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Is this the end of human race?
COVID 19 or Coronavirus disease of 2019 is the main threat the human race is facing now. Over 17,80,000 people got infected in over 200 countries. Over 1,00,000 people are dead. It is one of the massive outbreaks ever happened. World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared it as a pandemic, and countries around the world are implementing measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus, from national quarantines to school closures. India has implemented one of the world's largest and most restrictive mass quarantine. As a result, the factories were closed, the transportation has been cut to almost zero. The picture of Himalayan peaks took from Jalandhar is viral on social media. People could not see the Himalayas for decades due to the extremely polluted atmosphere. The reports say that the lockdown has dramatically increased the air quality in India. One of the most polluted cities of the world- Mumbai- is now seeing a clear blue sky, after a long period. It has just been 21 days, and the results are miraculous! COVID 19 helped us to understand a very crucial fact. We are, in fact, the real threat.
There have been 5 mass extinctions in the history of life. Ordovician (443 million B.C), Devonian (371 million B.C), Permian (252 million B.C), Triassic-Jurassic (200 million B.C), (K-T) Cretaceous-Tertiary(65 billion B.C). Now we are going through Anthropocene extinction (Happening as the result of human activities). The cause of K-T extinction was probably a massive asteroid impact. This time, humanity is the asteroid. Mass extinctions are driven by the change in environment. And we are changing our environment rapidly. All five of the mass extinctions had different causes. But the one common factor in all these was the increase in the level of CO2. We are having a massive increase in the level of CO2 than ever happened before due to the burning of fossil fuels and other various activities. Almost everything we do in the modern world causes air pollution. WHO estimates that 4.6 million people die each year from causes directly attributable to air pollution. Our actions are more deadly than the coronavirus. We are reversing the geological history. In other words, we are recreating the earth before life began. Oceans control the climate. But our activities are changing the oceans themselves. The oceans' chemistry is changing rapidly due to the increased level of CO2. Three and a half of CO2 in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the water, causing an increase in the acidic nature of oceans. As a result, the organisms are unable to grow their shells. Most of them are dissolving into the ocean. Phytoplanktons produce 80% of the oxygen in the world
We can exist only after the phytoplanktons have produced enough oxygen for us. But we are destroying them. The researches say that we may have lost 40% of plankton production in the last 50 years as a result of climate change. We are making our lives better for only us without knowing that we are becoming an endangered species. Permian extinction is the largest of all extinctions. Almost all life on the earth disappeared. One of the causes of the phases of this extinction was methane. Methane is 22 times more potent as a climate-changing gas than CO2. Livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all the direct emissions from the entire transportation sector. A cattle release 30 to 50 gallons of methane every single day. If there were a balance in the number of cattle, it would not have been a problem. But there are millions of cattle in farms as livestock. Furthermore, we destroy plants to feed them and for transportation. We are destroying species including us which took billions of years to evolve, in the blink of an eye. The future of this planet and the human race is in our hands. We can't afford to keep making the same mistakes because there won't be anything left. Coronavirus made us realise who the real villain is. It has given us a chance to understand our mistakes and save our planet and ourselves from mass extinction. It's now or never. As Carl Sagan said, let us preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
 സാങ്കേതിക പരിശോധന - Sai K shanmugam തീയ്യതി: 15/ 04/ 2020 >> രചനാവിഭാഗം - ലേഖനം
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