CLD9025 Final essay

By looking the Amazon forest fire, to see how climate change effects on health                        
wong ka yee 4030730

The Amazon forest, which holds a massive of Earth’s oxygen and regarded as the “Lung of
the Earth”, recently sparked off with a worldwide tragedy- the Amazon forest fire. The Lung
which provides more than 20% of the oxygen to the world, had triggered a big concern of
forest protection and people had turned to concern the environmental issue again and again. It
certainly because of the climate has changed. 

Climate change is about a significant change of weather with a long period of time, which is
about a decade or longer. As the planet is getting warmer as we all called it global warming.
The climate has changed to warmer. Global warming is one of the phenomena of climate
change. What’s more, most significant abnormal weather phenomenon nowadays is caused by
global warming. So, global warming not only a phenomena of climate change, but also the
cause of it. Back to the Amazon forest fire, global warming had raised the world’s
temperature. The rising of the temperature may lead to drought. Drought can make the land
dry, reducing on its production and the land are more likely getting on fire. Drought is the
major factor that causing the rainforest’s fire. Also, since the rise of the temperature, the
evapotranspiration may increase. The soil may less of water content and cause drought. The
dry season and the less of rainfall are favorable to the spread of fire. The fire is harm to the
environment. Not only it vanished the trees, plants and animals, the release of pollutants,
particles and toxic gases may compound into the atmosphere and make global warming even
worse.

As we all know, global warming has been making the world suffered from different disaster
rather than just causing the fire. In the following, we would take an insight into how climate
change and global warming make effects on earth’s health.

Let see how global warming affects ecological health.

First, global warming may increase sea levels when ice melt. (National Geographic)Sea levels
are expected to rise between 10 and 32 inches (26 and 82 centimeters) or higher by the end of
the century.1 The rising of sea levels may give a disaster to the planet. Flooding may become
more common. Harmful substances and chemicals may immerse in water and bring to us.
What’s more, the rise of sea water levels may help tsunami reach farther inland. Take the
2011 Japan tsunami as an example, the sea water had flooded across the coastline. The
1
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/global-warming-effects/
flooding ends up triggered a huge leakage of nuclear plant and the whole area was on high
radiation. So, the rise of sea water may huge problems, not to mention animals get injured and
homeless. 

Second, global warming may bring more frequent and intense extreme weather event.
Extreme weather is performed 90% unlike than the weather presented before in that particular
area. Heat waves would be more common mostly in oceanic area in summer. Many rivers
turned into rocky desert wash and fish die. What’s more, the water shortage increased stresses
for the plants. The whole energy transfer and food chain are being damaged. The present of
heat wave also increased stress for the animals, some of them cannot adopt for the extreme
hot and may die. (Ventimiglia, 2019)In 2010, during the heatwave in Russia – which was the
hottest in 130 years – more than 15 million hectares of forest, vegetation and peatland areas
burnt, and importantly in areas without fire-tolerant species. 2Also, due to the high
temperature, some environment gets more moisture when evaporation increased. The increase
of water content may turn out heavy rainfalls, hurricanes and storms. It is known that from the
Hurricane, (Ocko)the rainfall was more 15 percent more intense and three times as likely to
occur due to human-induced climate change.3

Global warming also makes problems to human being.

Global warming may worsen human health conditions. For example, the rise of temperature
may increase the number of mosquitos. The massive increase of one particular species may
affect the food chain. More importantly, the increase mosquito would bring us more inflection
cases, like malaria, dengue. Since not every country can afford and adopt the change.
Developed countries may have prepared with advances medical technology and public health
system to prevent the outbreak, while some undeveloped countries may not aware and get
prepare for the infectious diseases. Once the disease is spread, it would bring us a latter global
hygienic problem.

The rise of temperature would result a loss of agricultural productivities. Climate change
would dominate the precipitation patterns. As the evaporation increase, some lands would be
more dryer and more likely to suffer from drought and heat waves, some lands would be more
moisture and suffered from heavy rainfall and snow. The farm lands would be on high risk
suffering flooding, water shortage, drought and maybe the increase of pests. According to the

2
https://futureearth.org/publications/issue-briefs/heatwaves/

3
https://www.edf.org/climate/climate-change-and-extreme-weather
statistic done by IPCC, (Kasotia)it estimates that approximately 75 million to 250 million
people in Africa will be without adequate water and will face food shortages by 2020, as crop
productivity will decline by about 50 per cent.4 Rising temperatures could also result in food
shortages for 130 million people in Asia. In conclude, global warming is not just feeling of
our bodies, the rise of temperature also brings us to the problems of food and resources
allocations. 

In conclusion, as we all know, climate change and global warming these kinds of words are
not new terms to us. Many countries urged to do something to save the planet, like the
agreement of CO2 emission. However, I think there are still not much people aware the issue.
Before long, we will receive some messages saying that somewhere suffered from a big
disaster due to global warming. Then, we are going to like and share and just it and do what
we did with the Amazon forest fire. People, especially urban people, should bear what we are
doing. Just to acknowledge the issue of global warming is not enough, we should start
reducing our carbon footprint. Don’t let this to become our social disease.

4
https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/health-effects-global-warming-developing-countries-are-
most-vulnerable