How is climate change affecting the world?

Question

Aaron Anderson · Accepted Answer

Climate Change is a natural process that which the world goes through in cycles, it is the reason why the Ice Age ended, but climate change today is slowly getting faster due to Human interactions on the planet.

These interactions include the burning of fossil fuels and the felling of trees, which releases all of their carbon when they die. These actions all go toward creating the Green House Layer, a layer of gases that we have started to accumulate in our atmosphere. This layer traps thermal energy in our atmosphere and reflects it back to Earth when it rises from the planet's surface, resulting in Global Warming, which in turn accelerates Climate Change. Our world has only warmed by a few degrees, or 1-2 degrees Celsius, to be precise. While this may seem like a little difference to you and me because we would likely turn up the heat in our homes even higher, it is catastrophic for the environment. Small temperature changes in some places cause ice, snow, and glaciers to melt, raising sea levels and frequently resulting in unusual weather. The sea warming is also a small but significant change that all marine life can sense and frequently negatively impacts. Given that you live in Australia, sea level rise and sea warming will have a significant impact on your reefs. When temperatures rise, corals undergo a process known as bleaching, in which they expels all of the algae that is inside their calcium skeleton and uses it for photosynthesis and feeding. The coral "animals" allow the algae to stay inside the structure, protecting it, but the ejected algae is what gives the coral its color, turning it a calcium white or grey. Not only will sea level rise force sunlight to reach deeper underwater, where it will be necessary for corals to survive, but corals' relatively slow evolutionary rate will also result in coral death. The existence of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened by this, and thousands of other reefs throughout the world are also affected. Although it is a natural process, humanity has accelerated climate change.

Jonathan Avila · Answer

undefined Climate change is affecting the world by causing rising temperatures, more frequent extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity, and disruptions to ecosystems and agriculture.