Human activities are changing the Earth's climate from its previous behavior to one more unpredictable and violent. Our industries are producing chemicals ranging from carbon dioxide waste gases to microplastics to poisonous PFAS "forever" chemicals that are polluting the air, land, water and oceans around the world. Human life, health, living conditions and livelihoods are all adversely affected. The growth of the human population has resulted in a massive impact on the Earth. Some scientists call our present period the Anthropocene because the Earth's climate is clearly more affected by human activity than anything else.

Global Warming
Carbon dioxide, called a greenhouse gas, traps heat in the upper atmosphere instead of letting it escape into space, warming the planet. Created from a variety of human activities, carbon dioxide has increased faster, and is now one-third higher, than at any time in the past 400,000 years. Scientists have also found that microbes frozen in the arctic permafrost generate carbon dioxide once they warm up, adding to the production rate. What is especially alarming is that the rate of global warming is exponential, not linear, meaning the rate of change is increasing. Things will be getting ever rapidly worse in the near future, all due to the activities of a large and still growing human population.

Higher Temperatures
High temperatures are setting new records almost daily throughout the world. This excessive heat is directly killing people who cannot get to cooler settings, such as those who are very young, elderly, or homeless. Night time temperatures remain high, so people and infrastructure cannot cool sufficiently before morning. If the electric grid overloads and goes down, greater numbers of heat related deaths can be expected. And the grid must be supplied by non-carbon energy sources such as solar or wind or it will only worsen the problem. Keeping the electric grid running during ever increasing demand will be a major challenge for governments around the world.

Heat is also causing problems with plants, not just people. Plants spend more energy growing their roots deeper to escape the heat, but use more nitrogen and phosphorous in the process. This results in less nitrogen and phosphorous available to develop fruit, which then becomes less tasty and nutritious. Many plants cannot produce fruit or seed at all because pollen becomes infertile at high temperatures. Increasing temperatures are causing more food crops to fail, leading to food shortages, higher food prices. malnutrition and starvation.

Warmer Oceans and Hurricanes
The increase in carbon dioxide has caused the oceans to warm steadily over the past 50 years. Warmer seas mean more water vapor in the air above the oceans. More humid air means hurricanes hold more water and move slower because of the weight of the extra water. When a hurricane reaches land today, it has more water to dump, moves slower, rains longer, and causes greater flooding. Flooding means more damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure, raising the cost of living in flooded locations, and causing more disruption to people's lives.

Methane
Human activities produce methane, which is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere. The only good news is that methane breaks down into harmless gases in just 12 years in the upper atmosphere, compared to carbon dioxide, at 300 to 1000 years. Global warming in general is also causing the permafrost regions in far northern and southern climates to defrost, leading to the release of methane stored underground by bacteria decomposing dead plant material. At present, methane from all these sources causes one-third of total global warming, and this portion is increasing, leading to ever faster warming.

The bad news is that Earth is past the tipping point. Even if all sources of carbon dioxide were to shut down immediately, the Earth is warm enough so that methane will continue to be emitted from permafrost layers until it is all exhausted, in about 100 years. In the meantime, Earth will continue to rapidly warm.

Melting Ice and Rising Ocean Levels
Warmer oceans are melting sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. On land, warmer air temperatures are melting glaciers. This melting is causing sea levels to rise, gradually making coastlines uninhabitable when ocean storms sweep further inland, destroying buildings and homes. Some coastal cliffs are falling down, taking houses with them. Other coastal land is becoming permanently flooded.