 |
Home |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Sign up to play Santa |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Find a Santa near you |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Info on Global Warming |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Santa Survival Kit |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Press Releases |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Links |
|
|
|
||
|
|
About Us |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Contact Us |
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
A Closer Look at Why Climate Change is the most critical problem facing the world
On March 13th, 2003, U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix said, "To me the question of the environment is more ominous that that of peace and war...I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict."
Environmental issues - particularly global warming - under-gird and permeate all social, cultural, political, economic and military security issues and policies. Conversely, these issues and policies shape environmental policies. Global warming permeates all aspects of our lives, threatening stability of economic, political and social systems upon which we base our lives, our livelihoods, and our well-being.
The arena of climate change science and policy are vitally important. Ross Gelbspan calls climate change "the most profound threat facing humanity". In short, global warming is a crucial issue because it impacts the environment upon which all human life depends.
Assessments of global climate change can sound like a Stephen King novel:
- The temperature is predicted to rise by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100,
leading to more hot days and heat waves and increased incidence of death and serious illness in older age
groups and urban poor. Also, this means increased risk of damage to a number of crops, and greater demand
for electric cooling.
- There have been more intense rainfall events in some regions, which have led to
increased flood, landslide, avalanche and mudslide damage. This also has threatened to collapse private
insurance systems, currently a $3 trillion a year industry.
- There have been increased incidences of drought in other regions, which has led
to decreased crop yields, decreased water resource quantity and quality and increased risk of forest fire.
- Animals and plants have been forced to migrate northward to cope with rising
temperatures, threatening ecosystems, reproductive habits, and biodiversity. This has also been the case
with the planet's ocean life, as the heat content has increased.
- Higher temperatures have extended the range and activity of pest and disease
vectors.
- Snow cover and ice extent have decreased, threatening agricultural production
patterns.
- The global average sea level has risen, threatening to flood tens of millions
of inhabitants of coastal communities.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a body comprised of top climate scientists from around the world. In 1990, the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization - through the Framework convention on climate change - formed the IPCC. The undertakings of the IPCC are the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history.
What is Global Climate Change and Global Warming?
Put very simply, increases in carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere correlate with increases in temperature, or global warming. This global warming has tremendously devastating impacts and consequences. The climate is generally measured by the averages of certain components of the weather over a period of time. The changing of the climate is determined through changes in these components. Many sources, impacts and feedback processes contribute to a changing climate. While many of these changes are considered natural variations, human activities have been found to also have a role in climate changes.
Many scientists organize climate characteristics into two groups: simple (such as temperature and rainfall frequency) that occurs with regularity, and complex (such as drought, floods, hurricanes) that occurs without regularity, across space and time.
Global warming refers to a more specific facet of climate change, focusing on the simple climate characteristic of temperature, and even more specifically, increases in temperature over time. However, temperature increases do not occur in isolation from other climate characteristics, but interact with them to affect things such as weather patterns, hurricane and storm intensity and so on.
Over time, the term global warming has grown to be considered somewhat synonymous with the term global climate change, despite that it is a much more specific term. This has happened because temperature (particularly temperature increases) is seen as the most clear and distinguishable climate characteristic that indicates more general climate change. Also, many consider temperature to be the "fingerprint" for climate change.
Prehistoric climate records demonstrate that changes in Carbon Dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere correlate strongly with changes in temperature. In the last 100 years, carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by 90 ppm, or about 30% to current levels around 379 ppm. 75% of this increase is due to human activities of fossil fuel (coal, gas and oil) burning. Industrial facilities and automobiles primarily comprise this fossil fuel consumption.
This increase was preceded by about 10,000 years of relatively constant concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide at about 280 parts per million. Putting this further into context, homo erectus appeared 1.8 million years ago.
The present concentration of CO2 has not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years and likely not during the past 20 million years. The current rate of increase is unprecedented during at least the past 20,000 years. In July of 2002, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past 1,000 years", and that "the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period".
The Basic Science of Global Warming
What is it that causes temperature increases, or global warming over time?
Overall, the earth's climate system - and changes in that system - is the result of processes and interactions between and within the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), cryosphere (ice), lithosphere (land, sediments and rocks), and biosphere (life). These different spheres know no political boundaries, and interact on various scales from local to global. These interactions are driven by energy from the sun. Solar radiation enters the earth's atmosphere, and is partly absorbed or trapped, while being partly reflected back to space. The balance of incoming (short-wave) radiation, and outgoing (long-wave) radiation, is referred to as the planetary energy budget. Again, atmospheric temperature is the most evident change in work to balance this energy budget.
Certain atmospheric gases absorb this radiation, thereby affecting temperature. The main gases in the atmosphere are referred to as greenhouse gases. This is because atmospheric gases act much like the glass of the greenhouse, keeping in warmth. Carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), water vapor (H2Ov), ozone (O3), and halocarbons (such as chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs; HCFCs, HFCs etc) are considered the 'big six' greenhouse gases. So their existence, activities and impacts in the earth' s atmosphere are considered the greenhouse effect.
In discussions of global warming, carbon dioxide is often the focus of greenhouse gas contributions to global warming. CO2 is particularly important for reasons including the following:
- As mentioned earlier, prehistoric climate records demonstrate a close correlation between global surface temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
- Also, atmospheric carbon dioxide is the most impacting greenhouse gas changing directly because of human activities. To date, the increase in carbon dioxide has contributed about 70% of the enhanced greenhouse effect.
- Concentrations of atmospheric CO2 are expected to continue to increase, correlating with increasing temperatures, and continued fossil fuel consumption.
- CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for up to 200 years. Meanwhile, water vapor lasts about a week, methane for about a decade and N2O for about 120 years. If one were to cut emissions of a particular greenhouse gas into the atmosphere completely and immediately, there would be a delay before its effects are seen.
Through human activities, emissions of these greenhouse gases contribute to more absorption of radiation in the atmosphere, thereby influencing a temperature increase to regain the energy balance of the earth. This chain of interactions and feedbacks demonstrate the increasingly complex processes that contribute to climate change, and more particularly, global warming.
Overall, we should not be lulled into thinking that these shifts will come gradually, thereby providing us abundant time to prepare. Many studies now show that prehistoric climate shifts were abrupt rather than gradual. So this in fact gives us more cause for alarm.
So, act now! Sign up to join us in this fun-loving educational event.
Click here for our Privacy Policy
About Us | Contact Us