I am very excited about my degree and learning more about sustainability. There are many students in my class that have greater knowledge in a sustainable life than myself. I like this defination…it paints a clear picture for me and possibly for others on my level 🙂
“Climate change can be complicated, jargony, and technical, but it doesn’t have to be.
If you’ve only got 10 seconds, and you’ve not thought a lot about climate change, here’s what you need to know:
People, our energy, our economies and our lives, create pollution. Some of this pollution traps the sun’s heat in the earth’s atmosphere, too much heat. So far only a little too much, but in the future it could become a big problem — maybe the biggest problem human beings have ever known.
Yes, it’s actually much more complicated than that. But what did you expect in 10 seconds?
If you’ve got 60 more seconds, here’s how climate change works:
“Greenhouse gases” like carbon dioxide are a big part of human life as we know it; they’re created when we breath and when we burn things — especially when we burn the fossil fuels like oil and coal that make our world go. They’re called “greenhouse gasses” because they trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere and cause the whole earth to heat up.
We’ve burned A LOT of fossil fuels over the last few hundred years and while there’s disagreement over just how much warming is going to happen, as a result of all the additional greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, there is no doubt that the earth is heating up. It’s been measured. By thermometers (among other methods).
This is a problem because when the planet heats up, the entire ecosystem starts to change. If the earth heats up a lot and the ecosystem changes a lot, that could have big implications for life on earth. Especially life as human beings have known it for the last 10,000 years.
“There are lots of uncertainties in climate science. But that does not mean it is fundamentally wrong.”
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/moving-by-degrees/research.html
kberryhill 