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You've probably heard news, at some point in your life, that the Earth is warming, and as result is that the Arctic ice is melting.
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There is no debate that Earth is warming up.
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The planet's average temperature has increased one point one degrees Celsius since eighteen eighty.
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And sixteen out of the seventeen of the hottest years, ever on record, have been since two thousand one.
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NASA estimates there is ninety-five per cent probability that this current warming is a direct result of human activities since the mid twentieth century.
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And ninety-seven out of one hundred active publishing climate scientists agree that human activity is extremely likely to blame.
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As a result of this, ice around the world is melting and raising the planet's sea levels.
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The oceans already rose by six centimeters during the course of the nineteenth century.
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But they rose by nineteen centimeters during the twentieth century, over three times faster than they rose during the previous century.
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NOAA estimates that global sea levels could rise by up to two point five meters by the year twenty-one hundred, which would have devastating consequences.
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If this happens entire island countries like the Maldives, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu would be submerged beneath the ocean and cease to exist.
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Their entire populations will have to be transplanted somewhere else and this will create a situation in which hundreds of thousands of state-less people would find a new home.
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One hundred fifty million total climate refugees from around the world may exist by twenty-fifty,
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and by twenty-one hundred, that number could rise up to two billion people, eighteen per cent of the global population at that time.
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But in an even worse case scenario than this, however, what would happen if all the ice on Earth melted?
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If all the ice on Antarctica, Greenland, and the world glaciers melted in to the ocean it would rise global sea level by an incredible sixty-eight point three meters.
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Such a catastrophe would take five thousand years of the current rate of the ice melting to happen,
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but it would severely alter the geography of our planet.
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In North America, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and most of San Diego, and Los Angeles would be underwater.
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San Francisco would be an island and San Jose would be destroyed by the waves.
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The San Francisco Bay would greatly expand in size, to completely swallow Sacremento.
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The Gulf of California would expand so far North, that Palm Springs would become a coastal city.
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While on the Atlantic Coast, the ocean would expand to swallow the cities of Corpus Christi, Houston, New Orleans, the entire state of Florida,
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as well as the entire state of Delaware, almost all of Long Island, and the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Boston.
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South America would also be severely flooded with two new inland seas existing on the continent.
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And the cities of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro, would all be underwater.
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Europe would be one of the most devastated areas in the world.
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The entire country of the Netherlands would be underwater and so would nearly all of Denmark and half of Belgium.
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The British Isles will become more of an archipelago and London would be totally buried beneath the sea.
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Northern Germany would also be entirely underwater, including the city of Berlin.
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And Venice, in Italy, would be long since been reclaimed by the Adriatic Sea.
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Istanbul would also be underwater, the Crimean Peninsula would become the Crimean Island, and the Black and Caspian Seas would be connected with one another,
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which would mean that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan, would no longer be landlocked countries.
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Africa would, perhaps, be the least severely affected continent, but Egypt would be severely damaged by having both Alexandria and Cairo going underwater.
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The Persian Gulf, meanwhile, would swallow the entire the entire countries of Qatar, and Bahrain, and the city of Baghdad.
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India and Pakistan would be badly damaged, but the entire country of Bangladesh would cease to exist in this catastrophe.
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Hundreds of millions of people would be underwater in China, including Beijing and Shanghai, in addition to the cities of Seoul, Pyongyang, and Tokyo.
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Australia would be home to a new inland sea.
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And finally, Antarctica would become more of an archipelago.
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But unlike the Antarctica of today, this Antarctica would likely be habitable and easily colonizable by future humans.
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So what can we do to prevent this nightmare future from happening?
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Reducing humanity's usage of fossil fuels is perhaps the best way of mitigating our warming climate.
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These following countries produce at least seventy-five per cent of their power from renewable energy resources, like solar, wind, hydro-power.
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Global investments in renewable energy rose by fifty-seven per cent between two thousand eight and twenty fifteen.
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The European Union alone more than doubled it's renewable energy production between two thousand and twenty-thirteen.
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And recently one hundred ninety-five different countries signed the Paris Climate Accord in which they all agreed to cooperate in combating global warming.
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While the stakes have never been higher, we are close to seeing a true energy revolution.