Shantell Dunn
Sociology
Writing Assign. 5

Climate Changes of the World

Just noticing the difference in the climate change in the thirty years that I have been alive is a little scary. I remember snow on Thanksgiving all the way through the New Year, now it’s pretty rare to see snow on the ground in our region for more than a week at a time. It seems as though the warm season is getting extensively longer and the amount of rain is getting exceptionally lessened. After seeing the outcome of the 2012 corn crop in Stueben County it has really made me think about the total outcome all over the world as far as agriculture if the global temperature is going to go up. Crops require a certain level of time and moisture for growth, even though new plants are being scientifically altered to grow in different environmental changes but are shown to supply fewer nutrients. Robbing quality for quantity in the case of our food isn’t exactly the greatest idea when it means the health and quality of our food isn’t going to supply the nourishment we need. The altering of food scientifically will mean a sufficient gain in calories and lesser amount of much needed vitamins. (EBI, pg.1) While the growing of food for the human race is important, we aren’t all a bunch of vegans. To have livestock to supply meat for our families we have to feed the livestock as well. As many large companies have gone to genetically altered drugs to change the size of their livestock they still need the feed that is derived from the farming of natural crops such as grains. I fear that limitations are going to be set on the amount of beef, pork, and poultry products at some point that a house hold will be able to purchase in a given year, of course hopefully based on the amount of people that each house harbors. If we are unable to sufficiently grow enough nutrient rich food for ourselves how will we be able to feed our livestock and the people of the world. One of the scariest things to me about the temperature changing is the amount of diseases that are carried by insects from one person to the next going up. “These diseases are known as vector- borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever and both are transferred by mosquitos” (DeWeerdt, p 2). These aren’t diseases that currently plague us in the United States but we do have diseases that are carried by mosquitos such as West Niles Virus that has taken the lives of many people in the US in the last eleven years. You could very much expect the numbers of this disease to go up with the rise of the climate given the amount of blood meals a mosquito would take and the amount of mosquitos that would flourish from the heat. Another vector-borne disease that affected us in Indiana and Michigan this year was EHD (Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease), it was a disease that was carried by a fly known as “midges” that infected and killed off thousands of deer. This disease that was commonly referred to as blue tongue disease didn’t in any way affect humans but would dehydrate and kill deer with a sort of flu like symptoms that would kill the deer with an exceptionally high temperature. The weather has been unlike anything I have ever seen, or at least it has been for about the last ten years or so. I know that there have always been bad storms and at some points worst storms in the same areas, but the amount of savior storms in any given region seem as though they have increased sufficiently. Hurricanes In the United States seem as though they will hit so much more frequently in the Gulf of Mexico than ever before and all the way up the west coast for that matter. After the surprise of hurricane Sandy hitting the east coast and so late in the season, then running right up to