Is climate change real?
As part of the Green Week to celebrate the #WorldEnvironmentDay we have prepared a series of educational pieces online. Here's the first text (translated and adapted from the Polish version available here)
Is it real? It sure is! It is a fact verified by science. 99.9% of the world's scientists and all major science institutions and organisations have no doubt about that.
Climate change has been studied for a long time now, and one of the most important bodies looking into the topic is IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Founded in 1988 by the United Nations, it is composed of thousands of scientists who systematically review what we know on climate change. Every few years there's a report on the situation. Or rather THE report (to rule them all). Conclusions? Climate change is a fact. Our greenhouse gas emissions exacerbate the global warming and accelerate changes in the climate system. This drives the risk of universal, harmful and irreversible consequences for nature, economy and humankind.
The root cause of the global climate change are human made greenhouse gas emissions. It's not the sun, the volcanoes or some little green people from outer space who are behind this global crisis. This is why it is qualified as anthropogenic - made by us, people. The problem truly started only about 200 years ago, at the dawn of the industrial age. Our planet had been capable to (more or less) manage the situation before, but the break-neck speed of industrialisation was just too much for it to keep up.
To keep it very simple: we mine fossil fuels - coal, oil, gas. We burn them in power plants, furnaces and engines, which releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. And CO2 is the major greenhouse gas - it causes about 75% of the global warming. It's not the only greenhouse gas, of course. There's methane released as a by-product in mining or agriculture. Or industrial gases used in cooling or extinguishing systems. But it's the notorious CO2 that has the biggest impact on global climate change, and this is why it usually gets the top billing.
Carbon dioxide in itself is "natural" - it always has been present in the atmosphere. But nature is not capable to manage its additional emissions from human activity - industry, transportation, energy... The imbalance is growing, and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rapidly increasing, and especially so in the last decades. It has already reached levels higher than ever since the dawn of humanity on Earth. This higher concentration of the greenhouse gases leads to the increase of our planet's mean temperature - this is what the global climate change is about.
You could actually imagine it as a duvet. It was "just right" for hundreds of thousands of years. And then sudddenly we started stuffing it with more and more feathers. It's getting warmer and warmer, uncomfortably so. Stopping adding more feathers is the first step - and then we need to make sure to bring the duvet back to its perfect thickness. Well, easier said then done - at least in the case of the atmosphere!
Since the beggining of the industrial era, Earth's mean temperature has already increased by 1 degree Celsius. The last safe warming level for the world's ecosystems and the humanity is 1.5 degree Celsius. If the globe's average temperature grows by more than 2 degrees, the changes will be catastrophic and irreversible. This is why we are talking about the climate crisis. We have little time left - but we can act together for the planet: here and now.
#OrangeGoesGreen #RazemDlaPlanety