[A Sip of a Book] "3 Years Left Until Climate Disaster"

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly reach the reader's heart, creating a connection with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor's note

Professor Nam Seong-hyun, a leading authority on climate science in Korea, has organized the climate crisis in an easy-to-understand way at a glance. Starting with basic terms related to global warming such as climate, glaciers, and oceans, the book explains climate change in a way simple enough for children to understand. It clarifies the meanings of various scientific terms like 'global warming,' 'climate crisis,' and 'greenhouse effect,' which have appeared in textbooks and numerous media outlets, making them easy to comprehend.

There is an Indian proverb that says, "The Earth is not inherited from our ancestors, but borrowed from our descendants." As the first generation to recognize climate change as a reality and the only generation capable of solving it, we bear responsibility for the Earth's environment today and tomorrow. From the 「Prologue」

Recently, the abnormal weather in the eastern United States and even the severe cold wave in Texas in the southeastern U.S., experiencing a winter colder than Alaska, are closely related to the Arctic vortex. Asking why it is cold instead of hot despite global warming is a question that arises from not fully understanding concepts like the Arctic vortex. From 「Not All Seas Are the Same│Ocean Structure and Sea Ice & Albedo Feedback」

Although the global average temperature rise known as global warming seems like a mere 1-degree change, this 1-degree shift triggers a greater effect through processes such as sea ice-albedo feedback, amplifying Arctic warming and causing meandering of the jet stream. In some mid-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere, unprecedented cold waves or extreme heat waves rising by tens of degrees occur more frequently, leading to increasingly frequent weather anomalies. Since these weather anomalies are caused by anthropogenic climate change due to human activities, they possess characteristics of both natural disasters and human-made disasters, and thus cannot be considered unrelated to climate change. From 「1 Degree Rise in Earth's Temperature Shakes Humanity│Weather Anomalies」

Especially along the coast of Greenland, the ice sheet is thinning at a very rapid pace, with glaciers disappearing at an annual rate equivalent to 281 billion tons. Dividing this by the global population of 7.7 billion means that every person on Earth is effectively moving 36 tons of ice from Greenland to the sea each year, or enough to fill a 3-ton truck every month. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melts, the global average sea level will rise by more than 7 meters. From 「Melting Ice and Its Ripple Effects│Disappearing Glaciers」

The Inevitable Future | Written by Nam Seong-hyun | Forche | 256 pages | 17,800 KRW

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.