For many of us, the term “Global Warming” seems ambiguous and needs to be defined in a clear manner. In this article, I explain what climate change and global warming are. Also, I briefly mention what scholars suggest in 2020 to stop this mankind-threatening phenomenon.
First things first, global warming means the long-term “heating” of the earth. Simply said, the same way you heat a frying pan before dropping in what you want to cook. Global warming, however, is way more complicated. The big difference is that we all know the source of the frying pan’s heat, and we can control it. When it comes to the global level, scientists attribute that “heating” to something called “greenhouse gases effect”, and NASA says it is made mainly by human activities.
But what are greenhouse gases? In simple words, you need to picture three main things: (i) suppose your living room is the earth, and (ii) you get the daily energy from a small sun that you have no control over, and (iii) any abnormal activity you do will harm the ceiling, but for the sake of the argument, I assume that you do not pay attention to that matter yet. But bear in mind that the ceiling exists to control the traffic of energy that passes from and to the sun.
Back to your living room example, the ceiling of your room is the mechanism that makes your room livable, scientifically it is called “the atmosphere”, image below. If you remember from secondary school, the atmosphere is a huge circle made of gasses and it is all around the earth. The main gases in the atmosphere are carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and other gases (click on each of them to get the info you need). So, the gases are there to control the amount of energy inside the circle. Here comes the third assumption of this article: can we increase the amount of these gases and nothing will happen? In other words, can you guess what would happen if we manually increased the density of these gases in the ceiling of the room?
Well, unintentional human activities like burning coal and oil to fulfill the world’s demand for energy is no one’s fault. All nations in the world have traded oil, so everyone is involved in this issue. Or another example is uncontrolled livestock farming that emits a huge amount of methane. Also no one’s fault, we all want food to survive!
These gases that humanity emitted during the last 200 hundred years were enough to trap the sun’s energy in the inside part of the atmosphere. This is why it is getting hotter and hotter every year. It is also the reason why ice is melting in the Arctic.
In fact, no one is to blame for this problem but all of humanity together. Maybe we were not able to understand this issue 50 years ago. If you think of it as you keep smoking while you know the risk is very high of getting cancer. It says this in the box! and yet all smokers just keep smoking. Off topic: I was not one of them, check out how I quit smoking after 12 years of 20-cigarette a day.
So your room’s ceiling is now full of gases that soon will seriously start harming everything inside the room. The aftermath effect of this change is very alerting now. The world is trying to solve this problem, but a lot more work is needed to get things under control. The effects of Climate Change have already started. Check this out!
Our ancestors have lived in this earth for centuries without any problem. If we consider the world’s population to be the main concern, we see that it was around 1 billion in the year 1800 and increased 7-fold since then. This increase is insanely huge!
Since the beginning of the 1900s, scientists started to record unusual natural events, like increased temperatures, ice melting, and other brand-new events, which I attribute to them as the first symptoms of ecological cancer where specialists must watch out this serious issue.
Long story short, scientists suggest cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 3% and draw three gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year for the next 80 years, Tim Flannery, an outstanding Australian scholar, reports that “those numbers are so large that they baffle us”.
How can we do that? Well, the answer is a little complicated. But scholars have been trying to find solutions like mimicking nature or planting massive amounts of seaweed under the ocean to observe the carbon for a very long time. I illustrate these solutions in my next article.
To sum up, the U.S. Global Change Research Program reports that thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world have documented increases in temperature at Earth’s surface, as well as in the atmosphere and oceans. Many other aspects of global climate are changing as well. Human activities, especially emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, and land-use change, are the primary driver of the climate changes observed in the industrial era.
What is the definition of Climate Change? It is what happens to the earth’s climate due to global warming: deforestation is what makes me worried the most. We have got to return the earth green. and this takes me to my second article about climate change: I will explain in my next article the state-of-the-art solutions to climate change (i) Nature mimicking and (ii) the Seaweed solution.
