A Kid’s Guide to Stopping Climate Change

A Kid’s Guide to Stopping Climate Change

by Safari Davis

You’ve probably heard about climate change before, or global warming. It’s the thing that’s taking away polar bear’s homes…the thing that we humans have made. 

If you haven’t heard about climate change, then let me expand your knowledge on it. The latest studies show that it started somewhere around 1830, when the Industrial Revolution became a thing. The Industrial Revolution was a very big turning point in our history. It’s when we started to burn fossil fuels, natural gas, coal, and oil. We did this to power cars, home heating systems (look around, you probably have one in your home - electric fireplaces, HVac systems) and it is used to power all sorts of other things as well. 

When these unsustainable (bad for the earth) fuels get smelted (burned), it creates carbon dioxide, or CO2,and releases the CO2 up into the atmosphere. Once it’s up there, a bunch of heat generated by the sun bounces down to earth and then tries to escape, but the layer of CO2 blocks it, because the carbon dioxide is creating a barrier in between the heat and space. Instead of going to space, the hot air bounces right off of the CO2 layer, (this is called the greenhouse effect) and goes back down to the earth, where it heats oceans up and melts the polar ice caps, which in turn makes the ocean rise. This could cause flooding in places all around the world that are near the ocean, and it also slowly chips away at the poor polar bear’s habitats, which are almost entirely made of ice. CO2 is something called a greenhouse gas, one of many types of greenhouse gasses responsible for climate change.

Now, the first step to stopping it, is to realize that me and you, even if we try our hardest, have contributed to it. First of all, we need to try and reduce our carbon footprint. Our carbon footprint, like explained above, is the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the air to contribute to climate change. Even if we don’t realize we do it, there are many sneaky little machines that emit CO2. Here is a list of actions you can take to reduce your carbon footprint:

1. Talk to your parents/guardians about bundling up more in the winter, instead of using your heater.

1. Open the windows in the summer and use fans, instead of using air conditioning (AC).

1. Ride bikes instead of driving in cars.

1. Try and convince your parents or guardians to get an electric car.

1. Try to use less plastic products.

1. Make sure that your parents or guardians know to buy only what your family needs at stores.

1. Tell your parents/guardians to consider installing solar panels, a clean energy solution, on the roof of your house, if you live in a sunny place.

1.  Eat less meat, or at least have your parents or guardians get your meat from local, grass fed (and grass finished) farms.

1.  Make sure to recycle as much as possible, and to not litter.

1. Find more machines that use fossil fuels and create CO2, and other greenhouse gases, and replace them.

             Another type of greenhouse gas is methane. Methane is produced, among other things, when a cow farts. You heard me right, a lead cause in global warming is cow farts. That brings me to another way you can help prevent climate change. Eat. Less. Meat. I myself am a pescetarian (the only meat I eat is fish - I couldn’t miss out on fresh salmon sashimi), and you can be too. 

No pressure, of course, but if we aren’t all vegetarian, we need to at least limit the amount of meat we eat. Plus, we need to only eat meat from humanitarian places, meaning only places where the animals supplying our food had a good life and were treated well - but I’m getting off topic. That’s a story for later. Anyways, I hope that this guide has given you ideas and inspiration for getting ahead of climate change before it’s too late - and saving our future.

Thanks for reading in on the latest Piric Kids Journal!