CLIMATE CHANGE

Abstract:

Climate change is our generation’s most critical issue; we are the first to see the early signs, and the last one to be able to stop them from occurring. Human activities have boosted production of carbon dioxide, increasing the temperatures. One potential effect is severe weather and melting polar ice.

The article addresses the idea of climate change and variability within the collection of interconnected natural characteristics and processes known as the Earth system. The essence of the climate change evidences is clarified, as are the key processes that have caused climate change throughout History of the earth. Eventually, a detailed description of climate change is offered over many different timescales, from a normal period of mankind to all geological time.

Many people consider difficult to discuss about climate change and its issues. Even if it’s a subject that profoundly affects and worries them and they’re actively involved in doing something about it. So much so that in the last several years the word ‘ climate silence’ has arisen, defining the stigma that climate change is happening to hold–notably in more industrialized nations.

But in order to respond effectively to the challenges that climate change presents for our societies, it’s important that we speak about it openly–and in a way that brings and encourages a wide spectrum of people into the discussion. And this is the highlight of the night–it can be hard enough to engage in conversation on this subject, but it can be all-too-easy to inadvertently alienate or isolate others or make them deepen their commitment to their own, opposite opinions.[1]

I INTRODUCTION

Climate change caused by changes in the environment, as well as interactions between the environment and various other geological, chemical, biological, and geographical influences within the Earth system.

The environment is a constantly flowing dynamic stream. Both its physical properties and its rate and direction of motion are determined by a number of factors, including solar radiation, continent geography, ocean currents, mountain range position and inclination, atmospheric chemistry, and increasing vegetation on the earth’s surface[2]. Over time, all those variables change. Many variables, such as heat distribution within the oceans, atmospheric chemistry, and vegetation on the earth, change at a very small-time frame. Others, like the continents ‘ position and the distance and height of the mountain ranges, change over a very large time frame. Therefore, at every imaginable time scale the environment, which results from the physical properties and movement of the atmosphere, differs.

Climate is often loosely defined as the normal weather at a particular location, combining temperature, precipitation, humidity, and windiness features. A more precise description would say that over some extended time period, climate is the average condition and variation of these characteristics. All meanings agree that due to imbalances in the environment the climate is always changing. And as climate changes from day to day, climate often differs from day-to-night periods to hundreds of millions of years of geological time. Weather variance is a simplistic expression, in a very true sense — climate is always different. No two years are exactly the same, nor are any two decades, two generations, or two thousand years.

Since various elements of the Earth system change at different speeds and are important at different timespans, the past of Earth’s structure is a complex and diverse science. Students of the history of Earth’s environment are not only concerned with recording what occurred; they also interpret the past as a number of experiments in which solar radiation, ocean currents, continental structures, atmospheric chemistry, and other essential factors differed[3].

These studies offer opportunities to develop about the comparative impacts and relationships among different elements of the Earth system. Earth system history studies also determine the full range of states that the system has previously experienced, and those that the system will be able to enjoy in the long term.

II EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Both historical sciences discuss a major issue: they become more dependent on incomplete and unintended proof as they prove further back further in time. The past of the earth-system is nothing like that. For most regions of the globe, elevated-quality instrumental documents comprising the past few centuries arise, but the documents became scarce in the 19th century, with little documents predating the delayed 18th century. Many historical documents can often be were using like ship logs, diaries, court and church records, and tax rolls. Such records could provide details on frost, droughts, storms, sea ice, monsoon dates as well as other climatic characteristics in rigorous geographical circumstances — in certain figures up too many hundred years ago.[4]

Continuing climate change is now being tracked by sensor networks in space, on the earth’s surface as well as being on and below the oceans of the planet. Instrumental records as well as other archives record climatic changes of the past 200–300 years, particularly since the early 1900’s. Such written records and archives for the last couple of hundred years include details on climate change at some places. Some quite unusual documents are from more than 1,000 years ago. Climate change scientists who predate the instrumental record are progressively relying on environmental records, which are natural or geological mechanisms that document some form of past climate. Such natural records, also alluded to as proxy proof, are extremely varied; they involve, but are not restricted to, fossil records of previous allocations of plants and animals, sedimentary and geochemical markers of former ocean and continent environments, and land surface features characteristic of past climes. Methods are constantly being created and improved for the extraction of paleoclimatic material, and new types of natural resources are now being identified and exploited.[5]

