Climate Change Piece

Climate Change (United Nations) refers to long term shifts in the world’s temperature and weather patterns. These shifts can be classified as natural due to variations in the solar cycle. Since as early as the 1800’s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

The main point of focus for this article is climate change and its effect on the polar ice caps: caused by global warming. According to (NASA, 2022), global warming is the long-term heating of the Earth’s climate system which has been observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900). The term global warming is normally interchanged with climate change, though climate change refers to both human and naturally produced warming and the effects of it has on our planet. This “warming” as we might put it is taking a toll on the once solid ice caps of the Arctic and Antarctic circles. According to (World Wildlife Fund), we are losing the Arctic Sea at a rate of almost 13% per decade, and over the past 30 years, the most ancient of icecaps have declined by a staggering 95%. Statistics show that if the icecaps continue to melt at this alarming rate the Arctic could be ice-free by the summer of 2040. With an ice-free Arctic would come some dire consequences since what happens in the Arctic will not stay in the arctic.

There would be some very terrible heatwaves, since the arctic and Antarctic are the world’s refrigerators and the ice would reflect the heat back into space. Hence less ice would mean less reflected heat which would mean some very hot summers (hotter than they already are now) and some very cold winters. The sea levels would rise dramatically which would endanger coastal communities and small coastal islands. These places would be terrorized by coastal flooding and storm surges.

The food industry is taking a significant hit from the melting ice caps as higher average temperatures endanger some crops that serve as food for a vast variety of cultures and with this scarcity will come higher food prices.

As the ice caps decline and melt, new shipping routes will be discovered in and around the arctic circle. These routes may shave time off the regular shipping time but can also be extremely dangerous.

Wildlife would also suffer as well as animals who depend on the ice caps to survive will have to adapt or perish under the new conditions. Finally and maybe most importantly is permafrost. This in essence is ground that is normally frozen solid and stores obscene amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. When the ice thaws the methane is then released into the atmosphere which exponentially increases the rate of warming. The more the ice caps melt, the more we’ll see the climate change predictions made so long begin to actually come through.

Author: Peter Haynes

References

NASA (2022), Overview: Weather, Global Warming and Climate Changehttps://climate.nasa.gov/resources/global-warming-vs-climate-change/

WWF, Six ways loss of Arctic ice impacts everyone,https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/six-ways-loss-of-arctic-ice-impacts-everyone

United Nations, What Is Climate Change?https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/what-is-climate-change