The Google company, founded by US businessmen Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are among the 10 richest people in the world, usually commemorates important dates by dedicating doodles to the celebration, and this Friday was no exception.
Google dedicated its doodle this April 22 to Earth Day. It shows real time-lapse images from Google Earth and other sources showing the impacts of climate change on earth. Among the images that are observed, there is the top of a mountain with two different dates, the first in 1986 and the second in 2020. In the first, the summit is completely covered with snow, while in the second, less snow is observed, emphasizing the damage caused by climate change. This mountain is Mount Kilimanjaro, located in Tanzania.
Another image shows the retreat of ice in Greenland, while a third one shows Australia's Great Barrier Reef. In the last one, you can see the forests of Harz, in Germany.
Last year, Google's Earth Day doodle showed the importance of transmitting environmental education.
Every April 22, Earth Day has been commemorated, for 52 years. The commemoration began at the end of the 1960s, when the environment began to undergo changes and people were angry about it. Gaylord Nelson, who was a senator from Wisconsin, United States, conducted numerous environmental campaigns, and by 1969 he organized a demonstration that mobilized 20 million people.
Nelson himself, before he died in July 2005, at the age of 89, wrote an essay, in which he said that “it was rather frantic. Telegrams, letters and telephone inquiries came to us from all over the country.”
To organize the first April 22, held in 1970, Nelson had the activist Denis Hayes, who gained great influence at the political and social levels, since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created at the end of that year.
Subsequently, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, held in Stockholm, Sweden, laid the foundations of world consciousness, referring to the independence of living beings and the planet. Likewise, June 5 was established as World Environment Day.
In 1992, more than 178 countries signed Agenda 21, the Declaration on Environment and Development and the Declaration of Principles for Sustainable Forest Management at the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. However, it was not until 2009 that the UN officially decreed its annual commemoration through the General Assembly through a signed resolution.
As a result of his actions in favor of the environment, Senator Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, also for his role as founder of Earth Day and his work on other environmental issues.
On many occasions, climate change is often confused with global warming. However, it must be understood that the latter, is caused by the former. That is, the increase in the temperature of the planet caused by emissions into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases derived from human activity, are causing variations in the climate that would not naturally occur.
The earth has already warmed and cooled on other occasions in a natural way, but the truth is that these cycles have always been much slower, taking millions of years, whereas now, and as a result of human activity, we are reaching levels that in other times brought extinctions in just 200 years.
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