Climate Change

Hello everyone,

Climate change. It’s something that has been in the news recently and it’s something that has been on my mind so I wanted to weigh in on it.

What is climate change?

Climate change is something that is affecting all of us across the globe whether you believe in it or not. It is a change in the earth’s temperatures and weather patterns across a period of time and it is something that has occurred on the planet since earth existed and it will continue long after we are gone. We have gone through periods of tropical weather to periods of ice as seen in our previous age. However, in the present we are faced with climate change that is raising the average temperature of the planet. (This is why we used to call climate change global warming!)

Why is the temperature rising?

The earth’s temperature is rising by an alarming rate and is expected to rise by 3.7 - 4.8^oC by the year 2100 (Climate international, 2016). Whilst this may seem like a small amount to us, this is a huge amount for the ecosystems on our planet and this rising is all because of us. As humans we use fossil fuels to create energy to help us in our day to day lives, from charging a phone to driving to work. All of the fossils fuels come with a heavy price though, the price for burning them is that they release carbon dioxide (CO₂) into our atmosphere which is causing a greenhouse effect trapping heat in our atmosphere.

Why should I care?

We should all care because it affects all of us, every single person and every single living creature on this planet is at risk if we carry on with what we are doing now. At the current estimates temperature is set to rise by up to 4.8⁰C by 2100 (Climate international, 2016) which would wipe out most of our rainforests as well as melt the ice sheets across Greenland and Antarctica (WWF, 2017).

Without the trees from rainforest are world may not be able to cope with the amount of CO₂ we are producing and so climate change would increase exponentially past 2100. If we lost the ice sheets from them melting then sea levels across the world would rise by 70m, which would affect millions of people making them homeless and causing them all to move further inland which would cost the government’s huge amounts of money therefore increasing taxes. Snow covered landscapes and glaciers are also natural heat reflectors which help to reduce the temperatures across the planet and if Greenland and Antarctica were to melt we would have virtual no way of reflecting heat so would cause an exponential increase in the global temperature.

If we can get the temperature increase down to 2^oC then the effects will be less drastic (WWF, 2017) but they would still not be great. First off we will see severe weather patterns across the globe with some countries having massive storms whilst others are stuck in perpetual droughts. The arctic ice (North pole) will melt and we would no longer have ice in the north which would mean polar bears will no longer have homes. It’s not just the polar bears that are affected either though as without ice in the north earth will be set to have a further temperature increase because ice reflects solar heat. Peter Wadhams told the Guardian (2017) this:“Sea ice reflects about 50% of the solar radiation it receives back into space. By contrast, water reflects less than 10%”

In order for us to have even a remote chance of saving ourselves and the planet we would need to have a maximum temperature increase of 1.5^oC. Trees are able to help with climate change because they naturally convert CO­₂ into O₂ through their own metabolic processes but with the amount of CO₂ the human race produces, trees will only be able to help us with 30% (Climate international, 2017). The rest is up to us. At our current rate 800 million people are under threat from climate change (Climate international, 2017). If we round our world population to the nearest billion then we have a population of 7 billion people so 800 million is 11% of the world’s population which mean that a little over 1 in every 10 people face the direct threats of climate change.

So in answer to the question, we should care because climate change will affect every single one of us.

But if climate change happens anyway then why should I believe scientists that it’s a problem?

Climate change is a reality that has existed since the earth began. There is a huge difference though between our current rate of climate change and those which happen naturally. Usually climate change that happens naturally happens across large spans of time, which gives many creatures and wildlife time to adapt to the changes. Our current rate though has been accelerated due to the amount of greenhouse gases being produced (WWF, 2017) which is trapping heat in out atmosphere. This accelerated climate change is giving wildlife no time to adapt which is fuelling our current sixth mass extinction.

We need to believe the scientists because they are producing empirical data using many different methods to show us that we are in an accelerated climate change. The most frequently looked at is ice cores that allow us to have a glimpse into the atmosphere of the past which tell us that earths temperatures are rising at drastic rates. Peter Wadhams (The Guardian, 2017) has predicted that by this summer or the summer of 2018 the arctic ice will melt completely during our summer times.

If the world is getting warmer why is there snow?

This can be a hard thing for many people to understand and is the biggest argument used by climate deniers. Quiet often the words climate change are used interchangeably with the term “global warming” which suggests that everything is getting hotter. Global warming though is used to describe the fact that our current climate change is signified by an average temperature increase across the planet. This average increase in temperature does not account for the day to day fluctuations we see in our daily temperatures and weather patterns. The current earth temperature, as of 16/02/2017 and according to Google, is 61^oF/16.1^oC, and I can tell you that even now the temperature is a lot less than this because it is still winter and climate change isn’t going to stop us from having colder weather and won’t stop us from having snow.

It is also worth noting that we still have snow because climate change isn’t something that is going to change overnight, so you can still expect to see some more snow for now… But, we have already recorded that average temperatures have increased over the last century but not by enough to stop us from having snow yet.

What can I do to help?

There is a lot that we can do to help and I will be posting about that in my next post. But for now make yourself aware of climate change and spread the word and don’t stop until every person understands what is!

Thanks for reading. Together we can be a force for change. Heyze

References:

Climate International, 2016. Climate. [online] Available At: <http://www.conservation.org/what/pages/climate.aspx?gclid=CNf19O7RkNICFQ2eGwod39kHlw> [Accessed: 16 February 2017]

The Guardian, 2017. Next Year or After, the Arctic Will Be Free of Ice. [online] Available At: <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/21/arctic-will-be-ice-free-in-summer-next-year> [Accessed: 16 February 2017]

WWF, 2017. What are Climate Change and Global Warming. [online] Available At: <http://www.wwf.org.uk/climate-change-and-global-warming> [Accessed: 16 February 2017]