CLIMATE CHANGE

We have been facing the issue of climate change since long. But it has increased in recent years & especially at the time of pandemic of covid-19. What is climate change & how can we cope with this?

Climate change is a  change in global or regional climate patterns, in particular a change apparent from the mid to late 20th century onwards and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels. This includes: waste formation, global warming, weather events, etc. When we talk about climate change, we are often talking about the increase in temperatures linked to industrial activities and in particular the greenhouse effect. Therefore, we sometimes speak of global warming, which is said to be “of anthropogenic origin”. The first assumptions about the greenhouse effect were made by scientist Jacques Fourier in 1824, whose work was followed by several scientists who tried to quantify this phenomenon, like Claude Pouillet, John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius. For decades, these discoveries were not taken seriously in the scientific community. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1988 with the purpose of studying the evolution of the phenomenon of climate change and its consequences. It brought (and stills brings) together hundreds of scientists, climatologists, geologists, oceanographers, and biologists, but also economists, sociologists, engineers and other specialists in various fields – with the goal of having a global vision of this phenomenon. The IPCC made its first report in 1990 and they kept making new ones periodically until they published their last report in October 2018 that focuses on the impacts of a temperature increase of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, its GHG emission pathways and was built in an attempt to address policy makers more directly. Overall, in these reports, the IPCC scientific community analyzes the causes of climate change and its impacts on the ecosystems and on society by developing predictive models. These models and forecasts are then used by governments and businesses, helping them to put in place strategies to combat climate change or adapt to it.

Human activities — such as burning fuel to power factories, cars and buses — are changing the natural greenhouse. These changes cause the atmosphere to trap more heat than it used to, leading to a warmer Earth. When human activities create greenhouse gases, Earth warms. This matters because oceans, land, air, plants, animals and energy from the Sun all have an effect on one another. The combined effects of all these things give us our global climate. In other words, Earth’s climate functions like one big, connected system. 

Thus, we need to put in a lot from our side as human beings in controlling climate change & help nature regain its beauty again!