Climate Change and Leo

“Climate change is real and it is happening right now”. – Leonardo DiCaprio, Acceptance speech for Best Male Actor in a Leading Role. 

Instead of bringing attention to himself these are the words that after six nominations Leonardo DiCaprio chose to speak this past Sunday at the 88th annual Oscars. He chose to utilize his time on stage to raise awareness to an important problem that we are currently facing. 

Climate change, also known as global warming, is a very real thing. People would like to act as though it does not actually exist and go on with their daily lives, completely unaffected. On record, 2015 really was the hottest year that we have experienced.

Leo continued in his speech making sure to call this change a threat rather than an issue. We are threatening ourselves by making the Earth harder to inhabit. Killing off wildlife, ecosystems, and a long list of natural resources, we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by what we want and turning it into what we need. This political greed, that Leo brought up, is making a very obvious statement that we have turned serving in today’s world into an advertisement. Rather than only using what you absolutely need, the motto is more, more, more.

To many this chart is nothing more than just a bunch of squiggly lines that almost resemble that infomercial elderly women selling art sponges. In reality this is a chart showing the increase of CO2 gas in our environment. CO2 gas (carbon dioxide) when combined with water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, is a greenhouse gas that warms up our climate as it builds up in our atmosphere. This poses dangerous effects to cooler climates that need the lower temperatures to keep the animals inhabiting the area alive. If you pay attention to the numbers on the chart it shows close to 400ppms, which would translate to 0.0400%. This is the percentage of CO2 in our air. That seems like a small amount, but when put on a large scale the amount should frighten you. 

If you have ever gotten the chance to stand in an actual greenhouse, you can feel the humidity almost immediately. Currently there is a lot of discussion on the standpoint of polar bears and all this new addition of heat. With the melting ice caps, they lose majority of their inhabitable land mass as well as putting them more at risk for starving to death if they get separated from that mass. 

In Greenland they have been charting the melting of large glacier masses throughout the years. In Canada, the infamous Athabasca Glacier located in Jasper National Park has also been losing mass. This is something that should gather attention. Environment is changing due to deforestation and the misuses of natural resources. 

This is a serious issue that needs to be paid attention to. We need to stop heating up our climate and start heating up our conversations.

• climate change
• Leonardo DiCaprio