Is it already too late to change?

Europe is suffering a hear wave with "Temperatures expected to surge 20 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit) above the seasonal average of 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit)." A heat wave in August 2003 killed about 70,000 in Europe, France recording 14,802 deaths related to heat. The shock this time is because it is so early in the season. A Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg has created a sensation by going on strike to force her government to take action to reduce global warming. There has never been so much carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, trapping heat from the sun and resulting in rising temperatures. Rising heat is easy to prove by mapping melting of ice. Photographs taken by spy satellites launched by the US in the 1970s and 80s show that Himalayan glaciers are melting at a much higher rate. A team from Columbia University "looked at 650 glaciers in the Himalayas spanning 2000 km" and "found that between 1975 and 2000, and average of 4bn tonnes of ice was being lost each year. But between 2000 and 2016, the glaciers melted approximately twice as fast -- losing about 8bn tonnes of ice each year on average." Human beings are causing changes, not only by flying, driving, using air-conditioners, but also just by eating food. Studies show that cutting down on meat and sugar is good for health, and for reducing methane produced by grass eating animals. What about milk? No animal drinks milk from another species or after being weaned by its mother but human children drink cow's milk and milk products, like butter, cheese and sweets make up a large part of our diet. It is not just food. We now have 'fast fashion' which apparently means cheap clothing meant to be worn and discarded. This increases profits for producers and retailers and makes people feel they are keeping up with celebrities. It also means that 235 million items of clothing, contributing 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon emissions, are sent to landfills every year. Human beings must live in houses to protect ourselves from the weather, from criminals and from insects. Houses need cement to build. "The most astonishing thing about cement is how much air pollution it produces," wrote V Dezem. "Manufacturing the stone-like building material is responsible for 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than what comes from all the trucks in the world." "China continues to emit an increasing amount of ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), despite a global initiative to phase out CFCs under the Montreal Protocol", scientists have found. Climate change could end human civilization within 30 years and result in deaths of hundreds of millions of people, from lack of food and water to uncontrolled epidemics. The human population growth could peak earlier than we think, wrote D Fickling. But perhaps, it is already too late. For us and for all life on earth.