Climate Change is getting more and more important Nowadays, there has been one of the famous phrase, “Climate Change”, and we can hear this phrase many times. Of course there […]
Climate Change is getting more and more important
Nowadays, there has been one of the famous phrase, “Climate Change”, and we can hear this phrase many times. Of course there are some skeptics against climate change, but we have to define and understand this phrase before we argue whether climate change is actually occurred or not. Therefore, one of the important questions here is “What is Climate Change?”. In addition to this, we have to consider what causes climate change at the same time, and, in other words, we have to think the question “Human activities cause climate change?”.
Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Without drastic action today, adapting to these impacts in the future will be more difficult and costly.
Climate change describes a change in the average conditions — such as temperature and rainfall — in a region over a long period of time. For example, 20,000 years ago, much of the United States was covered in glaciers. In the United States today, we have a warmer climate and fewer glaciers.
Global climate change refers to the average long-term changes over the entire Earth. These include warming temperatures and changes in precipitation, as well as the effects of Earth’s warming, such as:
Rising sea levels
Shrinking mountain glaciers
Ice melting at a faster rate than usual in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic
Changes in flower and plant blooming times.
Earth’s climate has constantly been changing — even long before humans came into the picture. However, scientists have observed unusual changes recently. For example, Earth’s average temperature has been increasing much more quickly than they would expect over the past 150 years.
Climate change is a change in the pattern of weather, and related changes in oceans, land surfaces and ice sheets, occurring over time scales of decades or longer
Weather is the state of the atmosphere—its temperature, humidity, wind, rainfall and so on—over hours to weeks. It is influenced by the oceans, land surfaces and ice sheets, which together with the atmosphere form what is called the ‘climate system’. Climate, in its broadest sense, is the statistical description of the state of the climate system.
Climate change is a change in the statistical properties of the climate system that persists for several decades or longer—usually at least 30 years. These statistical properties include averages, variability and extremes. Climate change may be due to natural processes, such as changes in the Sun’s radiation, volcanoes or internal variability in the climate system, or due to human influences such as changes in the composition of the atmosphere or land use.
Tackling Climate Change becomes more urgent
As we see those three definitions above, we have to think of climate change as transformation in the long-term perspective like 30, 50 or even 100 years. In this sense, we can find the fact that several changes has occurred all over the world such as the average temperature is rising and the area of glaciers is decreasing after industrial revolution era. Of course, some parties state those changes are related to human activities and others says vice versa, but tackling climate change has been unavoidable nowadays. For example, European Union, Japan and China announced that each organization or country aims to realize carbon neutral by 2050, 2050 and 2060, respectively. In order to make our life as well as business sustainable and successful, we should take actions against climate change. At the same time, the definition of climate change will be different by each party, so it is better for us to try to update our information and pay attention to the situation around us.