What is global warming?

Laura

Global warming is the unusually fast increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature and is caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane being released into the atmosphere. When sent out into the air, these potentially harmful gases are known as emissions.

Throughout history, the Earth has warmed and cooled over long periods of time. But in the past 100 years, human activity has caused the Earth’s atmosphere and our climate to change more quickly.

When fossil fuels, like oil, gas and coal, are burned, lots of greenhouse gases are released into our atmosphere changing the way it’s made up.

All of these greenhouse gases absorb heat so they act like a blanket which wraps around the Earth, trapping energy from the sun and keeping the Earth or 'globe’ warm.

On top of this, when we change the surface of the Earth, particularly removing trees and natural landscapes and replacing them with concrete buildings, roads or other structures, we remove some of the Earth’s best natural defences- known as ‘Carbon Sinks’.

These are all the things that pull-out carbon from the atmosphere to help keep the planet cool.

Imagine you organised a football match and on one team ‘team carbon’ you put 11 players but on the other team ‘team Earth’ you keep taking off its defenders making it increasingly hard for team Earth to defend its goal.

In the last 100 years the Earth has warmed, on average, between 1 and 1.2 degrees Celsius which might not seem like a lot, but when the Earth is warmed even slightly, we begin to see big impacts. Like thermal expansion which happens when water gets warmer and swells.

This, along with the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, causes sea levels to rise and leads to flooding, erosion and loss of habitat.

Many of the climate changes we are seeing are happening faster now than we’ve ever seen in thousands of years, it is happening all over the world but some parts of the world do feel the impacts more than others.

We’ve seen effects like; melting ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic, more frequent tropical storms, heatwaves, droughts and fires threatening water and food supplies… Which all sounds very scary, big and out of our control I know!

But if society can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put out into the atmosphere, we can help slow down global warming.

Going back to our football match - to even the playing field you need to take some of ‘team carbon’s’ players off to give ‘team earth’ a chance.

So what does that actually look like? Well on a bigger scale our governments have some tough decisions to make to change how reliant the world is on fossil fuels for our energy and transport.

As well as reducing emissions from farming and other industries.

But as individuals we can also make everyday changes; like choosing public transport instead of driving, reducing how much air travel we do and buying less new stuff so that fewer items need to be made.

By making different choices, we can help to reduce carbon emissions and slow down Global Warming.