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