I based my drawing around the quote “if you wait until you can see the impact, it is too late to stop it” from Beth Gardiner’s article Coronavirus Holds Key Lessons on How to Fight Climate Change, and more generally about the sense of urgency established by the article. In my drawing, an iceberg is melting in the top chamber of an hourglass, as the lower chamber containing Earth slowly floods. Although Earth is not submerged yet, it faces little drops of water that represent the currently visible and seemingly minor impacts of global warming. Eventually, these drops will gather until Earth is submerged, at which point it will be too late to save. Although we can not entirely fix the damage we have already caused, we can slow or stop the problem from progressing into a catastrophe.
One of the biggest problems we face against climate change is the lack of sufficient action to prevent it. Because its effects are not yet immediately apparent, our country has not done much in response. In the article, Michelle Wucker says that climate change is like a gray rhino, “the 2-ton thing that’s coming at you, and most of the time we downplay it or neglect it. We kind of miss the obvious.” Although we have a lot of evidence that climate change is real, we act as if it isn’t. Our administration has even “rolled back measures meant to reduce carbon emissions.” We must take more proactive measures for the future, even if that means making small sacrifices in the present.