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Climate Change

What is climate change?

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In a nutshell, climate change refers to the rapid change in climate, generally on Earth.

However, climate change is not a one-off event, and it is not entirely human-caused though human activity has severely accelerated this change.

What are the causes of climate change?

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Human causes

Climate change is accelerated by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels (e.g. coal, oil, gas), and these activities cause CO₂ and methane buildup, both of which are greenhouse gases. These gases trap heat within Earth's atmosphere and keeps it warm, but also can harm Earth if more gases affect the natural greenhouse effect.

Natural causes

Natural causes are events such as Milankovitch cycles, sunspot cycles, and glacial/interglacial periods that naturally affect how much sunlight and heat Earth receives.

Milankovitch cycles

The collective effect of multiple aspects that affect Earth's climate, such as eccentricity (how elliptical Earth's orbit around the Sun is) and obliquity (aka axial tilt which is defined as the angle between the axis of rotation and normal to its orbital plane).

Sunspot cycles

Aka Solar cycles or Schwabe cycles, they are periodic changes in the Sun's activity over 11 years, measured in the amount of sunspots present. At a solar maximum, Earth experiences higher temperatures as sunpots and coronal ejections blast solar radiation. At a solr minimum, the opposite happens.