III CAUSES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The proof of climate instability and past climate change is so much simpler to record than to establish their mechanisms. Weather is determined by a variety of factors that work from hours to hundreds of millions of years at timescales. The Earth system is similar to some of the effects of climate change. Some are part of the Earth system but are outside of the atmosphere. Yet others include relations between both the Earth system’s atmosphere and other elements and are commonly represented as suggestions within the Earth system. Feedback mechanisms are one of the latest influencing factors found and rewarding to study. However, these factors are progressively acknowledged as performing foundational positions in climate variability. This portion describes the most essential processes of climate change.[6]

1. Solar Variability.[7]

After its creation the Sun’s luminosity, or brightness, has continued to increase. This effect is essential to the Earth’s climate because the Sun offers the energy to control the flow of the atmosphere and is the contribution to the heat system of Earth. Throughout Precambrian period, low solar luminosity underlies the weak young phenomenon of the Sun, defined in the section Early Earth Climates.

2. Volcanic Activity.[8]

Volcanic activity at various timeframes can affect climate in a number of forms. Specific volcanic eruptions may emit large amounts of sulfur dioxide and other aerosols into the stratosphere, decreasing the clarity of the atmosphere and thus the volume of solar radiation reaching the ground and upper atmosphere of the Earth. A recent example is the Mount Pinatubo eruption of 1991 in the Philippines, which had a significant effect on circulation in the atmosphere and heat budgets.

3. Tectonic Activity.[9]

Earth’s tectonic crust movements have had profound climate impacts at timeframes of millions to tens of millions of years. These movements have altered the shape, size, position and elevation of the continental masses as well as the oceans ‘ bathymetry. Topographic and bathymetric shifts in turn had powerful effects on both atmospheric and ocean circulation. For example, the Tibetan Plateau’s uplift during the Cenozoic Era influenced patterns of atmospheric circulation, producing the South Asian monsoon and affecting climate across much of the rest of Asia and neighbouring regions.

4. Orbital Variation.[10]

The Earth’s orbital geometry is affected by the gravitational impacts of other planets within the solar system in complex ways. Three main characteristics of Earth’s orbit are influenced, each in a cyclical or frequently repeating fashion. In particular, the higher the tilt, the higher the solar radiation obtained in summer by hemispheres, but the less obtained in winter. The third cyclic move to Earth’s orbital geometry outcomes from two common events: (1) Earth’s axis of rotational wobbles, shifting the direction of the planet toward the Sun, and (2) Earth’s orbital ellipse orientation rotates gradually.

5. Greenhouse Gases.

Greenhouse gases are gas molecules which have the nature of soaking up infrared radiation emitted from the surface of the Earth and re-radiating it up to the surface of the Earth, thus leading to the concept known as the greenhouse effect. The most essential greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapour, and they also have a huge impact on the Earth system’s energy output despite making up just a portion of all gases in the atmosphere. Throughout Earth’s history, levels of greenhouse gases have differed greatly, and these variations have caused major climate change at a wide variety of timescales. In particular, levels of greenhouse gas throughout warm periods were relatively high, and small throughout cold periods. Greenhouse gas levels are determined by a variety of methods. Some, such as tectonic movements, function at timescales of millions of years, while others function at timescales of hundreds to thousands of years, such as trees, soil, lakes, and ocean springs and sinks. Human activities— particularly the combustion of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution — are accountable for steadily increasing atmospheric concentrations of various greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, methane, ozone and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

IV HOW HUMAN ACTIVITIES AFFECTS CLIMATE?

