Climate Is Changing

Do you ever imagine waking up floating on flooded sea water?  Waking up from a drop of heavy rain leaking from your sealing touching your forehead? Finding carbon footprint (the amount of CO2 you emit) bill at your doorstep? Or waiting for weeks to receive your tiny proportion of water? Believe it or not, this will happen or has already started to be happening in many places in the world.

Climate Change is real, and the human behavior is the main cause of it. Humans emitting Global Warming gases or what so called Green House Gases (GHG) caused the earth atmosphere to warm up leading the climate system to change.

The physics underlying the climate system is well known and widely understood. The earth’s climate is determined by many factors, processes and interactions at a global scale. Important elements include the biosphere, the ocean, sea ice, clouds, and the ways in which these interact. One important phenomenon in the earth’s atmosphere is the well known greenhouse effect. This natural effect is responsible for the comfortable living conditions on earth, with a mean global temperature of 15 °C. Without an atmosphere, the mean temperature would be approximately 30 °C lower.

Global Warming gases include Carbon dioxides (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxides (N2O), Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC)s and water vapor (H2O). The CFCs are the only solely (human made) synthetic gases from Global Warming gases , other Global Warming gases  are both natural and synthetic gases but the humankind extensive and outrageous use of earth’s natural resources caused their atmospheric concentration to be amplified.

Burning of fossil fuels is the biggest synthetic source of Global Warming gases, and that happen in electricity production, industrial uses, transportation means and mining procedures. On the other hand, the Global Warming gases atmospheric concentration has risen as a result of losing the main sources that contain those gases naturally (sinks), i.e. Ecosystems (including forests) loss, oceans acidification and desertification.

Other forcing factors also exist that are beyond humankind’s influence. Examples of these include variations in solar radiation and volcanic activity, and fluctuations in the earth’s axis and its orbit around the sun. These are exogenous events, partly responsible for the changes which have occurred between ice ages and the interglacial periods. They take place over a longer timeframe (tens of thousands of years or more), and must be clearly differentiated from climate change that is induced by human beings. The latter can be prevented by taking adequate actions.

Today, human beings have also become a component in the earth’s system, driving and accelerating global warming through the intensive release of Global Warming gases  into the atmosphere. The warming itself leads to feedback mechanisms, such as the release of further Global Warming gases like methane, which was previously trapped in permafrost soils.

It’s our call to stop climate from changing, so don’t hesitate doing any tiny action that will reduce your carbon foot print; by that you will be achieving your obligation to our Nature. Simple things you can do includes recycling, washing clothes in cold water, using public transportation or carpooling if possible, turning off the lights that is not in need as well as turning off standby and Unplugging the appliances that you don’t use frequently.

By: Hussien Al-Kisswani

Climate Leader

Climate Reality project

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