Climate Change In The 19th Century

Climate change has been a prevalent topic in our world for some time now and for good reasons. Global temperatures have not only risen twice as fast as fifty years ago, but have risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit since the nineteenth century. Some may say that this is a normal occurrence as the past has shown that the earth undergoes cooling and warming periods; but scientists were kind enough to provide a graph of average world temperatures in 2012 that proved otherwise. The chart showed that temperatures have remained relatively constant for several hundreds of years, but they have turned sharply upward during the last hundred becoming what is now known as the hockey stick graph (Central 1). This sharp curve has been carefully analyzed, and as one might have guessed the most logical and proven reasons for it is industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels. Since the invention of the steam engine, more and more of our everyday technology requires the combustion of coal and other harmful fuels. They are harmful because if the earth continues to warm at this rate

For example, European oil firms such as BP and Shell expressed their support last year for the tax, stating that it was their “mission to provide the greatest number of people with access to sustainable and secure energy” and that “we stand ready to play our part…to meet [a] greater energy demand” (Unger 1). However, the reason they want to switch is more likely due to wanting to overcome recent high-profile environmental incidents, reach cheaper oil prices immediately not thinking of future possibilities, and wishing to spend less time and money navigating carbon prices says Unger. This correlates then with American firms who also expressed last year that they choose not to lose money on purpose thus removing them from the statement. There is not much interest in the people there as one can