Switching on good habits key to solving climate change

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Illustrator: Lynn Reynolds

We have run to discuss climate change, now we to need to act on climate change.

Reducing your carbon footprint is like consistently using the rubber bands you need for braces. It’s easy, but we sometimes forget and assume that it won’t matter if we skip out on it once or twice, which leads to a constant cycle of never doing it. Climate change doesn’t just affect the islands and coasts; Minnesota will also be negatively affected by this thing all of us wrongly classify as not important enough to bother taking action.

Many of us avoid thinking about or doing anything about climate change. Perhaps it is because the negative effects may only occur many decades from now and also because we are unsure of what the effects might be. According to Permaculture News, only 28% of Americans think that global warming is one of our biggest concerns. We know we should do our research, but we don’t want to know what’s going to happen to us in the future and how much impact it could have on us in the next decades.

There are many local signs of climate change, besides the warm winters. Over the last fifty years, the average rainfall in Midwest cities has increased by 5 to 10 inches; in Iowa, Missouri, and Wyoming, the rainfall has increased by almost 100%. In Minnesota, rainfall during the wettest days of the year has increased by 35%.

Drought is also something affecting the world globally. Cape Town, South Africa has until about April until they could run out of available water. The Sahara Desert and deserts near Las Vegas are expanding. Main causes of drought are the cutting down of trees and building dams.

Besides the amount of rainfall and precipitation, another factor we should be worried about is our water’s temperature. Warmer water will diminish the trout population (we all love our fish!) and causes more algal blooms, “Which can be unsightly, harm fish, and degrade water quality”.

Flooding and rising sea levels are also something we need to be aware of, it is likely that the Great Lakes will warm another 3 to 7 degrees F in the next seventy years. Many people are worried about the oceans warming just 0.302 degrees in the last fifty years. Since 1970, ice coverage on the Great Lakes has decreased by 63%.

It’s a little distressing about how close climate change really is, so here are some ways to be environmentally friendly that are as easy as putting rubber bands on your braces and that are cost effective but do not change your life drastically:

  1. Get the junk out of your trunk! The more weight your car has, the more fuel used.
  2. Turn the lights off in rooms you aren’t using. The light bulbs will wear out sooner which means you have used more energy to burn them (energy you could use for longer, a room light left on the whole time while on vacation uses energy that could have been saved for later). If everyone changed their light bulbs to 13-watt incandescent lights, we would save $700 million and prevent greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 800,000 cars annually.
  3. Take the bus and carpool. Not only does it save a bunch of gas, but it’s fun.
  4. Eat locally produced and organic food, it’s healthier for you as well. Organic fruit tastes better than conventionally grown fruit. True fact.
  5. Annually, junk mail kills more than 2 million trees and produces a billion pounds of landfill. Cancelling junk mail will help reduce this.
  6. Recycle. Bookmark a great local recycling guide with tips.

People know most of these things. Reducing a carbon footprint is as easy as putting rubber bands on, and hopefully, now you’re inspired. Clean your car. Change a lightbulb. Get informed. Climate change is a lot closer than we think and each of us needs to start taking initiative.