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

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

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