If you have watched the news at some point during the last ten years it is likely that you have heard about climate change. This is a process that has been talked about for much longer but became very influential in the news due to our concerns about irreversible damage to the globe. With most scientific issues, the general public is not nearly as informed about them as people who study the field in question. This often causes a lot of denial from the public towards these sorts of issues. Denial of these scientific truths leads to many problems towards solutions. With climate change, we need cooperation from the whole globe in order to effectively fix our mistakes. This makes it very difficult to implicate globally since so many people deny the truth of climate change. In this blog, I will be discussing how we know that climate change is real.
Isotopes of Carbon
One important step towards proving that climate change is real is to prove that it is our fault. This is one of the more difficult things for many people to accept because they just blame climate fluctuations on nature. We can prove that it is our fault through the studies of isotopes. Fossil fuels are mostly made of a lighter isotope Carbon-12. This is because fossil fuels originate from ancient plants. Currently, most other contributors to carbon emissions are composed of Carbon-13. When we take a look at the proportion of carbon-12 to carbon-13 in the atmosphere, we can notice that carbon-12 has been increasing in recent years. This means that our fossil fuel consumption is directly influencing the atmosphere.
The Chemistry of Climate Change
.png)
Many people have heard the term “the greenhouse effect,” but it is almost never explained. When UV light and visible light from the sun reaches the surface of the globe, it is absorbed and then released as heat or infrared light. This infrared light then heads back up to our atmosphere and hits many of the molecules within it. It can pass over most molecules, but, when it hits greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, the infrared radiation is scattered in random directions. This random scattering keeps the heat within the atmosphere and warms it more than it would without the scattering. The greenhouse effect keeps our world at a reasonable temperature, but the increased carbon in our atmosphere is pushing it past this temperature. We are now seeing much more acidic oceans, increased water levels, and raised global temperatures as a result of our influence. We need to do something about the climate now, and the first step is to educate the world on this issue.
You did a great job of explaining the complex science of climate change for people who aren’t necessarily familiar with the field, or scientific principles in general. Although I find your discussion of carbon isotopes interesting, when I initially read your first paragraph, I was expecting a conversation about the failures of a global initiative towards climate action. I think it would be interesting if you, at some point, investigated which countries are having the most negative impact on climate change and which countries are trying to alter their carbon footprint. I think it would be very enlightening to see how the global economy fuels the continued development of climate change. Great post!