Sci Climate Change Unit Notes

Key Vocab

• Climate driver - anything that causes climate change
    * Natural drivers
      * Energy from the sun
      * Changes in Earth’s orbit
      * Volcanic activity
    * Human drivers
      * Greenhouse gases (most important)
      * Aerosols
      * Changes in land cover (deforestation, urbanization)
• Mitigation - Changes in human activities to reduce climate change by reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
    * Carbon capture
    * Carbon tax
    * Electrifying transportation
• Adaptation - Change to human activities to reduce suffering and loss from impacts of climate change
    * Floating houses for floods
    * Green roofs for reducing urban heat island effect
    * Genetic modification of mosquitoes for preventing spread of disease
• Feedback loop - something that speeds up (positive feedback loop) or slows down (negative climate change) climate change in a repeating cycle
    * Ice-albedo feedback - ice melts because of warming, decreasing albedo, causing more rapid heating causing more ice to melt (positive)
    * Permafrost carbon - Initial warming causes permafrost thawing. Thawed soil releases methane, which increases warming (positive)
    * Other examples - clouds, forest fires, rainforest-precipitation feedback

Impacts of Climate Change

• Temperature
    * Heat island effect
    * Ice melting (glaciers, sea ice, permafrost)
• Weather/precipitation
    * Drought
    * Wildfires
    * Extreme storms (floords, wind, storm surges)
• Ocean Effects
    * Sea level rise
    * Coral reef loss
    * Marine species migration
    * Thermohaline slowing
• Living things
    * Migration/invasive species
    * Extinction
    * Agricultural struggles
• Human health
    * Water and insect-borne diseases
    * Permafrost disease
    * Heat
    * Air quality issues

Evidence of Climate Change

• Ice cores (timescale- hundreds of thousands of years)
• Fossils (timescale- millions of years)
    * Ginko leaves: produce fewer stomata when there is a lot of CO2, which can be seen in fossilized leaves
    * Fossils of marine organisms show sea levels in the past
• Atmospheric CO2 records
    * Carbon isotopes: CO2 from fossil fuels has no C-14. Atmospheric C-14 is decreasing as we add CO2 from fossil fuels

Causes of Climate Change

• Countries
    * Highest greenhouse gas emissions per year: China
      * Others: US, India, EU, Russia
    * Highest total greenhouse gas emissions: United States
      * Others: EU, China
    * Highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita: Qatar
      * Others: UAE, Australia, US, Canada
    * All countries on these lists are industrialized countries

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