Understanding Could Save the Earth

There are many things happening in the world due to the weather phenomenon, El Nino. El Nino is the warming of the water in the tropical Pacific every 1-3 years. It was given its name, which means "Christ child," by Peruvians 200 years ago when they noticed ocean warming at Christmas time. El Nino can cause many different weather patterns, such as heavy rains, snow storms, droughts, and forest fires all around the world. Thinking real hard about El Nino, I wonder if it could be caused by global warming, or at least linked in some indirect way. Everybody knows about the Greenhouse Effect and that it is getting worse and worse, so couldn't this be causing the ocean water in the El Nino zone to get warmer faster than usual? I think that it is, and if everybody in the world doesn't start changing the way they are treating the Earth and it's atmosphere, everything could become a big disaster.

The present El Nino has been going on for a long time, longer than all the other "normal" El Nino's have been. Maybe it's a coincidence, but our Earth is becoming warmer, and the temperature is rising a lot faster now than it did before all the big factories became popular. But I don't think it's a coincidence. All you have to do is think logically to come to that conclusion. Scientists seem to always need an explanation for everything. And it always has to be so complicated with them. They have all these formulas that don't make any sense to an average mind. But sometimes all people need is the average mind to figure something out, not Einstein's brain, or Ben Franklin's brain, just the brain you think with every day to make simple decisions. And everyday simple decisions could help make our planet a safer, healthier place to live.

Everything on the Earth is now being affected by global warming and El Nino. Sea life, including sea mammals, is dying and disappearing, and there seems to be nothing that anybody can do about it. The land is burning from droughts or being swept away by floods. People are also dying every day becauseof the disasters all around the world caused by this phenomenon. Take the baby seals and sea lions of California, for example. If you walk along the California shoreline, you'll find hundreds of them that are sick, dying, or dead because the warm water from El Nino is depleting their food supply.

All you have to do is imagine that these mammals are human beings, and that we are dying because our warming planet is destroying our ways of getting food. You see, nothing is too complicated for us to understand. And if people don't start understanding soon that we have to be careful about what we do to the Earth and its atmosphere, one of these days it may be too late to do anything about it.

Charlotte Alstrom