Reflect on: National Geographic’s Strange Days: The One Degree Factor

We never think about what is happening in the rest of the world while we are living our busy lives. Our everyday actions can be affecting or affect in the future a species that we do not even know. In the case of the porcupine caribou herd they have been greatly affected by the one degree temperature change. Due to the one degree average temperature change, Alaska is receiving more severe storms than before. It causes warmer weather to produce rain in December. When snow is on the ground caribou dig out the snow to expose the lichen which is their nutrition for the winter, but with the rain it causes a layer of ice underneath the snow and it keeps these animals from reaching their meal. Because of the burning of the fuels which has destroyed part of the atmosphere we have now raised the planets average temperature by one degree Fahrenheit.
Another effect is the temperature regime change of the pacific. This refers to when the water on the coast of Oregon is warmer than the water offshore. Then it reverses all together making the coastal water cooler and offshore warmer. The consequences are that the number of krill that make their ascend to the surface is fewer as well the frequency is less often, meaning that animals that feed on the krill suffer and their numbers decline. That species also feeds other species that suffer and so on. The ecosystem might get to a point of collapse. The things that I have read and learned over the past few weeks have astounded me. The saddest thing is that these examples are just the tip of the iceberg and there are many many more that we have not even discovered. So let’s just think for a moment how many species may disappear before we solve the problem.