Preventing the Deluge: Climate Change, the Four Spheres, Interactions, and Causalities

Abstract

Climate change means water change, and the impacts of climate change cause not only global sea levels to rise, but also elicit dangerous levels of coastal and mainland flooding. This study relates the effects of climate-change-induced sea level risings to several harmful, and sometimes preventable, factors causing floods. One topic discussed here will be the ocean’s current (more specifically, “The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current”) as it continues to warm with increasing temperatures. In addition to discussing the effects of the AMOC, it also relates the increasing causes that are contributing to flooding, plus the proliferation of melt from ice sheets, ice caps, and glaciers, which inevitably contributes to the devastating effects of flooding on coastal communities, destroying habitats and contributing to the extinction of both aquatic and land animals, and even impacting human infrastructure and livelihoods. This examination additionally presents the serious implications that climate change and flooding have had on the planet’s freshwater resources and reserves, which are being further destroyed by the added influx of salt water, causing water to then be treated with aquifers, an energy-intensive and highly expensive process. Lastly, this paper provides several suggested possibilities for curbing some of the harmful effects humans have already had on contributing to climate change, as well as the environmental factors that have further caused dangerous levels of flooding.