Acknowledgement of world climate change as an environmental problem has brought attention to the human activities ‘ climate impact. Most of this focus has centred on release of carbon dioxide through burning and degradation of fossil-fuel. Human activity also produces other greenhouse gas emissions, such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons. There’s little ambiguity between climate scientists that these greenhouse gasses influence the Earth’s radiation budget; the extent and significance of the climate reaction is a subject of great study. Paleoclimate reports from tree rings, coral and ice cores show a huge warming trend covering the whole 20th and 21st century’s first decade. The 20th century was in reality the hottest of the last 10 centuries, and the decade 2001–10 was the hottest decade since the birth of modern instrumental recordkeeping. This increasing trend has been noted out by many climate scientists as conclusive proof of human-induced climate change arising from greenhouse gas emissions.[11]

As a further cause of climate change, a second form of human influence, the transformation of biodiversity through degradation, topsoil erosion and agriculture, is gaining growing attention. It becomes clearer and clearer that human influences on vegetation covering can have local, national, and even global effects on climate, due to differences in reactive and latent heat flux to the atmosphere and energy distribution within the climate system. A significant, evolving area of study is to what degree these variables lead to the rapid and continuing climate change.

V CONCLUSION

Perhaps the climate change subject often efficiently debated and analysed is the function of relationships and suggestions among the different components of the Earth system. The suggestion includes various elements which function at different speeds and timescales. Ice sheets, sea ice, land ecosystems, ocean temperatures, weathering patterns, ocean circulation, and levels of greenhouse gasses are all explicitly or implicitly affected by the environment; however, they all also feed back into the environment, thereby affecting it in significant ways. For instance, various forms and ratios of vegetation on the surface of the ground affect the Earth’s surface reflectivity, thereby impacting the total radiation output at local to national levels. At the very same moment, vegetation mediates the passage of water molecules from the soil to the atmosphere, both explicitly and implicitly. This control of latent heat flux by vegetation will affect local to world climatic levels.[12] As a consequence, shifts in vegetation, which are partly climate driven, may in turn affect the climate system. Vegetation also affects levels of greenhouse gases; growing plants comprise a significant sink for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, while they serve as outlets of carbon dioxide when decomposed by wildfires. These and other suggestions among the Earth system’s different elements are crucial to both recognizing past climate shifts and making predictions of future ones.

References

[2] https://www.britannica.com/science/climate-change Stephen T. Jackson

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24021772

[4]https://www.forumforthefuture.org/sustainability-and-system-change?gclid=Cj0KCQiAkePyBRCEARIsAMy5Scv-t0fuZhCs06lYM3qR1lB6ICJr2HVqJMZrrOg_oU-kdUzygCAtYwMaAhAZEALw_wcB

[5]https://www.joboneforhumanity.org/global_warming?gclid=Cj0KCQiAkePyBRCEARIsAMy5ScutssO0nmCBxJA6df25_KQ5_DBYpjwP7NYojnmcx0reH-hsM4X6wRMaArMxEALw_wcB

[6]https://warmheartworldwide.org/climate-change/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAkePyBRCEARIsAMy5ScvabyOXPw_fKo3DzzeZyjp6NE5fztXk2Y4At1jYARHUshredgSiUioaAiZ4EALw_wcB

[7] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/43/5/5.9/208306

[8] http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/erupt.htm

[9] http://www.geo.hunter.cuny.edu/~fbuon/PGEOG_130/Lecture_pdfs/Chapter14.pdf “The Changing Climate”.

[10] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/207/4434/943 “Modelling the Climate response to Orbital Variations”.

[11] http://www.geo.hunter.cuny.edu/~fbuon/PGEOG_130/Lecture_pdfs/Chapter14.pdf “The Changing Climate”.

[12] http://www.geo.hunter.cuny.edu/~fbuon/PGEOG_130/Lecture_pdfs/Chapter14.pdf “The Changing Climate”.

Author Details: Sharmeen Saud and Hirok Shuvro Barua are students at Geeta Institute of Law.

The views of the Author are personal only.

(Source: Juscholars Journal, Volume 1, Issue 3)