You can help protect the planet! Try some of the following tips and get green.

【小题1】 Set out cans and bottles for neighborhood pickup, or exchange them for cash at a recycling ( 回收利用) center. Choose rechargeable batteries ( 充电电池), then recycle them when they die. 【小题2】 Sharing books is a great way to reduce waste and reuse materials.

Improve the outdoors. Plant a leafy tree that loses its leaves in fall on the south side of your home. Its shade ( 树荫) will cool your house in the summer. 【小题3】 Trees also help clean the air we breathe. They produce oxygen and reduce carbon dioxide.

Don’t litter. Rubbish thrown carelessly outside often washes into rivers, lakes and finally into the oceans. 【小题4】

Cut down on waste. If you have a dripping faucet (滴水的水龙头) in the house, ask your parents to replace the washer inside it. If you stop a faucet from leaking one drop each second, you can save 2, 700 gallons of water a year. Don’t pile (堆满) food onto your plate. 【小题5】 Enough food to feed 49 million people ends up in landfills in the United States each year.

Electric vehicles(EVs) are widely considered a strong weapon in efforts against global warming. But are they like what people believe? The Radiant Energy Group(REG) stated effects of EVs vary with countries. In some nations, EVs lead to the release of more carbon gases than gasoline cars. The group reckoned gas emissions(排放) caused by a gasoline vehicle and from charging an EV. Countries where charging an EV is cleaner than driving a gasoline-powered car use a lot of nuclear or solar power.

Sales of electric cars are rising the fastest in Europe. Data from REG suggests EVs in Poland actually create more carbon emissions because their electrical systems depend so much on coal. In other European countries, however, EVs result in fewer emissions. The countries with the biggest carbon gas reduction use much clean power. The first was Switzerland at 100 percent carbon reductions over gasoline vehicles.

Germany and Spain create lots of electricity from the sun and wind. But the sun and wind don’t add to a country’s electrical system equally throughout the day. For this reason, carbon emissions saved by driving an EV aren’t fixed. Charging in the afternoon, when there’s more sun and wind, saves 16 to 18 percent more carbon than at night when electrical systems are more likely to be using gas or coal.

The gap in emissions between electric and gasoline-powered vehicles has narrowed in recent years. In Europe, carmakers have been required to meet EU CO₂ emissions of performance standards. They’ve made their gasoline engines more fuel-efficient. As a result, carbon emissions of new gasoline-powered cars in Europe have fallen an average of 25 percent in the past years. But EV sales in Europe are backed by government spending and rules against new gasoline engine cars after 2035. Major automakers have set targets to sell mainly EVs in Europe in the coming years.

To understand the effect of ice melting around the world we first have to understand what an ice sheet actually is. Covering 5.4 million square miles in Antarctica (南极洲) and 656,000 square miles in Greenland, an ice sheet is actually a huge land of ice from the Ice Age. These sheets form in areas where snow that falls in winter does not melt entirely over the summer. This ice, home to different species of animals, is now melting at a rate that cannot support the life it currently holds.

Many of these creatures rely on ice sheets as land for resting, hunting and protection, yet as the size decreases, they are forced out of their homeland in search of other land on which to live. Often this means journeys to search for food and an imbalanced ecosystem happens when different species are forced together onto the coast.

Since the 1990s, the deer population has dropped by 56 percent — climate change has caused warmer temperatures over winter setting off rainfall instead of snow, which freezes more quickly underfoot and makes it harder to walk and search for food. In the summer, frozen layers of land melts and releases trapped diseases which bring death to animals. A similar situation has fallen on the polar bears who suffered a 40 percent population loss between 2001 and 2010.

Quite apart from these problems, the threat of sea levels rising if the ice caps were to disappear is approaching. If the Greenland Ice Sheet melted, the sea level would rise around six meters, and if the Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, sea levels would rise by around 20 feet. As a matter of fact, sea levels have risen about eight inches since 1880, three of which we’ve gained over the last 25 years. This seemingly small amount has already caused dangerous flooding, loss of farmland and more deadly storms.

While we’re still a long way from losing the ice sheets all together, we’ve already lost too much and if we don’t take climate change seriously now, we will certainly hit the point of no return.