Enhancing perspective on Climate Change

Earth's climate has been through a lot over the past few billion years and at this point, climate scientists have a pretty good handle on how our planet has changed over time. We talked about the future of the climate on how it's changing more quickly than the past and about the dangers of rising temperatures and more severe droughts and storms. Our methods for predicting the future of climate are a little different than those for reconstructing the past. The past leaves physical records we can study like tree rings and ice cores, the future requires us to be a little more abstract. We mostly predict the future of Earth's climate using computer models and mathematical reconstructions of our atmosphere that account for as much detail as possible to produce and accurate simulation It has taken decades to get to the point where we can be confident that what it predicts is accurate. What the models say is that our climate is changing, and humans are making it happen. Globa...

Human activities from pollution to overpopulation are driving up the earth's temperature and fundamentally changing the world around us. As we all know, the main cause is a phenomenon called 'the greenhouse effect'. Gases in the atmosphere such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons let the sun's light in but keep some of the heat from escaping like the glass wall of the greenhouse. The more greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped, strengthening the greenhouse effect and increasing the Earth's temperature. Human activities like the burning of fossil fuels have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by more than a third since the industrial evolution. Source : NASA The rapid increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has warmed the planet at an alarming rate. While Earth's climate has fluctuated in the past. Atmospheric carbon dioxide hasnt reached today's levels in hundreds...

Climate change is happening for a number of different reasons, but the main culprit is Greenhouse Gases like carbon dioxide, emitted from the burning of fossil fuels like coil and oil. Greenhouse gases happens when the sun shoots solar radiation towards Earth as visible light and these solar rays can easily pass through the gases in our atmosphere, The Earth absorbs some of these rays, heats up, and then emits them as thermal radiation or heat. This radiation however can be absorbed by certain gases in our atmosphere. So, some of this heat goes back down towards Earth and warms it. This forms a greenhouse-like heat trapping barrier around Earth. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped.  Since the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide level have risen more than 38% and their constant desire for more and more land has caused us to chop down and burn huge amounts of carbon absorbing forests.  A forest is considered to be a  carbon source ...

In recent years, the consequences have become more serious and visible. Almost every we experience the terrifying side effects of climate change. We've had more heat waves , the most glaciers melting, and the lowest amount of ice ever recorded in the North Pole . Of the last 22 years, 20 have been the hottest on record. source: berkeleyearth.org The only way to limit this rapid climate change is to decrease our collective commission quickly. Although all countries agree on this goal in principle, they did not agree who is responsible or who should bear the heaviest load. The developed countries point at their own effeorts to reduce emissions and the fact that the large developing countries on the rise, especially China are currently releasing much more CO2. On the other hand, developing countries argue that emissions by the West are lifestyle emissions, while for developing countries, they are survival emissions. Other call rich countries hypocrite that got rich by...

People around the world are encouraging the world leaders to take action on climate change. How did it become such a critical phenomena?  Nonetheless, with so many news and grey noise in the media, it's easy to get lost in the story. To help understand more regarding climate change we must first understand what it is. Climate change refers to the average long-term changes over the entire Earth. These include warming temperatures and changes in precipitation, as well as the effects of Earth’s warming. The effects that could be caused includes rising sea levels, ice caps melting faster in Greenland and Antarctica, shrinking mountain glaciers and changes in flower blooming time. We'll get more into that later but to understand how it happened, take a look at the graph below Source : NASA,  Credit: NOAA These are the levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere over hundreds of thousands of years. But the spike of carbon dioxide in the very end, that took during t...