Climate Change
An introduction to climate change
It is now widely accepted that the actions of people on Earth and the relentless burning of fossil fuels has created an unprecedented change in climate, and that this change will most probably continue into the future creating devastating effects.
To download an animated model of climate change which worryingly and clearly depicts the findings of the Hadley Centre, a world leader in climate change research
Click Here to down load a quick time movie (it is about 2megs so will take a long time to download on dial up connections)
The lungs of our planet, the trees and algae of the seas, have developed in harmony for millions of years in balance with the amount of CO2 and other gases in the air. Through this period climate change – and gas content in the atmosphere has followed a cyclic pattern.
By studying ice core samples and deep sea core samples scientists have been able to look back into the Earth's historical records of climate change and atmospheric CO2 content.
Ice ages come and go over periods of hundreds of thousands of years as can been seen by the graph below (the present day is depicted on the left of the graph):
The low carbon points represents an ice age as is clearly visible ice ages have always come in cycles and follow points of high CO2 content in the atmosphere.
The last ice age in this graph can be seen at around 40 000 years ago.
The clear and grave concern is that atmospheric CO2 content has massively spiked since the industrial revolution. The spike seen in the graph above does not follow the natural pattern of CO2 release into the atmosphere.
The burning of fossil fuels has had a massive impact on atmospheric gas levels, this can been seen more clearly in the following two graphs (the present day is depicted on the right):
The Question now being asked by science is:
Climate change is happening so what we can do about it?
We have already lost countless thousands of species in the past 50 years.
In Britain alone, in the last 50 years, we have lost ONE THIRD of our species of butterflies.
Globally the impacts on diversity of species through the combination of climate change and habitat destruction has been massive.
Unless we as people start making sustainable choices we as people will be the architects of the destruction of a great deal of life on earth, and could return our blue green planet to Baron rock.
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