Climate Change

Trevor Craig

Energy Science 110

Climate Change

9/1/11 

This lecture was about climate change and the effects of climate change on the world we live in. We have a large effect on our environment, although it may seem we are not doing anything to it by just living our everyday lives, but we are. An ozone hole has been developing above Antarctica, noticed in 2006, because of our lack of trying to prevent global warming. Many people doubt that global warming is a real thing, but the IPCC or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has 2500 scientists, 800 authors, and 450 lead authors’ from130 countries that all agree that global warming is real and a problem that needs to be addressed.

The main argument against global warming is that the earth naturally heats and cools, that is true but we are now pushing global warming. Since 1760 we have been forcing the environment to change with a radiative force of about +1.6. When we look at graphs for normal natural forces on climate change and actual temperature changes for the time the graphs do not line up. For example in 2000 the temperature according to the graph should have been a change of about 0C but the actual temperature change was about +.8C. Those numbers are very off when talking about temperatures of the planet, but if we include the idea of radiative force into our model graph then the numbers for the same time period are very close, if not exactly the same. So we are truly having an effect on our environment.

Some people believe we are not increasing global warming but that it is a natural occurrence due to the suns natural energy cycles hitting the earth’s atmosphere. This is an incorrect idea; the sun has been monitored since 1978 and is found to have an 11 year cycle going both up and down in energy, but there is a .07% fluctuation in global surface temperature than normal, when based off the amount it should be from the sun’s energy.

With this climate change it shifts how our climate works, there will be more droughts and less rain in some places and more rain in other places. This can already be seen in places like north eastern United States getting 58% more precipitation days. This is happening all over the world, and what this causes is a bunch of floods. For example in 2008 in Martinsville, IN there’s was a new rain record of 20.11 in where the previous record had been only 9.47 in, this caused massive flooding, clearly something is changing. Water is not the only thing that is changing, heat waves will also become more frequent in the years to come, and in 2070-2099 we are expected to have around 85 heat waves. This planet is changing because of us, we need to start to try and limit our effects on the environment and slow down global warming.

Mountain Pine Beetle- a bark beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) of the western U.S. that is extremely destructive to stands of lodgepole and sugar pines.

Cryosphere- That region of the earth in which the surface is perennially frozen.

ENSC110 Craig Climate Change