GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Global climate changes are manmade, so people should change their lifestyle to protect the environment

Global climate changes are manmade, so people should change their lifestyle to protect the environment

Introduction

The paper covers a very serious problem that is rising with great intensity. The concern, which is hurting, everyone around the world is Climate change. Thus, I would like to highlight various aspects that evolve around the phenomenon climate change which most of the people are not taking it seriously. However, since the onset of the industrial revolution (1750), human activities have altered the atmospheric composition of the Earth, significantly impacting the terrestrial energy balance. The burning of fossil fuels has significantly increased the amount of particulate matter and concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs), most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), into the atmosphere. The overall impact of human, industrial activities on global climate has been a pronounced warming effect, as GHG increases have enhanced the atmospheric greenhouse effect and reduced the amount of outgoing radiation from the Earth (Epstein, 2009).

Moreover, I would like to highlight that even if human ingenuity and/or behavior resulted in the entire cessation of anthropogenic GHG emissions tomorrow, the persistence of these gases in the atmosphere and the inertia of the geophysical, oceanic, and atmospheric processes that feed off climate change will result in a global mean surface temperature rise approaching at least 2 degrees C over the next century.

Changes in climate have occurred in Earth's history in the past, but the rate of change in the past 30-40 years has snowballed into a major global debate and concern. The past 10,000 years in Earth's history has been a period of unusual stability that favored human civilization, but anthropogenic activities, particularly after the industrial revolution in the 1970s, have lead to a warming of Earth's atmosphere by 0.75 degrees Celsius compared with the preindustrial level. The rise in Earth's temperature by 2050-70 projected by different models to range between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees C. This will have a grave effect on the ecology and socioeconomic of nations. The effect, however, will not be equal but will be greater on the poorer and marginal sections of human society—they will find it rather more difficult to adapt to the changed climate scenario.

Climate change

Discussed elsewhere in this paper, climate change is a phenomenon that results from radiative forcing as a result of various gaseous and particulate substances in Earth's atmosphere. The increase in Earth's mean surface temperature is caused by warming of land, ocean, and/or atmosphere as a result of the amount of the sun's radiant energy that is not reradiated into space but absorbed by the Earth and it components. However, abrupt warming may result from variations in solar radiation patterns. On the contrary, abrupt cooling may result from the reflection back into space of greater amounts of solar radiation by dust resulting from volcanic activity (Epstein, 2009).

A change in global mean surface temperature from climate change results in ...