Climate Change and Our Future (A Christmas Thought)

The Christmas celebration was a whole lot, I was busy with family and friends and I just enjoyed every bit off it and in this holiday season, it wouldn't be a bad idea to learn about our environment and our climate especially now that we are experiencing drastic climate change.

Climate change is personal and it affects a lot of things or a lot of things affect it including when we go to toilet, talk, complain about the dry harmattan like in this part of the world or when you are forced to put on the long underwear and thick clothes for the snowfall and if we will be sincere, it will affect us more than we will expect year after year.

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This change is a collective and systemic problem that affects every living and non-living thing on the planet. While I was enjoying the Christmas break, I was inclined to think of what the next generation would look like when they begin to suffer the effect of the climatic decisions we made years before and now. You are asking why the need to worry about something that doesn't affect me but if we do not solve it now, wouldn't it become a difficult problem in the future?

Compared to the billions of years that the earth has been existing, its climate change has never been this fast. We can go back to the 1850s when Eunice Foote began to study the sun's ability to heat up the earth, examining how density and mixture of gases affects how the ability of the atmosphere to hold on to heat. In her study, she noticed that high amount of carbonic gases causes the earth to heat up very fast and remain at a warm state for a very long time. This led her to conclude that if the atmosphere ever comprises of any of these gases in higher amount, then the temperature would increase drastically. Today, the carbonic gases are Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (Methane and Water Vapor).

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The sun radiates visible light, Infrared radiation and UV light which we see in form of heat. When these radiation enters the earth, they pass through the atmosphere and touch earth to be absorbed by land and sea which would naturally reflect it back to the sun but with greenhouse gasses and their effects, the radiation and energy is absorbed by the atmosphere instead of going into space and this causes earth to warm up since the heat is going returning to earth.

It looks like yearly, this amount of radiation and heat the sun gives to be returned are reducing. Although this gas makes up a small portion of the atmosphere, it role in determining our climate major temperature cannot be overemphasized. Temperature increase by just a few hertz is enough to make our existence of earth unbearable and not enjoyable. With glacier bubbles, it is easy for scientist to tell earth temperature in the last 4.5 billion years and with the study, we have been able to see that the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is majorly responsible for temperature fluctuation.

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In the last 100 years, the spike in temperature is the highest that earth has recorded and this can be attributed to the industrial revolution which happened because we were able to do things fast and precise just by burning fossil fuel. These fossil fuels were able to provide a whole lot of things including heat and electricity also the burning of this fossil fuel is what has helped us with our modern civilization but at one cost; release of carbon dioxide and the more we burn them for our needs, the more greenhouse gases we produce for our need.

So we can conclude that our activities has caused the earth to warm up in an unprecedented rate and I can only imagine how much carbon dioxide knockouts will add to the atmosphere this celebration period. While it might look like our weather is still quite fair, we need to understand that our climate is a combination of how our weather reflects in the future based on our activities today.

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^Reference

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^{https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.4.20210823a/full/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/05/earth-just-hit-a-terrifying-milestone
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20281
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natural
https://theconversation.com/scientists-understood-physics-of-climate}