Climate Change And Global Warming - 1060 Words

Climate change (Klaus) 1000 The terms â€Å"global warming†, â€Å"climate change† or â€Å"greenhouse effect† have become more than just parts of the popular lexicon as they rather are subject of public discussions, scientific research or political debates. Despite the popularity and the ubiquity of these terms, the public’s theoretical and conceptual understanding of them and their causal relations is often based on superficial knowledge and buzzwords or caricatures outlined and depicted in several popular media. To take account for the latent threat that global warming embodies to humanity, wildlife and the whole environment, it is important to understand the science behind this occurrences. This abstract describes in short the terms mentioned above,†¦show more content†¦Global warming usually refers to human-caused impacts on the climate change, and in particular to the increase of the surface temperature. According to the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on C limate Change (IPCC), scientists were more than 95% certain, that most of global warming is caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic activities . In order to understand this causal relationship, it is necessary to understand the difference between the natural greenhouse effect and the human or enhanced greenhouse effect (figure 1 shows a depictive representation of the greenhouse effect). The term greenhouse house effect suffers from a bad connotation, whereas without it, the Earth’s surface temperature would be about 0  °F instead of actual 60  °F . This average surface temperature arises from an energy balance between incoming and outgoing solar radiation and different sources of energy. Incoming solar radiation, which is visible as light, as well as invisible in form of electromagnetic radiation is partly absorbed (70%) by the atmosphere, clouds or the surface of the Earth. To maintain a stable energy balance, respectively a constant temperature, the Earth (as a whole) needs to emit the same quantity of energy it absorbed from outside. The wavelength of the radiation emitted by the Earth is longer than the wavelength of the incoming solar radiation. So called greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, which