Sunday, April 22, 2012

Climate Change - What is it?

There are lots of explaination on what Climate Change. But a simple explanation that will come over some people's mind is Climate change is any changes in the temperature due to the condition of weather in a specific country or place from time to time. In scientific research, we experience more intense and frequent weather event because of climate change. Some explaination comes from the ideas of different scientists.

George Fuelner, a climate modeller, said that climate change comes from the everyday burning large amount of coal, gas and other fossil fuels that releases carbon atoms which is the energy. The carbon atoms contained by the fossil fuels are converted into carbon dioxide during combustion. It is released to the atmosphere and will act as greenhouse gas that will block outgoing radiation or heat that leads in warming of the atmosphere.

According to Kevin Trenberth, head of Climate Analysis Section,The Earth is habitable because of a natural greenhouse effect brought about mainly by water vapor (60%) and carbon dioxide (26%). Otherwise its average temperature would be below zero Fahrenheit. Humans are altering the composition of the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels. As a result carbon dioxide has gone up over 35% since pre-industrial times and over half of that is since 1970. This changes the greenhouse effect and traps radiation that would otherwise escape to space, producing warming. The warming is manifested in many ways, not just increasing surface temperatures, but also melting ice, and changing the hydrological cycle and thus rainfall. Since 1970 the effects are large enough to be outside the bounds of natural variability for global mean temperatures, but global warming does not mean inexorable increases in temperature year after year owing to natural variability.

In the oppinion of Jessica Blois, an ecologist, climate has changed through earth’s history, regulated naturally by a combination of orbital forces that determine how much sun hits the earth as well as the total concentration of different natural gases in the atmosphere. These natural processes are still occurring today, but with the rise of industrialism in the mid-1800s, humans started altering the balance of gases in the atmosphere, primarily by emitting a lot more CO2 due to burning fossil fuels like oil and gas. Since CO2 is a ‘greenhouse gas’ that traps heat in the atmosphere, human activities have caused temperatures to increase much, much more than naturally expected.
 
Leonid Polyak, a Geologist, said that, first, greenhouse gases – primarily CO2 – in the atmosphere increase temperature at the Earth’s surface and, second, it is well documented that atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising at a fairly high rate and has been rising for the past couple of centuries. From this it follows that the Earth’s temperature has to rise, which agrees with the observations. The next question is how much of this increase is due to human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Models show quite convincingly that most of the CO2 and temperature rise is caused by humans.

Mark Serreze, director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, stated that the earth has a natural greenhouse effect. Certain atmospheric gases tend to trap energy emitted by the Earth’s surface, warming the atmosphere which then radiates heat back down to the surface. What we are doing by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is making the greenhouse effect stronger – adding on to the natural greenhouse effect. Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere must increase the greenhouse effect, and must therefore cause warming. It’s basic physics, and the physics will unfold as the physics must unfold.

These scientists have defined  climate change differently but have the same point about climate change.

I hope you learned from what you read in here. Happy exploring guys.