At the end of my last post I mentioned how Vandana Shiva's concept of shared resources of the air around us really changed my perception of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. She refers to this concept of how the atmosphere is a non-privately-owned resource as The Atmospheric Commons. You see, when it comes to pollution and climate change, we're all in this together; the atmosphere belongs equally to all of us.
But I am getting ahead of myself, we should first examine what climate change exactly is and how exactly humans are a contributing factor.
Climate change is, in one sense, simply a change in the long term weather patterns. More contemporarily, climate change would be defined as an observed phenomenon of higher average temperatures and changing weather and precipitation patterns. The overall climate of the Earth is generally in constant flux, changing all the time, but over thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years. Changes in climate occur natural due to normal variation in Earth's orbit, cyclical solar activity, and even volcanic eruptions.
However, the important aspect of modern climate change is the time scale in which is occurring. [SCALE is an ever important geographical concept!] In the last century or so, Earth's average temperatures have been increasing dramatically, about as much as would naturally be expected over the course of a several hundred thousand years.
These higher average temperatures can be found on this great interactive map, seen below. This map demonstrates that at much, if not most, of the planet has been experiencing high than normal average temperatures.
But I am getting ahead of myself, we should first examine what climate change exactly is and how exactly humans are a contributing factor.
Climate change is, in one sense, simply a change in the long term weather patterns. More contemporarily, climate change would be defined as an observed phenomenon of higher average temperatures and changing weather and precipitation patterns. The overall climate of the Earth is generally in constant flux, changing all the time, but over thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years. Changes in climate occur natural due to normal variation in Earth's orbit, cyclical solar activity, and even volcanic eruptions.
However, the important aspect of modern climate change is the time scale in which is occurring. [SCALE is an ever important geographical concept!] In the last century or so, Earth's average temperatures have been increasing dramatically, about as much as would naturally be expected over the course of a several hundred thousand years.
These higher average temperatures can be found on this great interactive map, seen below. This map demonstrates that at much, if not most, of the planet has been experiencing high than normal average temperatures.
These higher than normal temperatures are exemplary of this change in climate, and can be seen in the video below which shows global surface temperatures from 1881-2009. Higher temperatures are just one of the symptoms of climate change, but are often an easy example for people to understand; there are others, but we'll discuss them in subsequent posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment