Climate change has been a cause of concern for over a century, but has recently come under heavier scrutiny. Studies and models show the drastic effects global warming already has on earth, and is steadily worsening, particularly with increasing levels of greenhouse gases. In addition, human activity proves to be the largest and most obvious contributor to earth’s degradation.
Scientists are attempting to categorize and measure various aspects of the problems at hand, and have created Global and Regional Climate Models in order to study and predict climate shifts. Zooming into country-level statistics, it can be seen that the size of carbon footprints left by each country are closely tied to not only the population size, but also the level of affluence.
Each country's share is further broken down into more intimate levels, where institutional regulations and individual actions for climate stabilization come into play. Institutionally, the number of ways to cut emissions and wastage, and promote renewability, are limited in their effectiveness. It all boils down to the education, action and climate-consciousness of each and every person to truly make a difference.
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Some points I just want to add(some were not told in lecture, but I just found they were quite useful and interesting):
ReplyDelete1.the energy from the sun reaching the top of the atmosphere(called solar constant)is 1370W/m2.As a black body, the earth also emits energy, it follows the Stefan-Boltzmann law(E=σT^4,σ is Stefan's constant). Then take the Earth's albedo and the transmittance through the atmosphere into consideration, we finally get the temperature of the earth's surface. the greenhouse gases such as CO2 is mainly affect the transmittance through the atmosphere. As a result, the earth's surface need to have a higher temperature to reach a new equilibrium so that the solar flux can be equal to the flux of ground and atmosphere.
2.Greenhouse gases are CO2, methane, water vapor and tropospheric ozone. aerosols also has effect on the greenhouse effect, though we do not know how much effect it has.
3.taking all effects into account, IPCC's best estimate of the global average temperature rise for double CO2 is 2.5K, with a rang of 1.5-4.5K that allows for the cloud uncertainty. However, the difference in global average temperature between middle of ice age and the warm periods in between is only 5-6K.
4.IPCC's estimate is that sea level will rise by 50cm by the end of this century, and the main reason is thermal expansion of ocean, rather than the melting of the icecap.