Climate change has been happening for a long time, and unfortunately, it’s because of us humans that it is gotten so bad. While there are different terms to describe climate change and its effects, it’s essentially a change in climate that happens over a period. Another term you may hear when talking about this is climate variability. This is the different ways in which the climate changes over certain periods of times (i.e. seasons).
Sometimes we’ll experience higher than average temperatures, and when this goes over a certain threshold, it’s considered to be an El Nino event. On the opposite end of the scale, if it falls below a certain point, it’s called a La Nina event. When the average climate is consistently rising or falling this is climate change. It’s where a new average weather replaces the normal average weather in an area. Don’t get global warming confused with climate change as many people do. Global warming is simply one part of a bigger change in climate.
The predictions of where climate change is going don’t paint a pretty picture. It includes more acidic oceans, rising sea levels, less ice, disease, extinction, and potentially catastrophic weather events. Aradhna Tripati is an associate professor at UCLA’s Department of Earth and Space Science, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and she says, “It’s clear-cut. It’s like you’re adding drops of poison to a glass of water. You can see it happening.”
Part of Tripati’s work involves reconstructing climate norms of the past in her lab using chemistry. She does this using really old things such as mollusk shells to help reveal information that’s been locked away for a very long time. Tripati was part of the team that devised a technique called the paleothermometer which helps scientists measure past temperatures by analyzing the ancient specimen’s chemical ratio. With thanks to this technique, in 2009, Tripati revealed that 15 million years ago carbon dioxide levels were the same, even though the sea level was 120 feet higher and the average global temperature was around 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is now. And more recently she’s discovered that during that period the Antarctic ice sheet was also affected by fluctuating temperatures.
Greenhouse gasses are causing the same problems they did all those years ago. The difference is that today it’s mostly down to human activities causing these problems. By us creating greenhouse gasses, we are threatening the natural beauty that we rely on to live such as forests and plankton that are supposed to absorb the gasses. And it’s not just the Earth’s atmosphere that heats up. The oceans too are feeling the heat and are around 30 percent more acidic than before industrialization came along. The Arctic sea ice has also become thicker and less extensive while sea levels are on the rise from melting ice sheets found on both sides of the globe.
These changes are happening at a rate so fast and experts predict that moving forward climate change is likely to happen at a rate about 10 times faster than anything over the past 65 million years. It’s already been proven that humans are responsible for the rising sea levels and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. So, it’s clear these things are happening all around us. It’s now up to us as a race to reverse some of the damaging effects that climate change has created and tried and save our planet before it really is too late.
Related Links;
- Warmer oceans are now linked to dangerous neurotoxins in shellfish / Popular Science
- Human activities are impacting the climate system / Climate.gov
- El Niño and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder / Yale.edu
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