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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