The most important meteorological and climatic data is temperature. Often, to give evidence of global warming, climatologists show a graph depicting the anomaly which is the annual global average of surface temperatures or, briefly, the anomaly of the global temperature.
Why is this increase in temperature so important? First, remember that we are talking about average increase. On the continents, it is almost 2°C, in the oceans it is less than 1°C, due to the property of water which absorbs a lot of heat at the same temperature increase. Secondly, we must remember all the direct and indirect negative effects of the increase in temperature. Among the direct ones we recall desertification, floods, sinking of inhabited areas… among the indirect ones wars, migrations, social tensions…
What should we do? Fall into depression? No. Humanity is moving in the right direction, starting with the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning chlorofluorocarbons. As you may recall, in the 1980s scientists discovered that these gases caused the ozone hole. Today, the hole is closing. The Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, providing for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions so as not to increase the temperature of the planet by more than 2°C. On 2 March 2022, the UN Environment Assembly established an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to develop a treaty for the reduction of plastic by 2024.
What about you? You can do a lot with lifestyle, consumption options, choice of rulers, and opinion campaigns. To convince you that your actions matter, I'll tell you a (true) scientific story. 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen was not present in the atmosphere and human life would not have been possible. Then, thanks to the small contribution of innumerable and (apparently) insignificant single-celled organisms – cyanobacteria – the air was enriched with oxygen until it took on its current composition. The biggest ones being between one and ten millionths of a metre, they are so simple that they do not have organelles and can reproduce by mere division but… they contain chlorophyll and produce oxygen thanks to photosynthesis.
The full article is available in the WYD 2023 booklet in Italian, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
https://www.infoans.org/en/sections/news/item/18230-rmg-salesian-missions-day-2023-environmental-ecology#sigProIda22fcfef8b
