Lesson 3: So, what IS climate change?
Do you know the difference between the weather and the climate?
Weather > short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere. e.g. temperature, humidity, precipitation (when we don’t want to say the bad R-A-I-N word), cloud cover, etc.
Climate = long-term weather patterns in a specific area (usually over 30 years or longer). To describe the climate of a place, we might say what the temperatures are usually like during different seasons, how windy it usually is or how much rainfall you typically have. It’s a bigger, wider picture.
So now we know what the climate is, what climate change is, and how it is happening.
The sun very helpfully sends down energy to Earth in the form of infrared radiation and heat. The Earth's surface absorbs most of this energy, which is used to keep us all lovely and toasty, instead of freezing to death in space-like temperatures.
Now some of this heat reflects into the atmosphere, where it returns to space. Now, regardless of what we do, there are greenhouse gases in the air, which do inevitably trap some of that energy, known as the greenhouse effect. We need the greenhouse effect to keep the world alive. Without that, we wouldn’t have any heat, and we couldn’t survive.
However, as we produce more greenhouse gases, they can’t escape the atmosphere and surround the earth, which is trapping the sun’s heat and energy. That means the heat and infrared radiation remain in the atmosphere, and that is why the Earth’s temperature is rising and why we’re experiencing bigger and more frequent weather events now.
To make it super simple – think of these gases as a blanket.
The Earth is plenty warm with just the wee blanket she had, but now she has an electric blanket tossed on top – which means she’s now overheating and trying desperately trying to cool down!