Climate change. Yes, I am going to explain this topic, just like the millions of; bloggers, Youtubers, journalist and comments section enthusiasts before me. However, I have done actual research into understanding geology and climatology so am able to offer a simple and easy to understand explanation of the main issues.
What is Climate Change?
Climate Change is literally the average planetary climate (weather, temperature, humidity, rainfall, etc) changing. Simple right!
What’s the problem?
The problem is that the climate is increasing in temperature. Each climate zone, be it snowy tundra, forests or deserts are all getting hotter. That’s it.
The planet does this anyway what’s the issue?
Your right, the planet does go through cycles(Milankovitch Cycles) over the course of 10’s to 100’s of thousands of years, from going hot to cold. Due to a series of 3 primary factors, the Earth’s; tilt(obliquity), how circular it’s orbit is(eccentricity) and which direction the pole is pointing(precession) e.g. the north start(Polaris). These changes happen slowly over time and when they match up, around every 400,000 years it leads to very cold and very hot periods in the Earths history.
What people don’t seem to realise is that Earth’s primary climate is cold. There is generally a longer period of cold, or ‘Ice Age’, than a period of warm weather.
An Ice Age is easy to define- A period of time when there is solid ice on the planets polar regions. At this point some of you may have realised that, yes, we are in fact in an Ice Age right now.
So………
So this is where the problem comes in. We are forcing the Earth out of it’s natural climate with pollution. This is far more impressive when you recognise that the Earth likes being in a cold state and it struggles to stay away from Ice Ages. Don’t miss understand me. When we say Ice Age we mean, Ice in our polar regions, this has the effect of cooling the overall temperature by reflecting some of the heat from the Sun’s light back out into space, the Albedo effect, keeping the planet cooler. Although, there have been instances of the planet going into a state known as “Snowball Earth”, simply meaning that the ice was so expansive that it went from each pole and met in the middle at the equator. These are very difficult to break as the amount of heat reflected is very high, snow has an albedo of uptown 90%, so 90% of the Sun’s light is reflected back out into space, how do you melt it?
If you want to read more about this phenomena and Ice Ages, a great book, for the layman, is Snowball Earth by Gabrielle Walker.
So why is the Earth getting hotter a big deal then if it does it all the time?
There are several major, major issues that people don’t either understand or aren’t explained.
Climate is significantly important for life. Every organism on the planet has adapted to their specific levels of temperate, rainfall, humidity, etc. As climate gets hotter, organisms will gradually migrate further towards the poles to follow their natural environment, in essence, the climate they can live in moves. Yes, this will leave room for new organisms to evolve and fill this “space”(niche), but it will become far to hot for large organisms to survive and the deserts will expand.
With more deserts, there is less space for food to be grown as well as people to live in. The liveable planet space is, essentially, getting smaller.
With the hotter weather, water will also be more readily evaporated meaning less to drink and give to crops. Those of you who understand greenhouse gases will recognise that water vapour is the primary greenhouse gas, not carbon dioxide, although our carbon dioxide release is adding fuel to fire so to speak. More water vapour in the air means more heat is stored on the planet, meaning it gets even hotter. This causes a rather unpleasant, runaway cycle. The hotter the air, the more water vapour can be stored, the hotter the planet gets. Again, don’t miss understand, it is our release of extra greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide which allow for the Earth to heat up and begin this cycle.
The water cycle, something everyone learnt at primary and early secondary school. However, the more complicated idea is studied in hydrology, the ocean currents, and can get a little complicated.
Let’s start with ice on the poles. The South Pole is the big issue with it being Continental Ice. This means it is ice on top of land, not floating in the sea like in ‘Titanic’. When this melts it adds more water to the oceans increasing the global sea level (The north pole ice won’t change sea level due to buoyancy). This means coasts will become flooded and less land will be available for living and farming as most farm land is built next to rivers for irrigation. This is the least of our problems. The real issue comes in when you recognise that it’s fresh water.
So…, water is water isn’t it?
Nope. If you change the amount of salt(salinity) in the oceans it will not only kill lots, and I mean lots, of marine life, things we eat, but it will change the ocean currents. What people may not realise is that there is enormous currents that circulate water all around the planet. These currents are controlled by the winds as well as rising and sinking of denser and less dense water(less dense goes up, more dense goes down). The water density can be altered either by temperature (hot and cold water) or salinity, such as say, billions of litres of cold, fresh water flooding into the oceans from the polar icecaps. These help to do many things such as control the temperature of regions and “mix” the water. For example, the UK should be significantly colder and much snowier that it is, but due to the Gulf Stream from the Gulf of Mexico, the warm water heats up the UK making it rainy and miserable, but not freezing cold.
The really strange thing is this isn’t true, yet. The local affects are actually more salty and more fresh in each region, strange no. Well, this is because the hot weather evaporates more water. As salt isn’t evaporated the percentage of salt to water goes up, meaning the sea is saltier. Also, as more water is evaporated more rainfall is produced keeping the rivers (fresh water) cleaner of pollutants and other minerals.
Finally, an idea that I have personally never seen explained anywhere or even pointed out. Fossils fuels where made in the Carboniferous by the collapse tree into swamps. Trees and other plants are able to absorb carbon dioxide which they use to grow. When they die this stays in there “bodies” until they are broken down. However, the fungus that decomposes trees had not evolved in the Carboniferous period. This means when trees fell in the swamps, they stayed there, they piled up and, over millions of years, they became buried and crushed into solid “lumps of tree” also known as coal.
This means that the coal we are burning has not been accessible to the atmosphere for 100’s of millions of years AND we have no way of removing it. Once it’s burnt, that’s it, unless we can progress technologically enough to absorb and store carbon to keep it isolated from the atmosphere the climate is irreparably altered. Planting trees can off-set the affects of the carbon dioxide, but when each tree dies that carbon is released again.
When did this start?
The industrial revolution. Yes, it once again has the blame fall squarely on the western industrialists when we began to progress rapidly but burning this miracle rock for energy. It is even notable in the geology record through Ice cores and some modern sedimentary(dirt) deposits. All of the complaining about other countries burning fossil fuels is, honestly, quite hypocritical and unfair if you ask me. Yes, no one should continue to burn fossil fuels, however, unless the infrastructure is developed, unless the technology is shared and advanced together then how can we refuse them. Do you want electricity or not, the answer will always be yes which, for now unfortunately, means burn.
