Earth does not belong to humans; humans belong to Earth- and so do millions of other creatures. We share the world with birds, animals, insects, worms, and microorganisms. But it is the human species that is having a domineering influence on everything on the planet.
The planet has seen many drastic changes in its climate in the past. A couple of them, it is theorised, has even led to mass extinction. But those climate change events were driven by Nature, while the current one is the result of human activity. Successive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – mandated by the United Nations to assess scientific evidence on climate change-have suggested that the observed changes in global and regional climate over the last 50 or so years are almost entirely due to human influence on the climate system and not due to natural causes.
The main driver of climate change is the greenhouse effect. Human activities such as burning of fossil fuel, clearing of forests, livestock farming, and the usage of nitrogen in fertilizers, release a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, especially CO2, leading to global warming and climate change. Frequent floods, intense drought, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and warming oceans are the results of climate change. They can harm animals, destroy their homes, and wreak havoc on people’s livelihoods and communities. They can affect ecosystems and drive species to extinction. Scientists believe human-driven climate change is driving the world into sixth mass extinction.
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The impact of human activity on Earth is so profound that scientists think that we should call the current geological time, Anthropocene Epoch. The word Anthropocene is derived from the Greek words anthropo, for “man”, and cene for “new”. A popular theory is that it began at the start of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, when human activity had a great impact on carbon and methane in Earth’s atmosphere. Others think that the beginning of the Anthropocene should be 1945. This is when humans tested the first atomic bomb, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The resulting radioactive particles were detected in soil samples globally.
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