What is Climate change?
Climate change is when there is a change in the usual weather in a place. This means a country that usually gets a lot of rain may be experiencing more heat than usual and less rainfall. This place could have a big change in temperatures they usually experience. Climate change is also hugely the change in earths climate in general, changing the temperatures seen all around but also areas of earth getting unexpected snow when they usually don’t. These changes in earths climate change slowly over hundreds to millions of years and may only go up by a degree, however this adds up and can cause huge issues for the world.
The earths average temperature is 15ºC and this has gone up and down through history, however at the moment this keeps rising and we need to make changes to control this so that the earth isn’t effected to the point of no return.
How is Climate change affecting us?
Climate change is linked very closely to The Greenhouse Effect. The Greenhouse Effect is where the suns rays are passing through our atmosphere and warming up the earth. A lot of this heat once hitting earth reflects off the surface and escapes back up to space which creates cooling. However, not all this heat escapes and gets trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases (Carbon Dioxide, Methane and nitrous oxide), meaning the heat travels back to earth. Due to CO2 levels continuously rising and having a 30% increase since the industrial revolution, we have higher levels of CO2 meaning more heat is retained and this causes temperatures to increase.
Many of the reasons for this increase in Carbon levels in our atmosphere are due to human movement around the globe and technological advancements. As a civilisation we don’t consider the environmental effect of things, consciously realising things need to be changed, however hardly changing anything. We have been burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees which has been increasing the CO2 levels. Also, simple things like transportation and using so much electricity is all adding up to create climate change.
This climate change over time has caused an overall temperature rise of 1ºC which makes a big impact on environmental factors around the world.
Main factors of Climate Change
Overall, Climate change can see many observable effects on the environment. Some of these huge changes that we have seen are:
- Global temperature rise
- Warming of Oceans
- Shrinking Ice sheets and Ice cap melting
- Glacial Retreat
- Sea level rise
- Declining artic sea ice
- Extreme weather events
- Changes in biodiversity of plants and wildlife
- Ocean acidification
Reflection
This research has given me a better grounding/starting point on Climate Change and initial context on how the temperature rises are slowing destroying our earth. I think its extremely critical in researching to investigate the topic and I’ve found it interesting in knowing that CO2 is a massive issue within our atmosphere, and how it is destroying many environmental factors.
One of the other reasons as to why I carried out the main contextual research was as I didn’t have a topic that I wanted to focus closer on where others in my group did. Looking at the main factors of Climate change, two things stood out to me that I found interesting: Extreme Weather events and ocean acidification. The way that Rainfall events has changed so much over time is so fascinating to me as I find it crazy that human activities can make such a big difference into how our environment and nature interacts. I also thought ocean acidification was something different to what I usually hear about Climate change, as I’ve never learnt about how this is affecting the ecology of the oceans. I have decided to look closer into both topics, to then try and come up with ideas on how these could be represented.
References
BBC: Science and Environment. (2020, November 18). What is Climate Change? A really simple guide. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24021772
Jet Propulsion Laboratory / National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2021, March 25). Climate Change: How do we know? – Evidence. NASA Global Climate Change. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
May, S. (2017, August 7). What is Climate Change?. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-climate-change-k4.html
Figure 1: https://www.bradford.gov.uk/environment/climate-change/what-is-climate-change-and-how-will-it-affect-the-uk/