New News Biology #72

Global Warming & Climate Change

Thanks to the atmosphere, earth is always at this nice temperature that allows life to thrive. That is because the atmosphere acts like a blanket, insulating just enough of the sun’s heat energy, which is pretty much like a greenhouse.

Let’s look closely at how it actually works:

The sun shines on the earth, transferring a part of its energy to earth as light and heat energy. On other planets and our moon, they don’t have an atmosphere, so the heat energy will be deflected off the surface and back into space. However, on earth, the atmosphere doesn’t allow all the heat energy to escape.

When the heat deflects off the surface and tries to escape, it hits gas particles in the earth’s atmosphere, trapping the heat in the particles. After a short delay, the heat is re-emitted back into the atmosphere.

Of this re-emitted heat, some of it escapes into space, however, the remaining heat is projected towards earth, and bounces of the surface, inevitably hitting other gas particles as well.

This process continues, and is how earth and its atmosphere manages to maintain a stable temperature that is just right for life to thrive.

The gases that actually do this job are known as greenhouse gases, and they include carbon dioxide, methane, and surprisingly water vapour, just to name a few. These gases are essential to life but also cause global warming.

Global Warming: In the 4.5 billion years of earth’s existence, the strength of the greenhouse effect has grown and shrunk over and over, and is happening again mostly due to humans releasing loads of carbon dioxide and methane. Because of us releasing all this extra greenhouse gas, it causes the earth to get warmer and warmer, an effect known as global warming.

Climate change: This is different from global warming, because climate change is the effects of global warming. Climate just describes long-term weather patterns.

One consequence of global warming is that what used to be uncommon weather patterns like droughts and hurricanes and floods will become more common and more severe.

Another consequence if sea level rise. As the temperature gets higher, more ice at the poles will melt, releasing water into the ocean. Also, as the water in the oceans warms up, the volume will increase. Sea level rise may result in seasonal flooding and even the submersion of entire islands.

There is also a general impact on organisms around the world. As sea levels rise and rain patterns change, species that were once adapted to the environment will no longer be able to survive. In some cases, species may be able to adapt to new conditions, or migrate to other regions, but some can’t adapt well or fast enough, resulting in a possible fall in biodiversity.