The Basics of Climate Change and Its Solutions
What you need to know about climate change and its solutions - simply explained
The Earth is heated by the sun.
Energy from the sun reaches the Earth and then the Earth releases energy back to space through a mechanism called infrared radiation.
However, some of the energy which is released through infrared radiation is absorbed by gases which exist in the atmosphere (such as, carbon dioxide).
Those gases then release some of the absorbed energy back to Earth and some of it goes into space. Those gases are usually called greenhouse gases, because they function like a blanket, as many people like to describe it, which traps energy released from Earth which otherwise would have all gone into space.
The greenhouse effect that those gases create (namely, the trap of heat) is not necessarily bad. In fact, it is even desirable. Without those gases in the atmosphere, the Earth’s temperature would have been too cold for human life and other forms of life to exist. In other words, some greenhouse effect is necessary for life.
On the other hand, too much greenhouse effect is not desirable. When there is too much greenhouse effect, due to a big amount of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, then a lot of heat is trapped and this causes an increase to the Earth’s temperature, with various consequences. Till the industrial revolution, the amount of greenhouse gases that naturally existed in the Earth’s atmosphere was stable. Since the industrial revolution, however, human beings have emitted a lot of extra greenhouse gases through various activities that technology made possible by burning fossil fuels (like coal, oil, and gas) but also through land use and forestry. This increase in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the years has intensified the greenhouse effect, increasing the average temperature of the Earth, based on the mechanism I described earlier.
One consequence (or, in more neutral terms, one effect) of the increase of the Earth’s atmosphere is climate change. And the change which occurs in the climate (namely, the change in the frequency and intensity of rainfall, heatwaves, weather temperatures, hurricanes, etc.) has various direct and indirect impacts to human life, human society, animals, insects, biodiversity, etc.
The direct impacts can be, for example, people and animals not being able to bear the increasing heat waves affecting, therefore, their health directly. Indirect impacts can be decreased amount of crops (and, therefore, higher food prices) or increasing waves of immigration due to more frequent and severe floods, high temperatures and droughts. The list of the impacts of climate change is truly long, and unless we try to stop it or even reverse it, those impacts will seriously alter the world as we know it and threaten our civilisation; which, I must say, as I show in my work, I regard a fundamental cause of climate change in the first place.
Can the climate change be reversed? The answer is yes.
We can decrease the amount of human activities that contribute the most to climate change; we can replace the sources of energy which are used for production with other sources of energy which are more environmentally friendly; we can invest in technologies that would help removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; we can plant more trees, which function as natural carbon sinks; we can address the social and economic inequalities that contribute to climate change the most; and various other things. At the moment, we don’t do them — at least, not to the degree that climate scientists say it is necessary to avoid the harmful impacts of climate change.1
Why don’t we do what is needed? This is a question that I might address in another article. The certain thing is that, whatever is needed to prevent climate change, is not going to happen on its own…
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To avoid the harmful impacts of climate change, we are supposed to not increase the earth's temperature more than 1.5°C than it was before the industrial revolution. According to IPCC, we need to cut down our CO2 emissions by almost half by 2030. And yet, the last time I checked, emissions are still rising, albeit in slower rates. In other words, unless we take immediate action, we are fucked — if, of course, we accept what climate scientists say.