Case Study 3

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by Kira Harmer2 views·Updated Dec 15, 2021
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  1. the icebergs are melting.
  2. We all know that climate change is a very, very prominent problem in our world today,
  3. and I wanted to focus on the polar ice caps.
  4. What is climate change?
  5. Climate change is a change in the usual weather found in a place.
  6. This could be a change in how much rain in place usually gets in a year.
  7. Or it could be the change in place as usual temperature for a month or season.
  8. As we're seeing in Colorado right now,
  9. we're having one of the driest winters that we've ever had.
  10. I mean, it's the middle of December, and we've only seen about
  11. an inch of snow in the Denver metro area,
  12. and I know it's not better up in the mountains, either.
  13. Mhm.
  14. After the start of the Industrial Revolution,
  15. carbon has been burned faster.
  16. Then we can get rid of it, and now it's stuck with us.
  17. I was watching a documentary about the height of the Industrial Revolution
  18. and the way that
  19. the billions and billions and billions of tons of carbon that we
  20. use for fuel,
  21. um, every year
  22. And how that affects the co two in our ozone
  23. Co two warming comes from human activities were using way too much.
  24. People are driving cars way too much where
  25. heating and cooling our houses.
  26. There's
  27. the
  28. Factories
  29. that mass produced. 24 7.
  30. This is creating an atmospheric blanket of co two. So then the
  31. rays from the sun
  32. and the heat that comes down to the earth isn't
  33. able to bounce back the way that it used to.
  34. Atmosphere attempts are rising,
  35. and the ocean does an excellent job of absorbing the extra heat from the atmosphere,
  36. delaying the full impact of global warming.
  37. It would be much hotter in the atmosphere if we didn't have all this water.
  38. The top few meters of the oceans do as much heat as the Earth's entire atmosphere.
  39. Overcrowded homes, soil capping,
  40. which is when carbon dioxide naturally is in soil.
  41. Um, as a result of decomposing organic matter,
  42. air conditioning systems, fossil fuel burning, deforestation,
  43. those are all problems that we have
  44. And causing co two.
  45. Yeah,
  46. Uh huh.
  47. Causes of increases in CO two Emissions Human greenhouse
  48. gas emissions are accelerating global warming around the world.
  49. Industrial processes, land use changes, fossil fuel, combustion each day,
  50. new greenhouse gas emissions further accelerate these changes.
  51. If we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,
  52. we can have a real impact on the to fight the effects of the greenhouse gas pollution
  53. and save our planet.
  54. Heard of some charts
  55. Glaciers
  56. When glaciers, glaciers are advancing,
  57. more masses added that comes from the snow
  58. that turns into ice when glaciers are retreating.
  59. That's when the mass is melted and it doesn't add to the mass of the glacier.
  60. Uh,
  61. we're getting a lot of rain instead of snow over by the polar ice caps.
  62. So this way the polar ice caps are not getting the mass that they used to used to.
  63. And between the glacier's accumulation zone and ablation zone,
  64. there's a third area where only the amount of mass gained is
  65. mass gained
  66. as snow melts away each year.
  67. This is known as the equilibrium line.
  68. Scientists often assess changes in the altitude of glaciers
  69. Equilibrium line
  70. to understand its health.
  71. Our glaciers are melting.
  72. Sea levels are also rising. Current global sea levels rise,
  73. sea level rise begun began at the start of the 20th century,
  74. a rise of 7.5 centimeters from 1993 to 2000 and 17,
  75. for an average rate of 31 millimeters per decade.
  76. Decade. Polar ice caps really start to melt by 2030 and could be almost gone by 2040
  77. and the Netherlands could be consumed by water.
  78. They're already doing things to displace the
  79. water that's coming on to their shorelines
  80. and building houses that can withstand being on water.
  81. Same with restaurants and relying less on cars and having more boat docks.
  82. Hurricanes are a rapidly rotating storm system
  83. characterized by a low pressure center,
  84. a closed, low level atmospheric circulation,
  85. strong winds in a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain.
  86. Warmer water temps fuel the storm.
  87. With our water temperatures rising the way that they are
  88. now due to the co two and climate change,
  89. there is not much that we can do to
  90. stop the hurricanes like
  91. the
  92. weather
  93. and
  94. well, the weather is a factor
  95. in
  96. the climate change that we know,
  97. but also we can see that the environment and the earth
  98. and nature is lashing out at us for what we've done
  99. and the way we've treated it.
  100. There's no question that climate change is a thing.
  101. Summers are warmer winters are more dry.
  102. The amount of CO two in the atmosphere is heating the oceans, water temperatures.
  103. We need to save the Earth or will be underwater before we know it.