I attend Southwest Open School. I am currently enrolled in a class called POW. POW stands for an organization called Protect Our Winters. The main subject in our class is to focus on climate change.
All of the students in our class have a passion for snowboarding or skiing. We get to go on field trips to ski resorts and we get some active fun outside of class. However when we’re in the classroom we are working hard on trying to figure out what is happening to our world.
My goal is to tell as many people as I can what is occurring. Everything I am about to say has been backed up and proven by professionals such as the National Snow and Data Center, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, POW, and more than 95 percent of the world’s scientists.
The global temperature has been increasing. This is most likely due to all the pollution in the air from carbon emissions. The increasing temperature is causing our polar ice caps to melt, which is causing our sea level to rise. The rising of the sea level is affecting human, animal and plant habitat. Our winters are becoming shorter and summer is coming quicker. Less snow means less fresh water and more droughts. Scientist are predicting that within 50 years things will get much worse. We could possibly lose snow all together. Farmers will experience horrible droughts, important animal species will become extinct, certain parts of the world will have little to no water and other parts will have too much.
So what can you do? First get educated, learn about what is happening for yourself. Second think about how you use your resources, try to drive your vehicle a little less, recycle, unplug unused electronics, take a shorter shower, and the list goes on. It is time to make a difference, it’s time to take action.
The last step is educating others, use your voice let people know what is going on. Only we as humans can fix what we have begun destroying.
Samantha Dale
Cortez