Climate change refers to the average long-term changes over the entire world. These include warmer temperatures and changes in precipitation. These effects cause rising sea level, shrinking mountain glaciers, changes in flower and plant blooming times. Many people, including scientists, are concerned about this warming. As Earth’s climate continues to warm, the intensity and amount of rainfall during storms, such as hurricanes, is expected to increase. Droughts and heat waves are also expected to become more intense as the climate warms.
Human activities causing pollution to over population are driving up the earth’s temperature and fundamentally changing the environment around us. The main cause of the phenomenon is known as the Greenhouse effect where gases in the atmosphere such as water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous-oxide and chloro-fluorocarbons, let the sun’s light in but keep some of the heat from escaping, much like the glass walls of a green house. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the more heat gets trapped, strengthening the greenhouse effect and increasing the Earth’s temperature. Human activities like the burning a fossil fuels have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by more than 20% in less than 40 years, and is well over 50% of the total increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the onset of the industrial revolution. The rapid increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has warmed up our planet at an alarming rate. Scientists have determined that, when all human and natural factors are considered, Earth’s climate balance has been altered towards warming, with the biggest contributor being increases in CO2.
Climate change has consequences for our oceans, weather, food and health. Ice sheets such as Greenland and Antarctica are melting. The extra water that were held in the glacier are now melting and causes the sea water level to rise, which causes flooding in coastal regions. People around the world are already losing their homes and if things carry on, a million more of us will be the victims of this consequences. Warmer temperatures also make the weather more extreme which means not only more major intense storms, floods and snow falls but also longer and more frequent drought. These extremes will cause our economies much damage and lead to much human illness and death. The more climate change is allowed to progress, the more we face intense problems. The changes in weather causes more challenges in growing crops as vanishing lands for animals and water supplies diminish.
This overall discussion explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amount of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It provides the evidence that the consequences of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of the recent change is almost certainly due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. The rapid rate of climate change is caused by the humans, humans are also the one who can combat it. Citizens and governments can choose among several options in response to this overall impact and they can change their pattern of energy production and usage in order to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and hence the magnitude of climate changes. If we work to replace our fossil fuel with the renewable energy sources like the Solar panel and wind which don’t produce Greenhouse gas emission, we might still be able to prevent some of the worst effects of the climate change.
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