Sci 256 - Climate Change Response

Climate Change Response

Angela Vasquez

SCI/256

Monday, February 5, 2018

Siroos Mostaghimi

Climate Change Response

Climate is constantly changing and it is a majority since humans are constantly redefining the natural flow of life. Human activities are changing the natural emission of greenhouse gases and it is taking a toll on our atmosphere. Climate change is happening more rapidly, non-renewable resources are depleting, renewable resources are becoming harder to sustain and time is running out. There are warning signs but people are keen to ignore them. A few indicators of climate change are heat waves, sea-levels rising, glaciers melting, ecosystems no longer thriving, seasons changing harshly, downpours, droughts and wildfires.

Past Global Temperatures and Climates

Different parts of the world have records of typical climate. Antarctica is always cold, Arizona is always hot, and Hawaii is always tropical. Hot, cold, windy, and dry are all terms used to describe weather conditions all over the planet. According to "NOAA Climate.gov" (2014) “From Ice Ages to Hothouses, global and regional climate has change on very long timescales, and many of the changes are recorded by natural processes. Paleoclimatology is the study of climate records from hundreds to millions of years ago. Paleoclimate data come from climate records found in nature.” Weather is the foundation of our abundance of life and it can affect our health in more ways than one.

All organisms have a way of offering signs of aging; river, lake, and ocean sediments, size of a plant, rings on the inside of a tree, layers of ice, fossils and records logged from early observers. Paleoclimate is logged from all over the world and it is used to analyze the condition of the Earth, past, present, and future. The most common method used to collect data is by sampling tree rings, coral, sediments, and ice. Each layer tells a story and can deduce the conditions present in each layer. Another way to learn about past global temperatures and climate is to link directly to the source, the Earth’s crust.

The Greenhouse Effect

A greenhouse is typically something positive that we associate with the aid of growing plants proactively. A greenhouse allows the sunlight to enter and feed the plants and soil. The way the sun penetrates the design of the greenhouse makes temperatures higher inside of a greenhouse, allowing plants to grow abundantly. The Earth has a similar effect but with the addition of burning of excessive fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and CFCs, it has contaminated the Earth’s atmosphere. Changes to landscape is also a factor of the greenhouse effect. The trapping of extra heat is causing the Earth to have an unstable atmosphere because the ozone layer cannot do its job fast enough.