Global Warming is something we are all familiar with, whether that be we understand that it is happening, we heard about it in science class, family parties or so on, we all have a level of familiarity with the idea of global warming. Yet, we as a society are all blissfully ignorant about what is actually happening to our world. We turn our backs to the mere fact that our world temperature is literally rising, as we know it. Little did we know, that we are not only heating up, but there are endless reactions that will occur if we don’t step in and make a change. We turn our backs because we excuse ourselves from the problem, by simply believing that there is no way we can change Earths course, yet there is.
In order to truly assess and hopefully tackle a problem such as global warming we have to first understand what we can do to change it or in this case slow it down. In Margaret Atwood’s text, Time capsule found on the dead planet she describes our world in ages, beginning with the creation of gods progressing to the creation of money, and ending with deserts. In my opinion she shows this progression, to appeal to our emotional side. Personally, it scared me because as we discussed in class, we are somewhere lost in the middle of the third age. It is especially relevant because Money rules our world, and I think she intends to make a correlation between how we first idolized gods, and migrated to idolizing money. Unfortunately that is the world we live in, in a world where our motives are fully powered by the idolization, and chase of money. This is just one of the many distractions that keep us enthralled and ignorant to global warming.
Yet I firmly believe that if everyone took a second out of their day to visit the Global Weirding website it would change 99% of peoples perspective and willingness to make a change for the benefit of our universe. Sure, some people would simply ignore it as an exaggeration of global warming and put it off as too much of an extreme to be real. But those that it hit as hard as it hit me would be interested in the movement of bettering our world to eliminate some of the horrendous effects of global warming. Prior to this class, I was like a majority of people, simply knowing that global warming was occurring and would progress, but now I know that it has a tumbling effect to our sea levels, rainfall, wildfires and so on, I realize that it is everything.
Global warming is happening, and will continue to happen, so not only can we be aware as a society, but we can take steps to alter the course that the Global Weirding website has depicted for us. It is a terrifying idea that in order for anything to change and alter we need a majority of our society to make a change, but with advances such as social media, word of mouth, and trending topics global warming can be tackled.
I agree with you on the impact of the Global Weirding website. At first I thought it was unrealistic, but then researching on my own I found similar comparisons. I also like the options it gave whether to be hands on, somewhere in the middle, or do nothing and then compare and contrast what would happen. It makes you think what impact we can have.
The technique of breaking down the world into ages is an extremely important tool as you stated that Atwood utilizes in “Time Capsule Found on a Dead Planet”. I also agree with your point about it appealing to our emotional side. Based off the discussion in class, the word choice, we at the beginning and you at the end both causes us to personally connect with the story and also shows us we still may have time to act and combat climate change. The point at the end of your second paragraph about the role of money is society is very pertinent. Industries seem to hold a lot of power when it comes to the production of greenhouse gasses and policy towards the issues.
I 100% relate with your thoughts in your post on global warming. I also believe that if people took a few minutes out of their day to try and make a change in any way, shape, or form then it would be tremendously beneficial. Reading some of the short stories in class and looking over the Global Weirding site frightened me as well in the sense that one day, most likely, Earth will succumb to the harmful effects of global warming. I really hope that people around the globe see what is happening and can collectively tackle this serious and urgent issue.
I was also interested in what I saw on the Global Weirding site. I was less concerned about the temperature fluctuations and more concerned about the possible fresh water contamination and vegetation loss. If we take steps to work on solving those problems, then the warming can be dealt with more easily.
Your point about changing peoples minds via the Global Weirding site really stuck with me. If everyone just took a few minutes out of their day, and viewed the Global Weirding website, many opinions would change, and in my opinion, much more would be done about preventing climate change. It is not necessarily just the Global Weirding website that people should look at either. There’s loads of websites regarding climate change that would successfully be able to convince the average person of the real and soon consequences of global warming and possibly persuade them to do more to prevent it.