I had a very interesting conversation about climate change with my two friends yesterday while we rode our bikes throughout Eugene. It all started when my friend Andrew remarked, “Wow. I can’t believe it’s March and it’s this beautiful outside. Maybe global warming isn’t so bad?” The three of us let out a chuckle as we pedaled along the Willamette river.

That comment sparked an hour long discussion about pollution, global economics, rising sea levels, and the agriculture industry, and how they all pertain to global warming. I told them about a video I saw recently from the documentary Chasing Ice that captured the largest glacier calving ever filmed. Over the course of a 77 minute time-lapse, a Manhattan-sized glacier calves and rushes into the sea. The video left me breathless because it truly captured the awesome power and scale of mother nature. I used this video to explain the potential impacts that global warming could have on glaciers worldwide, and how a rising sea-level would be catastrophic to most of the world’s population.

My friend Damon interrupted and asked, “Isn’t the sea-level only going to rise like 2 meters? That doesn’t see like that much.” I told him about a recent Vice HBO episode that chronicled global warming’s effects on the glaciers of Antartica, specifically the Thwaites glacier located on the West coast of the continent. Scientists have concluded that the Thwaites glacier is melting at an extremely fast rate and will detach from the continent, raising the global sea level by 1 meter. This single glacier, with a diameter of around 21km, has the power to remap the entire planet. According to VICE, a 1 meter sea-level rise will put around 17% of Bangladesh and most of the southern tip of Florida underwater. To put that into more understandable terms, a scientist remarks, “Sea-level rise will create over 300 million climate change refugees, that will need to be taken care of somehow.”

Damon’s eyes widened when I told him that last fact. He remarked, “There is no way that the world could support 300 million refugees without a drastic lifestyle change of every person on the planet.” He went on to talk about how we, especially Americans, have not been living within our means. He talked about how society has created an unsustainable demand for food and fossil fuels, which in turn has spearheaded pollution and climate change. It was interesting to discuss how our own lifestyles have propelled climate change, and the only way to change thins was to look no further than ourselves.

We tried to end the conversation by trying to find any positives around climate change. It was Andrew who said, “Global warming is going to define our generation, and how we react to it will determine the fate of the entire human race. It is scary, but I find that we constantly underestimate the vigor and adaptability of the human race. We’ll give it our best shot. I know we will.”