Climate Change

Climate change is the topic of today's podcast. It's not about whether it exists, but how it affects us. Climate refers to long-term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Earth's atmosphere has four zones with different temperatures. Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, warm up the atmosphere. This is bad because it causes climate change and affects species. Examples of greenhouse gas emissions include electricity, transportation, agriculture, and land use. You can calculate your carbon footprint to reduce your impact on the planet. Hello, today we will be talking about climate change. In today's podcast, however, we will not be discussing whether or not it exists, but we will be going over how it affects us and the world around us. Climate refers to long-term patterns of temperature and precipitation. So, in other words, climate is an average of temperatures over many, many years. The Earth's atmosphere has four distinct zones, each having contrasting temperature, which results from differences in absorption of solar energy. The layer of air immediately above the Earth's surface is called the troposphere. The stratosphere extends from the tropopause up to about 50 km. And unlike the troposphere, the stratosphere is relatively calm because warm layers lie above colder layers. Above the stratosphere, the temperature diminishes again in the mesosphere, or middle layer. Above the middle layer is the thermosphere, which is the heated layer. In the thermosphere, intense pulses of high-energy radiation cause electrically charged particles, also called ions, to glow. One interesting fact is that there is no sharp boundary marking the end of the atmosphere. The density of gas molecules decreases with distance from the Earth until it becomes indistinguishable from the near vacuum of interstellar space. You may be wondering, what does the Earth's atmosphere have to do with climate change? This is a simple answer. The more carbon dioxide that is created, the more the atmosphere warms up due to greenhouse effect. Greenhouse effect is the retention of long-wave terrestrial energy in the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is a natural atmospheric process that is necessary for life on Earth. And greenhouse gases is a general term for trace gases that are especially effective at capturing the long-wavelength heat energy from the Earth's surface. One question you may be wondering is, why is greenhouse gases bad? So greenhouse gases pose severe environmental and health issues. They cause climate change by trapping heat, which in turn affects various species in already arid climates. So in other words, too much greenhouse gas makes Earth too warm. Here are a couple examples of how we create greenhouse gas emissions. One of them is electricity, another being transportation, another being agriculture, and lastly land use or forestry. One way you can help reduce greenhouse gases is by calculating your carbon footprint. I will be providing a link below to a free carbon footprint calculator that will help you estimate your annual greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully that can help you find ways in which you can help reduce your impact on the planet. And that is everything for today's podcast. I hope you were able to learn a couple things about climate change and you enjoyed the video.