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 What is Climate Change? |
Fossil fuels contain carbon which has been buried in the ground for millions of years. When burnt, the carbon is released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide , a colourless odourless gas.
Carbon dioxide is one of the gasses known as greenhouse gasses , so-called because they trap the sun's heat within the atmosphere in much the same way as the glass in a greenhouse traps the heat.
As the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere increases, the global temperature rises. The effects of this are wide ranging, and include:
- Melting of polar ice caps and glaciers in mountainous regions
- Desertification
- Rising sea levels due to melted ice
- Reduced albedo of the planet due to melted ice
- Flooding due to melting of glaciers
- Flooding due to increased sea levels
- More extreme weather, like Hurricane Katrina
Collectively, these effects are known as climate change.
Our planet exists in a delicate equilibrium with negative feedback mechanisms to keep it in balance. If the proportion of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere gets too high, the planet gets too hot, it could set off all manner of positive feedback cycles, sending our climate and weather systems completely out of control.
Join the ClimatePrediction experiment
Climate science is a very complex area, and we can't be certain yet exactly how the climate will change. To understand this better, the BBC and Oxford University have launched the ClimatePrediction.net experiment. Using the same principle as the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the experiment takes advantage of unused processor time on people's home PCs to run many slight variations of global climate models, to determine which are the most accurate models of our climate systems. If you have a reasonably recent PC (not suitable for laptops) and a broadband connection (or a dial-up connection and lots of patience), download the software and start the model running on your own PC. It even comes with a screensaver showing how the model on your PC is getting on.
See also this animated guide to the greenhouse effect on the BBC web site.
The following animated guide comes from Defra's ClimateChallenge web site.