What is Climate Change?
This is a question I surprisingly hear a lot and the answer is basically in the name. Climate change is… the change of the climate (global environment weather etc). It is caused by a myriad of factors but most relevantly it is caused by carbon emissions from factories, cars etc. This carbon, when released into the air causes an effect known as the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is when the gas builds up in the air and traps the heat from the sun, causing similar effects to a greenhouse. As more heat is trapped, the entire planet’s average temperature rises, with it having risen an average of 1.4 degrees since pre industrial eras. This number may seem small but it isn’t. Think of your own body, when your average temp is 1 or 2 degrees higher it counts as you having a fever. Its the same with the world, 1 or 2 degrees may not seem like much but remember that’s heating up the entire PLANET, every ocean, island and city. This requires an absolutely unfathomable amount of energy to do. An analogue to how earth’s temp is rising is something like dropping multiple nuclear bombs into the ocean every second. Also, that number of 1.4 isn’t uniform across the world, because at the ice caps temperatures have rising a catastrophic 4-5 degrees Celsius. This is due to the fact that as more ice melts, it exposes the darker coloured ice underneath which absorbs far more heat than the white colored ice that would usually reflect most of the heat back. Not only that, because more ice melts from the darker color of other melted patches, that accelerates the melting of white ice, creating a feedback loop where exposed melting ice exposes more melting ice to melt faster. The Earth being a few degrees hotter shifts the Earth’s natural balance immensely. First, as more ice melts the sea level naturally rises due to the icebound water being released into the ocean. As we are 67676767676767676767676767676776767676