[NEWS] 10-Year-Challenge

"Today, we can see with our own eyes what global warming is doing. In that context it becomes truly irresponsible, if not immoral, for us not to do something."

– Joe Lieberman, former US Senator

As the new year rolled over, #10yearchallenge had gone viral on social media with images from 2009 juxtaposed to images from 2019, showing the changes over the years or showing what had stayed the same. To share a few posts I’ve witness the for the past month, Anne Hathaway did not change a bit on the outside, although she claims in her own post that her inner strength has gone stronger. Go Anne and all the other women who fought to bring changes through movements like #metoo and #timesup. 

Surfing through this hash tag, I revisited the transformation of Instagram’s logo, how ridiculous we looked when we used to wear leggings as pants, and how Lady Gaga is no longer just a make-up heavy singer, but an actress (no offense). The first iPhone was released in 2007 and in the fall of 2018, Apple released its 18th model. Without a doubt, human kinds have made the biggest and the greatest growth in the past 10 years of our history. The applications in my smart phone in and of themselves seem to prove. Call-taxis versus Uber. Phone call food deliveries versus Postmates, Seamless, Grubhub, Uber Eats, etc. Online banking even sounds ancient when we have “phone banking”. There definitely were the times when people barely knew what our President looked like, but the President of the United States in 2019 tweets every morning and several times during the day. It is hard to forget what he looks like and how he talks. This is just a few of what 10 years have come to.

Most of what’s noted above are positive changes. They are improvements. They are conveniences. They are considered accomplishments. Still, within those same 10 years, the United States’ went through the most severe financial crisis since 1920s. Osama bin Laden died but ISIS appeared. Major hurricanes including Katrina, Sandy, and Florence swept America and thousands of lives. Where there had been push forwards, there were pull backs. Where they had been advances, there had been deterioration. One of the biggest deteriorations we, us human kinds, have caused for the sake of all the advances we also made, was on the environment. The Planet Earth. In the forests. Up in the sky and down in the oceans. To the wildlife creatures. To our children.

The 10-year-challenge matters when we know the sea-level is rising at a fast rate, sinking the islands including Japan or parts of Florida slowly but surely. In 2016, more than hundred nations passed and signed the Paris Climate Agreement and in 2018 the United States, one of the largest nation contributing to the urgent threat of climate change, decided to pull out. Despite all the technological advances, global warming and climate change seem to be tough ones to prevent or stop. However, I do not believe that it is because we lack the skills and technologies to do so. We just lack the further vision to inherit this environment to future generations, lack the motivation to achieve long-term goals, lack to sympathy to protect wildlife.

The #10yearchallenge should not merely be taken as simply a fun social media hash tag. The pictures shown below are the proofs to our wrong-doings and un-doings in the past several years. 

What took the nature to nurture over hundreds and thousands of years, humans could destroy in 10 years. Not only are the green trees gone, but also are the species that were living in the region. These are the aerial shots of Amazon rainforest 10 years ago versus today.

Question - What has changed in 10 years in these photos? Answer - Nothing. It takes at least 450 years for one plastic bottle to completely degrade. So plastic bottles in the oceans, on the beach, and on mountains of waste dumpsters have stayed the same for the last ten years. We are soon going to be drowning in the waves of plastic, IF WE DO NOTHING.

What you see above are the Great Barrier Reefs, a specific kind of coral reefs living under the oceans. In the past tens years, the GBRs have deteriorated and been affected by "coral bleaching", an effect caused by warming of ocean temperatures. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) expects the world can experience a mass coral extinction by 2040 at this rate.

Images courtesy of Christian Aslund and the Norwegian Polar Institute. This is the artic 100 years versus today. Leonardo DiCaprio, an environmental activist, posted this on his Instagram as well to show the saddest truth about our climate and how urgent of a threat we are facing today. Antartica is losing six times as much ice as it was 40 years ago today. And since 1958, the Arctic ice has lost about two-thirds of its thickness due to warming of the planet and thereby causing sea-level rise around the continents, which lead to worst tsunamis and hurricanes.

Same.. in the Rhone Glacier in the Swiss Alps...

These are the views of Seoul Tower on Mt. Namsan in Seoul, South Korea. Over the last ten years, the air pollution has exponentially gone bad in the capital city of a country that shares borders with deserts of China. Stories of kindergarten children painting the sky in grey crayons, people purchasing high-technology air purifiers or respirator masks when going outdoors not only belong to Beijing, but also in Seoul and other big city in East Asia.

We may not be able to do much about what had changed and unchanged in the past 10 years. Thankfully, the awareness is growing and state legislators in the United States are taking initiatives to fill the gap created by pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The change begins now from acknowledging the truth that we are facing a threat against our environment, so that the next #10yearchallenge look more promising.