(Note) This piece won fourth in the school speech competition, and tied for first in the Sandy Andy Speech Competition.



Thomas Edison put it: “If we did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.” If he were alive right now, I think that Mr.. Edison would use this phrase again. The fate of the earth, by the Greenhouse effect, is like an enormous scale. We have human causes of global warming, and natural causes of global warming. We can make a difference, but take a guess which side is weighing the world down?

Without the burning of fossil fuels, the Earth would have a cycle that kept the world clean. Carbon dioxide is produced naturally in the upper layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere, but then trees and plants take it in and produce oxygen, thereby creating the balance. When we humans add extra carbon dioxide, not to mention cutting down millions of trees, the balance is disrupted, and we now have global warming.

The Greenhouse effect isn’t something that’s only happening far away, something that couldn’t be here, not now. I read an article in national Geographic, which presented a disturbing caption: By the time you finish reading this article, an area of the rain forest, the size of 200 football fields, will have been cut down. People aren’t only cutting down trees in the rain forest. There used to be a large apple orchard, out of use, across the street from my dad’s house. Now, there is a paved road, a housing development and no trees what so ever. As I said before, deforestation destroys trees that take in carbon dioxide. But when they clear-cut them, it lets out all the carbon dioxide that the trees have absorbed. Also, ways that we cut trees let our carbon emissions, such as fire, pollution, so we’re letting out even more Greenhouse gases.

Scientists have been warning the government and the citizens of the world about the Greenhouse Effect, but no serious action is being taken. Yes, we have hybrid cars, but we still have pollution ones. There are over 600 million cars on the earth,and the numbers are growing every day.

I feel so scared and panicked about global warming, about how Earth is slowly spinning toward abolition, and we’re pushing her along. There are ways to conserve and save, but how many people are going to stop using hairsprary, stop watching as much TV, and try to remember to turn off lights in unused rooms. Little things, but such tasks are trivial in our minds compared to, for example, shopping, playing video games, and so on. Simple, most humans like the way they live: modernly, and consequently, destructively. “Men do less than they ought, unless they do all the can.” from Thomas Carlyle, is an excellent description of this.

Just close yours eyes and think of a moment, what it must have been like to have lived in the time period where TVs, stereos, and phones were invented. Everyone bought one, because advancing technology was good, right? The Industrial Revolution, where we made more cars, trains, and polluting items, had to be good, right? Well, then, if it was so good, why has global temperature been increasing ever since?

Now, we’re frantically trying to preserve our Earth, but is it to late? When I’m fifty years old, will people who are my age now even know what glaciers are, or that snow used to fall feet at a time? According to scientists, there aren’t supposed to be any glaciers by 2050!

A stereotypical “future,” used to be when everyone used hover cars and lived like the Jetsons, minus the being in outer space. Now the future holds no snow, no glaciers, possibly no humans. Paul Valery said it well: “The trouble with our times is that the future is now what it used to be.” Now people are starting to think about how what we do now affect the future, but with how we’re treating our earth now, what kind of future lies ahead?

I just hope that we’re able to lift ourselves up, and start making some serious change. I can’t even believe that fact that some people don’t believe in global warming! It just amazes me! When I read books like Little House on the Prairie and such, don’t winters come with at least five feet of snow? How about now? I was horrified a few years ago when along came a brown Christmas, with no bright snow to cover up the dead grass and pine needles.

I just keep thinking this, over and over. Is it now, after decades of pollutants, to late to completely halt the oncoming fate of global warming? If it isn’t, how long can we last? A few hundreds years? A hundred years? This whole thing, how we humans are dealing with the Greenhouse Effect, reminds of a bad dieter. You just keep telling yourself you’ll do better later, and it doesn’t really matter right now because, of course, you’ll be doing it later. But, like I said before, how much later do we have? The scale is tipping because of us, but it isn’t in our favor. Can we restore that balance?