Ending US history

I have learned a lot this year in US history about several different wars and conflicts. I have learned that things don't always go as planned and that creating solutions is hard and always come with consequences. To end out the year we watched the movie 13 years about the cuban missile crisis and I took away from the movie that solving solutions is on our hands and that you can't always get everything you want. It is up to us. Strategizing and having several plans is important. That theme ties in with our recent climate study in that there aren't solutions to the rapid climate change and the solution has to come from the people.

Letter to future about climate science

Dear future teen,

The climate is rapidly changing and we were curious about why it is changing and the science behind it. I was curious about how we know the climate is changing, the causes of climate change, the difficulty of studying climate change, the reliability of the models used, and how the change is affecting plants and animals.

When first thinking about climate change, I wondered well how do we know the climate is actually changing? I started doing research and the article (1) Climate Change: How do we know? Informed me of many ways we can see the climate change. A few pieces of evidence of climate change are sea level rise, warming oceans, shrinking ice sheet, and many more. The sea level has risen 6.7 inches in the last century, most of the warming of the ocean has occurred in the last century, and Greenland lost 30-60 cubic miles of ice per year between 2002 and 2006. This evidence was shocking to me because so many beautiful places are vanishing. Be on the lookout for example such as these to know if your climate is rapidly changing.

Once I got further into research, I realized that all of these issues are in very recent years, years that I have been living on the planet. This led me to wonder, what have we done differently in the past few years to cause all of this mess? I found from (2) How our Climate has Changed that this rapid climate change is a result of many natural and human causes. The natural causes include variations in energy from the sun, the way the earth orbits the sun, the way oceans transfer heat from one area to another, and volcanic activity. Sadly, we can’t change those but we can change the human causes. Be sure to read this so you can avoid doing these things to prevent climate change. The biggest human cause if from the gas released into the air from cars and burning fossil fuels. I found more examples of ways humans cause climate change from an article called (3)Climate Change Science Overview. The human emission of greenhouse gases come from many things such as clearing forests, fertilizing crops, storing waste in landfills, raising livestock, and producing some kinds of industrial products.

The discussion of climate change is often very controversial and I was curious why that is. I decided to research why the climate is hard to study and the article, (4)The difficulty of detecting anthropogenic climate change, told me why. All of the changes caused by humans make it hard to find one reason because all of the human causes go together and are hard to separate. Some regions are harder to detect than others, the North Atlantic Region is really hard but the tropical Indian ocean is easier to detect. No one has been able to predict how the warming of oceans will influence carbon dioxide levels. If you all have not already predicted that then I challenge you to do so!

When doing research about the climate, I came across very many graphs so I decided to research the reliability of these models.(5) How Reliable are Climate Models explained how the models work and their accuracy. The models show climate trends which are said to be weather averaged over time. These are important because they eliminate extreme events. The models have been successful. They have accurately predicted many effects such as the warming in the arctic and the stratospheric cooling. Here is a graph that shows the rise in Carbon Dioxide levels. Look at how much they have gone up from 1950 until today!

When I was on this website, there was a list of questions relating to climate change. One that caught my eye was, is extreme weather related to global warming? The (6)article said that extreme weather is most likely related to global warming because the rising temperatures affect weather patterns. Rising temperatures cause many things such as an increased rate of evapotranspiration(which intensifies droughts), more water vapor is able to be held(this increases rainfall), and changes in sea surface temperatures. All of the changes, such as these increase the odds of extreme weather. Some examples of this actually happening are the drought experienced by the southeast and the west, Australia had very heavy rainfall and droughts, and the heat waves are occurring more as the temperature rises.

Another question that was interesting to me was: How is the climate change affecting our plants and animals? The (7)article about this question said that 60 percent of the world's ecosystems are now degraded and the extinction rate is way higher than it ever has been. Global warming has affected the species timing of breeding, migration, flowering, and much else. The UK has estimated that by 2050 35% of animal species will be extinct. That means that in the time you are currently living there are hardly any animals! I hope that is not the case.

One last thing that is important for you to know that I learned from (8)How can CO2 hurt us? Is that carbon dioxide is essential for many things but having too much of it is bad. This is what is increasing the global temperatures and causing the climate change to cause problems. I also found out from(9) The heat wave of 2003 that climate change brings many health risks. In 2003, 20,000 died due to extreme heat waves in Europe.
Here is an image that shows the effects of climate change on humans.

I hope that hearing these things makes you realize how bad climate change is and that it needs to be stopped because it is rapidly changing. If you all do not already have it under control, I highly encourage you to stop emitting gases into the air! Yes the climate is causing many bad things but we can do something about it. I don’t know what the climate looks like for you but I hope it is better than what it is now. I hope that all of the model's predictions were wrong and that you are living a great life free of terrible effects from climate change.

Sincerely,

Sarah Margaret Cimino










Footnotes:
1. NASA-National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA is a United States government agency that is responsible for science and technology related to air and space. Evidence of climate change found on the climate website of NASA.
2. BBC-The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. The climate article("How our Climate has Changed) is found on bitesize which is an educational website from BBC for school kids.
3. EPA- The United States Environmental Protection Agency is an agency of the U.S. federal government which was created for the purpose of protecting human health and the environment by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress. Article: "Climate Change Science Overview"
4. World Ocean Review- The World Ocean Review is an extensive report, dealing with the state of the world ocean, the interactions between the ocean and ecological, economical and sociopolitical conditions. Article: "The difficulty of detecting anthropogenic climate change"
5-7. Skeptical Science- Skeptical Science (occasionally abbreviated SkS) is a climate science blog and information resource created in 2007 by Australian blogger and author John Cook.
Articles: "How reliable are climate models?"
"Is extreme weather caused by global warming?"
"Can animals and plants adapt to global warming?"
8. EPA- The United States Environmental Protection Agency is an agency of the U.S. federal government which was created for the purpose of protecting human health and the environment by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress.
Under Climate Change Facts: Answers to Common Questions, the question "How can Carbon Dioxide Hurt us?"
9. Met Office- The Met Office (officially the Meteorological Office until 2000) is the United Kingdom's national weather service. Article("The heatwave of 2003") found under learning, learning about the weather, weather phenomena, and then weather case studies.

Research Process

In my research about the science behind climate change I have learned a lot. From this article I was surprised to see the graph that shows the massive increase in the carbon dioxide levels. It was interesting to learn about the evidence that the climate has been changing. Sea levels have risen about 16 cm in the last century, the global temperature has risen with and warmest 10 years have been in the last 12 years, the oceans have warmed about .302 degrees fahrenheit since 1969,  ice sheets have shrunken such as Antarctica who lost about 36 cubic miles of ice between 2002 and 2005.
      From this article I was once again surprised by another graph. The graph showed the huge rise in the global temperature. This site talked about the natural and human causes of climate change. I learned that some of the natural causes are variations in the energy from the sun, the way the earth orbits the sun, the way oceans transfer heat from one area to another, and volcanic activity. The biggest human cause is gas that is released into the air from cars and burning fossil fuels. 
      In this article, I learned that most of the warming of the past half century has been caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. I was surprised to read what greenhouse gases came from such as burning fossil fuels for heat and energy, clearing forests, fertilizing crops, storing waste in landfills, raising livestock, and producing some kinds of industrial products.
 So far I have learned about the human and natural causes of climate change but next I need to look for the way the climate is predicted.