Drake’s Story
It’s tiring and draining feeling the intense heat surround and choke me.
It’s tiring and draining feeling the intense heat surround and choke me.
I am sensing climate change through the environment and weather conditions around me.
I’m scared for where humans are leading this world, I’m worried about the future of our planet and our own future.
I am sensing climate change through the increase in extreme weather.
In my audio recording, I speak about my experience growing up competitively skiing.
My family huddled up in one room with air conditioning and even with it, it was still 80 degrees in there.
It got up to 100.
It was very hot
They make me feel sad and worried for my mama’s home, and my family’s home, and if future generations are going to have the same Earth we want them to have.
I feel that the rapid urbanization in a country like India has led to many such deforestation activities.
There was no more forest but spans of dried up trees. Ailing, sad, brown – the place I had once loved and known to be full of birdsong and butterflies now ceased to exist. The birds had all left – Delhi was simply too hot for them.
However, last year when I returned home for Winter Break from Penn and walked outside of Union Station, the first thing I noticed was how warm it was outside. It felt like spring and I was very concerned right away because I thought about how hot it was the past summer.
When I was the same age as Daniel, I remember blizzards that would cancel school for a week, snow so high that my dad and I would make igloos out of them, snow so heavy I could sink waist deep. Core memories that don’t just pale in comparison, they hurt.
In class, we spent time gazing out the wide-paned windows to catch deer and bobcats stalk the barren mountains outside instead of study the math worksheets and history books in front of us.
For what seemed like forever, the skies became orange and hazy and it became normal to see smoke somewhere. The smell of burning wood and building materials permeated the air.
My nostrils burned a little more with each inhale as I realized that there must be a wildfire somewhere close by.
I don’t know if I should dress warmly or wear something that won’t make me sweat all day.
The game was no longer trying to play your best so you wouldn’t get subbed out, but to conserve your energy under the hot sun so that you wouldn’t pass out from the heat.
With the heat rising, the sun would beat down against the pavement and fry us.
The forest was no longer as loud; I used to be able to hear more birds chirping.
Just knowing that something like this is possible is horrifying.
Those families that can barely afford bad quality food but still want to keep their families healthy have to suffer and choose what they should prioritize more: health or supporting their family financially.
In the early month of June, however, England was facing record-high heat.
As Christmas came closer and closer, I waited for the first bit of snow to arrive. I waited and waited, but not one flake of snow fell down from the sky that December.
Suddenly a thought comes unbidden.
This will be gone soon too.
Every year it feels like I’m seeing the trees change later, and when spring comes around and I see either dead trees or trees that have been green for a while I just think about how I might be one of the last generations to experience this.
Instead of waiting for the snow, I’ve come to dread the inch of snow that becomes thin ice, not even enough for a snow day.
I love when the snow actually sticks to the ground and piles up to six inches–I would make bunny rabbits with footprints, or draw things in the snow that was piled on ledges. Sadly, I don’t remember doing any of those things in the last two or three years–not because I don’t have the time to do so, but because there was never that much snow to begin with.
As the years ticked by, snow has made less and less frequent appearances. Maybe this is just a side effect of childhood nostalgia—the feeling that every weather event, holiday, and outing was just a bit more dramatic and exciting when I was younger—but part of me tells me it isn’t.
I’ve read so much about how climate change affects places like the Arctic and Alaska, but it was different seeing the glaciers in person.
The young campers between ages six and eight complained about not feeling well and nearly fainted as some had in the previous summers due to these heat waves.
During the summer of 2022, the temperature was so high, there were a lot of days where the temperature had reached over 100℉.
Most of the beaches on the entire south stretch of the island were full of foul-smelling and unsightly sargassum seaweed.
It’s place in me will always exist and I hope that I will have places I can go to with it for years to come.
Mainly, the sounds of animals have diminished
I have seen first hand how fast climate change has begun to exponentially make itself known.
Holding infant-me, my parents huddled on the kitchen floor in order to avoid the windows. Because of the raging hurricanes in the summer of 2004…
Ohio was home for the first eighteen years of my life. Since leaving it, however, it has become refuge.
I was born in France but barely ever lived there. However every winter I go back there to celebrate Christmas…
Bogotá used to be much colder, and with constant rain (volume and frequency)…
In 100 years, my hometown will have the same climate at Richmond, VA!
I am sensing nearly unbearably hot and humid summers even in Wisconsin…
For my climate story I am writing about the changes that I have noticed while attending college and living in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
My whole life has been spent by Lake Winnebago. My parents’ home sits across from it and as a kid…
Near my college apartment, there is a small nature preserve. Located behind an elementary school…
I see the climate changing in winter, three weeks ago there was little snow on the ground…
Growing up in Seattle, I remember playing outside in all seasons. Seattle’s temperate, rainy climate was…
I find myself becoming increasing reliant on air conditioning in summer and are scared of sudden power outage…
I spent all of my childhood living less than a 10 minute walk from the Navesink River. It was the place I learned to sail,…
We used to go ice skating almost every year, sometimes even on the canals.