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JA8. Global Climate Change

Statement

In your readings, you learned about global climate change and the various causes thereof. Compare and contrast how natural- and human-induced processes have influenced global climate change. Be sure to include changes that have occurred in the past as well as those presently occurring. In your opinion, what is the greatest factor influencing global climate change? Defend your position.

Solution

Climate change is such a real threat to the life as we know it; we all remember the winters when where kids and how the winter today has changed since then. Changes were part of the planet’s normal cycle; however, the change may be acute (progress quickly) or chronic (progresses slowly over big number of years). The change may happen at smaller scale (affects only small area of the planet) or large scale (covers large ares).

Many years ago, climate changes had only nature reasons, but today, the human actions have significant effect on the climate change. The human effect is characterized as large-scale acute; while the vast majority of the natural changes are small-scale acute or large-scale chronic.

Natural causes of climate change include volcanic eruptions, solar variations, and changes in ocean currents (Turrentine, 2022). All of them are small-scale acute; that’s, when affecting some area, life may migrate to another area and the planet as a whole survives. There are other types of large-scale chronic changes such as ice ages or the movement of the continents. These changes are slow and the life has time to adapt to the new conditions.

Human activities that affect the climate change include the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and agriculture (Met Office, n.d). All of them are large-scale acute; that is, affects animals and plants have no where else to go, nor a time to adapt to the new conditions.

In my opinion, the greatest factor influencing global climate change is the human activities. As mentioned above, human induced climate change are large-scale acute, and the nature of these changes kills the hope of survival; for example, during the climate change after the dinosaurs extinction, there certain life forms that survived and evolved to the life we know today; but human induced climate change is different to the point that is killing those life forms, and thus the planet may not survive another disaster.

To conclude, climate change is a real threat that is caused by natural and human activities. Even if one argued that natural causes have greater effects, the fact that we are able to control the human activities put a greater responsibility on us to protect the planet, while we can not control the natural causes. I personally feel attached to the climate change problem as I’m surrounded with people who deny the human responsibility in the climate change, and I’m trying to convince them that we are responsible and we need to act now.

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