How does climate change affect us in Budapest?

Climate change is one of the major challenges of our time and adds considerable stress to our societies and to the environment. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global. We are not doing much about it though. Without drastic action today, adapting to these impacts in the future will be more difficult and costly.

There is also a lot of proof that climate change is real. September 2017 was the fourth warmest September in 137 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. Last month was +0.80 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean September temperature from 1951-1980. The warmest months of September according to the analysis happened in 2016 and 2014 (+0.87 degrees Celsius) and 2015 (+0.82 degrees Celsius).

The problem is that there are a lot of people who don’t believe in climate change and without a contribution from everyone we can’t stop it from happening. The U.S. President, Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change; he says that the term climate change was “created by China in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive”. Therefore, the United States, one of the biggest and most influential countries in the world, does not contribute anything in order to stop climate change.

People in Budapest complain that they are seeing very hot summers now, up to forty degrees. But would coping with forty-two degrees really be much worse than coping with forty degrees? On the other hand, temperatures can reach -20 C in Winter, which literally kills many people in Budapest every year. If the extreme cold continues taxes might have to rise to help people in need, so climate change could also affect people in Hungary financially. So, if Budapest spent a bit less time every year below zero, it would help plenty of people.

In conclusion if everyone around the world does something against escalating climate change, we can stop it. Unless this happens this is going to be a very big issue in the future for everyone around the world.