20 Weird Ways Climate Change Affects Us

  1. Fall foliage will have fewer red leaves

Many colorful red trees such as maples and sourwoods are more sensitive to drought, so they’re migrating north.

The ones that remain may be stressed and fail to produce the chemical anthocyanin which is responsible for that distinctive red color. Leaves may pass from green to brown, skipping red.

As temperatures increase, fall foliage will not only lean more orange and yellow, but it’ll also be duller as a whole.

2. Jellyfish populations are increasing explosively

With climate change comes warmer weather and less oxygen. These are conditions that are just fine for jellyfish but much more difficult for other species.

That, coupled with the overfishing of jellyfish’s natural predators like sharks and turtles means jellyfish numbers are skyrocketing.

Over the past 20 years, swarms of jellyfish, called "jellyfish blooms" have become more common worldwide, forcing beach closures, killing other species, and causing power outages by clogging the lines that lead to power plants.

3. Siberia is turning into an enormous, flammable trampoline

They Siberian Arctic is full of permafrost, which is soil that is supposed to remain frozen year round. But that geographic area is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world, and the soil has begun thawing.

Trapped in this soil are microbes that produce methane in warm, low oxygen conditions as they digest the defrosting biomass. Much of that methane is escaping into the atmosphere, but a lot is getting temporarily trapped in underground pockets of wet earth.

Meaning there are around 7,000 sites around Siberia where the soil is legitimately bouncy now right mow, but also explosive.

4. Satellites are gaining speed

Satellites orbiting the earth are gaining speed, along with all the other space junk we’ve released into the atmosphere.  

Increased CO2 means we’re releasing more heat into space.  More heat contracts the thermosphere, which is the atmospheric layer where all these satellites reside.  This decreases drag on everything orbiting in it. 

Less drag means faster satellites, increasing the potential for collision, which could interrupt cell phone & TV services.

5. More ghost forests are being created

We know have what are called “ghost forests”.  Sea levels are rising and salt water is inching into the land.  Trees on the fringes are being poisoned by the saltwater, causing entire swaths of trees along the east coast to die simultaneously. 

North Carolina has especially been hit hard, and now has these “ghost forests” in some of its protected woodlands.  The phenomenon is even visible from space.

6. There will be less nature sounds

This one may sound obvious, but here’s something you may not have thought of.  If you go to a forest and listen, you may notice that sounds of different animals tend to exist in different ranges of notes that sound harmonious rather than clashing and cacophonous, like an orchestra.  Think the baritone croak of a frog vs. the alto rush of a creak vs. a soprano songbird.  This happened evolutionarily because it is advantageous for animals to pinpoint those of their own species.  This orchestra will decrease, maybe to a lonely note.

7. There will be more nature sounds

In some ways climate change means less noise, but in other ways it means more noise as trees disappear. Trees serve as a natural noise buffer for the human ear, reducing background noise by absorption, deflection, refraction, and masking.

In some situations, a well placed tree can reduce noise levels by up to 50%. Less trees means those annoying city sounds your walls only partially block out will become even more of a nuisance.

9. Ancient diseases may reemerge

There is a possibility that as ice frozen for thousands of years thaws, long-frozen corpses of the ancient dead will resurface. As their bodies get discovered by the modern man, long-dormant diseases may resurface as well.

In 2016, there was an Anthrax outbreak that hospitalized a dozen humans, killed a child, and killed thousands of deer in Siberia. It is thought to have originated from the thawed, 75-year old carcass of a deer that was infected by the bacteria decades ago.

10. We’ll be able to straight through the North Pole

By 2040, people will be able to sail straight through the North Pole as there will be no sea ice left in the Arctic Ocean.

Temperatures in the Arctic have been rising faster than the rest of the planet, so the polar ice pack has seen a marked decrease in size over the past few decades. This will only continue as the planet warms.

11. Giant holes exploding in Siberia

Giant holes, hundreds of feet wide are popping up in western Siberia, and the earth can be heard exploding from 60 miles away.

At first, people believed aliens to be the culprit, but we now know it’s due to thawing permafrost.

12. American rivers are changing color

From 1984 to 2018, scientists compiled satellite images of rivers across America and found that a third of them had changed in hue. In 2018, 56% appeared yellow, 38% green, only 5% appeared blue.

Although the exact reason is unknown, it is probably due to agricultural runoff causing algae blooms, as well as pollution, changes in river flow, and rising water temperatures.

13. There’ll be more mixed-species hybrids

Because vertebrate animal populations have decreased by over 50% in 40 years, there are now fewer options for animals to mate with within their species.

So, there’ll be more mixed species hybrids, like blynxes (bobcat-lynxes), pizzly bears (polar-grizzly bears), and coywolves (coyote-wolves).

14. Gravity is shifting

Changes in how mass is distributed between ice sheets, ocean atmosphere, and groundwater has meant a change in the distribution of gravity across the planet as well.

The ESA (European Space Agency) used to a satellite to map the gravitation field between 2009 and 2013 and found that Antarctica is losing so much ice that it’s decreasing Earth’s gravitational field in that region. To be exact, it’s losing 150 gigatons of ice each year.

15. Shark attack odds are increasing

Thanks to rising sea temperatures, juvenile sharks are being prompted to expand their territories and swim in new waters more frequently. Shark bites are still extremely rare but odds are increasing, in part due to climate change.

16. There’ll be fewer clouds in the sky

Clouds cover 70% of the earth at any given time, and due to global warming, they’re moving away from the middle latitudes—where most humans live—and toward the poles.

This is because the troposphere—the lowest layer of our atmosphere where weather occurs—can extend higher with a hotter surface. And because in the tropics, the atmospheric circulation patterns—which large-scale movements of air—are expanding.

This will mean weirder for us like hotter days because it means there’ll be less clouds to reflect the sunlight back into space.

17. Earth is getting dimmer

Earthshine is a term for the light earth reflects onto the dark side of the moon. 2 decades of earthshine measurements, combined with satellite observations of Earth’s reflectivity has shown the planet is getting dimmer.

A decreasing in clouds due to the warming of the atmosphere and the oceans is thought to be the culprit. Lower clouds are often quite thick and reflect a lot of light back into space. Less of them means the planet absorbs more light, becoming dimmer as seen from space.

18. There will be more ice crop circles

Ice finger rafting are ice formations that appear in frozen lakes across the world.

They’re formed when thin ice sheets drift over and under each other at the same time, creating a zig zag pattern. Warmer weather means thinner ice, so these patterns will become more common—we just can’t blame it on the aliens.

19. There will be more tropical storms

There will be more tropical storms like hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. When the ocean warms, evaporation increases, and when the atmosphere warms, the amount of water vapor it can hold increases. Together, this means future storms will occur more frequently and unleash more rain at a greater force.

So invest in a good umbrella, maybe.

20. The air will become poisonous to breathe

In some areas, the air will become poisonous to breathe, and it’s not as far off as you may think. For example, 2/3s of the Great Salt Lake in Salt Lake City, Utah has already dried up. If this continues, it wiill begin to expose high levels of arsenic and other toxins present in the lake bed.

Wind storms could carry those molecules to the nearby city’s population, which could lead to devestating health problems.

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