being desolated. One extinction event, the Permian mass extinction, also nicknamed The Great dying killed off 96% of all the species on the planet. These events are terrifying acts of nature or outer space (asteroids) that show the end could happen at any time. Contrary to belief these extinctions didn't happen in the blink of an eye, rather they took hundreds and thousands of years. Although humans had no control of past events, they do have the ability to change the future. In an article titled The Current Mass Extinction within the PBS library the immediate threat of a mass extinction is presented as a very real possibility. The article claims that "the background level of extinction known from fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with)" (PBS). The incredibly scary part is that due to the destruction of the rainforests by human landscaping and increased drought/temperature an average of 27,000 species are being lost each year in those habitats. Now most of these species are insects, bacteria, and plants, but when diving deeper into the mammalian side it can be seen that over the past 400 years there have been 89 mammalian extinctions, which according to the article is "45 times the predicted rate, and another 169 mammalian species are still listed as critically endangered" (PBS). If this really is the beginning of a 6th mass extinction then it would take "more than 200,000 generations of humankind before levels of biodiversity are comparable to those we inherited" (PBS). With today's rate of extinction it is projected that 30% of the Earth's species will be extinct in the next 100 years. Tropical rainforests will be the most effected, along with top carnivores, species with small geographic ranges, and marine reef species. Some scientists believe even after all of that humans will survive and adapt. But what is a planet without diversity? What is a planet that has basically died?

The laws of thermodynamics state that matter cannot be created or destroyed. That everything in the universe is made up of other objects that may have been destroyed previously. This means humans are made from space. Earth is made from space. By random chance Earth was in the goldilocks zone, not too hot and not too cold. By random mutation the first and only organism with a conscious came to be. Unfortunately it is not by chance that we humans are destroying the planet. A planet such as Earth doesn't just show up every day. There are distant habitable planets, but does anyone really think we can travel 15 to 20 lightyears and return in time before the planet is a lost cause? Instead human efforts should be focused here at home. Working together to reduce carbon emissions needs to be first on the list. Pollution, trash, chemical dumping, over fishing, and poaching all need to be a close second. There can't be cutting corners or only worrying about one effect when really there are hundreds happening all over the world. The overall goal of the human race should be to move forward together as a species not to continue to polarize ourselves with different sides to every type of issue. 

