A few weeks ago, we celebrated 100,000 pounds of waste saved since the announcement and start of our waste-free initiative. Within that post, we discussed only briefly some of the dangers we're looking at on the road ahead, but we wanted to take some time this week to talk more in depth about this. It's an important topic to us at Wings, relating to the health and happiness of our environment, our communities, and our planet.
The planet's climate hasn't been perfectly steady throughout all of history, and there's always been carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. However, it only began to spike to dangerous levels within the last hundred years.
Prior to the 1950s, the level of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had always been at a safe level. It had risen and fallen throughout time, but suddenly spiked like this recently, and hasn't truly fallen since. And as these levels remained in the atmosphere, the damage it's done has grown steadily worse.
The oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, and becoming uninhabitable for some species, and endangering others. Coral reefs, such as the famous Great Barrier Reef in Australia, are bleaching and dying. We're losing these natural wonders, and fish and other water-dwelling creatures are losing their place to live. This sparks a chain reaction -- if fish can't live, the organisms and animals they support can't live, and the organisms and animals that those support can't live, and so on. It's a dangerous trend to start.
In addition to this, sea levels are on the rise. It's leading to retreating shorelines, and making some places like the Maldives uninhabitable. There are people there who could lose their homes, lose their lives over the water levels rising.
Extreme weather events are becoming more intense, and will only continue to get worse. Hurricanes have intensified in intensity, frequency, and duration in the last forty years, and will only continue to grow stronger. This damages habitats, and causes massive destruction to islands and coastal cities. There will be more droughts and heat waves in some places. California's wildfires have been making headline after headline, causing more and more damage, and costing lives.
And this is only a part of the story, only part of all the damage done to our planet. Some things are already irreversible, and the whole of it could become the same within the next decade.
It's important to not only raise awareness, but to do in any small part what we can to help stop this before it becomes too late.