• Question: How severely has the entire world been affected by: global warming, pollution and deforestation?

    Asked by TheHappyHamburger04 to Hannah, Joanna, Joe, Luis, Vincent on 16 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Hannah Grist

      Hannah Grist answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      Wow, that’s a massive question! I can’t go into details because there is so much there, but I can try and provide some ideas.

      Global warming is having a pretty big impact across the world, even though it doesn’t feel like it has got that much warmer. For starters, it has changed the weather. We are seeing more big weather events, like tsunamis, floods, big storms, really cold spells and hot spells, which is affecting everything: plants and animals and humans in different parts of the world.
      The warmer world is having a big effect on lots of animals and plants. You might have heard about coral dying in Australia: that’s probably because the sea is much warmer over there. Lots of animals are moving where they live, or losing habitat, or changing when they do things like have babies, and it means we are seeing loads of changes, and losing quite a lot of animal and plant species.
      You’re right that pollution is also a big problem. One of the biggest pollution problems at the moment is actually plastic: plastic something that humans make, and isn’t natural, so everything that gets thrown away and ends up in the environment is pollution. It’s a big problem in the sea: there are huge patches of plastic right in the middle of the ocean where we can’t see, that are miles and miles wide. Lots of sea animals like fish and birds try and eat these bits, and can’t survive on just plastic.
      Phew, and deforestation? Scientists think we lose an area of forest about a third the size of the whole UK EVERY YEAR. That’s a huge number of trees, which means that all the animals that live there have lost their home, and are in danger of becoming extinct. Trees are also really important to us because they produce oxygen that we need to breathe, so losing such huge numbers is pretty serious.

    • Photo: Joe Nunez-Mino

      Joe Nunez-Mino answered on 21 Jun 2016:

      That is a huge question. The short answer is very severely. Some places have got very little forest left and in tropical regions in particular this has meant that many species have gone extinct. Pollution and global warming is also impacting species across the world although how much of an impact it has depends on where you are. Let me give you an example, if you are a species that lives at the top of a mountain and nowhere else, global warming will mean you have nowhere to go. If you specialise in living lower down the mountain you can try and move up as the temperature increases in the hope that your “ideal” temperature still exists further up the mountain

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