Climate change

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Climate change recognises that the climate of Earth does change. It is certain to happen, and always has. Climate change can be a problem.[1]

The Earth's climate has been much hotter and colder than it is today. It is not a fixed value: it is affected by variations in the Sun and in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and by activities of the planet's life-forms. Climate change this century and last century is sometimes called global warming, because the average temperature on the surface has risen.[1] The climate is now changing much faster than it has in the recent past.

At times in the past, the temperature was much cooler, with the last Ice Age ending about ten thousand years ago.[2][3] Ice Ages are long times when the Earth got colder, and more ice froze at the North and South Poles.[4] Sometimes even the whole Earth was covered in ice, and was much colder than today.[5][6] There is no one reason why there are Ice Ages. Changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and the Sun getting brighter or dimmer are events which do happen.[4] Also how much the Earth is tilted compared to the Sun might make a difference.[7] Another source of change is the activities of living things (see Great Oxygenation Event and Huronian glaciation).[8][9]

The climate of the Earth has changed over not just thousands of years, but tens or hundreds of millions of years.[3] In common use, especially in environmental policy, "climate change" usually refers to rapid changes in the climate over recent decades.[needs to be explained as I said before "policy" and "refers to" are not simple English. So whoever put that back in should simplify it] These climate changes are due primarily to human-caused generation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere (see global warming).

History of climate change studies[change | change source]

Joseph Fourier in 1824, Claude Poulliet in 1827 and 1838, Eunace Foote (1819–1888) in 1856, Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820–1893) in 1863 onwards,[10] Svante Arrhenius in 1896, and Guy Stewart Callendar (1898–1964) discovered the importance of carbon dioxide (CO2) in climate change. Foote's work was not appreciated, and not widely known. Tyndall proved there were other greenhouse gases as well. Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901 invented the term.[11][12]

The Sun[change | change source]

The Sun gets a little bit hotter and colder every 11 years. This is called the 11-year sunspot cycle. The change is so small that scientists can barely measure how it affects the temperature of the Earth. If the Sun was causing the Earth to warm up, it would warm both the surface and high up in the air. But the air in the upper stratosphere is actually getting colder. Therefore the changes in the Sun are not causing the global warming which is happening now.

Related pages[change | change source]

References.[change | change source]

  1. 1.0 1.1 Rosen, Julia; Parshina-Kottas, Yuliya (19 April 2021). "A climate change guide for kids". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-05-29.
  2. Imbrie J. & Imbrie, K.P. 1979. Ice ages: solving the mystery. Short Hills NJ: Enslow. ISBN 978-0-89490-015-0
  4. 4.0 4.1 "Problem Solving Activity: What Causes Ice Ages?" (PDF).
  5. Williams G.E. & Schmidt P.W. (1997). "Paleomagnetism of the Paleoproterozoic Gowganda and Lorrain formations, Ontario: low palaeolatitude for Huronian glaciation" (PDF). EPSL. 153 (3): 157–169. Bibcode:1997E&PSL.153..157W. doi:10.1016/S0012-821X(97)00181-7.
  6. Evans D.A; Beukes N.J. & Kirschvink J.L. (1997). "Low-latitude glaciation in the Palaeoproterozoic era". Nature. 386 (6622): 262–6. Bibcode:1997Natur.386..262E. doi:10.1038/386262a0. S2CID 4364730.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. Robert E. Kopp; et al. (2005). "The Paleoproterozoic snowball Earth: a climate disaster triggered by the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102 (32): 11131–6. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10211131K. doi:10.1073/pnas.0504878102. PMC 1183582. PMID 16061801.
  9. Lane, Nick (2010). "First breath: Earth's billion-year struggle for oxygen". New Scientist (2746). A snowball period, c2.4–c2.0 billion years ago, triggered by the Great Oxygenation Event [1] Archived 2011-01-06 at the Wayback Machine
  10. Tyndall J. 1863. Heat as a mode of motion. London & New York.
  11. Easterbrook, Steve (18 August 2015). "Who first coined the term "Greenhouse Effect"?". Serendipity. Retrieved 11 November 2015.
  12. Ekholm N (1901). "On the variations of the climate of the geological and historical past and their causes". Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. 27 (117): 1–62. Bibcode:1901QJRMS..27....1E. doi:10.1002/qj.49702711702.