Holding Your Breath for a Minute: Would It Make A Difference?

People say climate change is caused by different factors, and one major factor is the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is a natural occurrence by which our atmosphere traps the Sun's energy, warming our planet enough to support life on Earth. However, today, there is a drastic increase in the production of greenhouse gasses that is increasing the planet's temperature. Greenhouse gasses are defined as "any of the atmospheric gasses that contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing infrared radiation produced by solar warming of the Earth's surface." (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/) Some popularly known greenhouse gasses are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapor- gasses that are usually emitted from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, rice paddies, land fills, etc.

Carbon dioxide, one of the famous greenhouse gasses, is a gas every living organism produces. Every time we humans exhale, we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This concept inspired a crazy idea from one of my professors in the university. "If every single one of us would stop breathing for a minute, would it make a difference?" There were 30 students in the class who would hold their breaths for a minute. Imagine if the whole population of the Philippines, with almost 96 million people, would stop breathing. Would it actually matter? What if other countries would do the one-minute breath holding test? What if everyone, around the world, would do such a thing, would it reduce our carbon dioxide emission?

Of course most people would say this is a stupid idea. Members of the class argued against it, and even our professor agreed to them. Probably a small percentage of carbon dioxide can reduced, but the composition of the atmosphere responsible for greenhouse effect is not just because of carbon dioxide- other gasses are responsible as well, as identified earlier. Holding your breath for a minute would actually get you gasping for air after, and eventually exhaling more because of rapid breathing. The test was conducted to see how much people would believe in the experiment. We were asked to post "Hold your breath for a minute and save mother Earth" over social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. Some of us got replies such as "Seryoso ba yan?", but most of us got NO response at all. We were basically ignored.

I searched for tags and pages that had stop breathing and environment as keywords, and I actually found a page on Facebook which was started in early in 2010. However, not many people were part of that page and it does not really have updates since it was created.

 

There are many ways by which people are encouraging others in environmental advocacies, and public awareness is one of these so-called ways.  Environmental awareness should start from small and simple things that could easily be understood by people of all ages and of various backgrounds. The one-minute breath holding experiment was one of the things that may seem crazy but, could probably set people into thinking something similar to this could actually work, given a larger context. Awareness could start from mere introduction of the idea to actual in-depth understanding of what really is happening in our environment.


For further reading on the greenhouse effect:
http://www.epa.gov/climatestudents/basics/today/greenhouse-effect.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/sci_nat/04/climate_change/html/greenhouse.stm