The Earth’s Climatic condition has always been changing, sometimes slowly over many hundreds of thousands of years or even millions of years and sometimes very abruptly owing to volcanic or other geological activity. During these natural cycles of Climate Change, there have been many Ice Ages, and even times in the Earth’s History when the entire planet has been covered with ice for millions of years. We sometimes refer those periods of intense glaciation as ‘ Snowball Earth’. Human Beings could not have survived during such a period of the Earth’s history.

But equally humanity will not be able to survive on world that is literally on fire.
The natural processes of Climate Change are now well studied and better understood, and we have come to accept that fact that we can do nothing to prevent them as and when they occur, and we have come to respect the Biosphere and its balance, which is essential to all life, not just our own.
If we put an apple in the cooler and take it out after a while, there will be a very thin layer of water condensation covering it. This extremely thin surface layer is analogous to the relative thickness of the biosphere on the Earth, which we have to protect at all costs, for the consequences of failure are grave indeed.
The first ancestors of Humanity have been on Earth for some millions of years, but the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. The last glacial period began about 100,000 years ago and lasted until 25,000 years ago. Today we are in a warm interglacial period. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started only in the 1800s. with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
There is now overwhelming evidence which shows that our planet has been getting warmer because of Anthropogenic changes due to man-made Climate Change . The warmest 20 years on record have been in the last 22 years according to the World Meteorological Organisation. The warmest four years were between 2015 to 2018. Global average temperatures are now 1℃ higher than they were in the pre-industrial era.
In a world of constantly changing climatic conditions, 1℃ does not seem very much, but we have already seen that the weather systems of the world are being severely disrupted. If these dramatic trends continue this disruption is set to worsen, with predictions of global temperatures increasing by as much as 3-5℃ by the year 2100.
The Nations of the World have recognised the threat that Climate Change now poses to our future. The is no ‘Planet B’. We need to take action together, and now. The current world temperature map looks like this:
