The Great Barrier Reef Persuasive Speech

On February 28th. 2016, Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar for the movie The Relevant. Before he concluded his acceptance speech, he made a very powerful statement that left the audience speechless. “Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world. A world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real; it is happening right now” (DiCaprio). He saw the effects of climate change first had and decided that is it urgent that we as a society should do something to stop it. Climate change will occur when CO2 is trapped in the earth’s atmosphere, causing the planet to warm. The …show more content…
The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia is known for the most amazing coral and fascinating sea life that live within it. The reef covers 134,364 square miles and is the home to over four hundred types of coral and five thousand types of fish and mollusk species. With warm water temperatures, the coral in the reef start to bleach losing its color. If the coral is under too much stress from the warm temperatures, the bleaching could become permanent and kill the coral. Typically, the temperatures will drop to give the coral time to recover from the damages but there has not been a change in the temperature. “We're seeing areas that have seen high temperatures for two to three years in a row. There's no time for corals to recover.” (Weisberger). This is a direct result of global warming. If there is not a drop in the temperature, there is a great chance that the coral will never recover and it will be lost forever. If the coral dies, thousands of fish and mollusk species will become extinct because their habitat will be destroyed. In 2002, only eighteen percent of the GBR were showing signs of intense bleaching but in 2014, over ninety five percent of the reef was bleached from the warmer water. Since majority of the reef already shows signs of bleaching and the temperatures are not dropping, the coral will most likely die off in the next few years. …show more content…
This hurricane ranked in the top five deadliest in the United States. It created havoc killing roughly twelve hundred people and accumulating over one hundred billion dollars in property damage. Although hurricanes and global warming are not directly related, the result of global warming with increasing ocean temperatures directly affects the intensity of what a hurricane can do to the coastlines. People cannot change the fact that hurricanes will occur, but they can change how destructive they are. Since warmer ocean temperatures relates to the outcome of a hurricane, we must stop producing CO2 into the atmosphere because it is warming ocean water. Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, talked about how we must prepare for all stages of climate change. The stage she narrowed her Ted Talk on is the outcomes of hurricanes. Building raised houses and using solar panels are solutions Arroyo proposed to minimize the damage hurricanes can do but she also addressed that if we changed the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we would not have to spend so much time and energy preparing for the damages because they will not be as severe. The military takes the threat of global warming seriously and so should the rest of the world. The military are there to protect against harmful threats but it is hard for them to do that when we are creating the problem by producing CO2 into the