All over Europe now, we are experiencing heat waves. It’s been happening more often lately, and it’s getting hotter each and every time. This is the direct cause of the man-made climate change that scientists have been warning us about for decades now. And it’s not just a regular “warmer than usual” summer, it is a terrifying sign of things to come.

It is not just a matter of our comfort. Our discomfort over the ever worsening temperatures and weather events will be the least of our problems in the future. To us the difference of a few degrees is an inconvenience, but to other species across the globe, it’s catastrophic. Even an average increase of “only” 5 degrees will mean the extinction of thousands of species across the globe, and that will start off a chain of events that will quite likely lead to the collapse of most life on the planet. Because everything in nature depends heavily on each other, natural ecosystems are like an elaborate clock, take just one piece out and everything will stop working. So not only are the individual species that are in danger of extinction, but also the important relationships between them

There’s a discipline in ecology called Phenology, it’s the study of cycles and natural timings in nature. Many species are codependent on each other, take for example flowers and insects. The flowers need insects to pollinate and spread themselves, and the insects use the flowers as a food source, they are both synchronized to each other’s cycles over the course of millions of years. Now flowers base their life cycles (where to grow, when to bloom, etc) on the length of the day, but the insects that are required to pollinate and maintain the life cycle of the flowers base their own life cycle on the temperature, which is changing. So what can happen is; the insects hatch too soon because of the Earth warming, they look around and find the flowers haven’t bloomed yet, they lack the necessary food supply to survive and then they die. Afterwards, the flowers bloom, but there’s no insects left to pollinate them, so they can’t reproduce, and then they also die. Happening on a large enough scale, with even just a couple of mismatched life cycles, they all can go extinct. 

Even now, in the face of overwhelming evidence and the urgent need of immediate action, some people still deny it, and they’ll keep denying it right to the end. They’ll first say “Oh climate change isn’t real, you’re stupid if you believe it” and then as time goes on it wil change to, “Ok climate change might be real but It’s not caused by us” and then to, “Fine we might have something to do with it, but It’s not that bad, stop overreacting” “Alright it is bad but It’s too late to do anything about it” and finally to, “This is really really bad, how are we going to survive this? How do I save my family?” But by then there would be nothing left to do, the wilful ignorance of us and our predecessors have sealed our fate. But now is not the time to give up, we still have a chance to avoid this bleak future, we just have to fight for it, whatever it takes.