Introduction to Climate Change

Essay by Hasan_M123Junior High, 8th gradeA, October 2014

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"Climate change is a naturally occurring cycle and future generations have nothing to worry about"

Climate change and the assertion of global warming have taken the world by storm. Drawing the lines along public opinion, defining political stances and challenging the notion of 'scientific consensus', it has evolved into a fiery topic of debatable proportions. Global warming may be informally defined as temperature rise yet formally it is recognisable as the trapping of heat and radiation by specific greenhouse gases, namely carbon dioxide, water vapour, nitrous oxide and methane. This gives rise to the greenhouse effect analogous to the heating of a vehicle in a parking lot on a summer's day. However, the world remains partitioned; with those that agree that global warming and its change of climate are a naturally occurring cycle, meaning that human intervention is not to blame and future generations have nothing to fret about. Plus those that disagree: claiming that global warming is a concern catalyzed by human intervention and is a definite concern for the future generation of earthlings.

To begin with those that believe that climate change is a naturally occurring cycle that is over-exaggerated, global warming and its change of climate is a process that has been around for four billion years, fluctuating with periods of cooling and warming. Of those four billion earth years, the only period of sustained warming in which human activity could cause any effect was from 1983-2001 as projected by peer-review studies (Lindzen, Douglas, and Knox 2004-2009). Elaborating on such evidence, climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide lies between a quarter to a seventh of what organisations such as UN and Greenpeace claim. In the projected period, the change in temperature was caused by naturally occurring cloud-cover change of three watts per square meter. Furthermore, studies by the...