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Lets face it we all know the earth is in trouble. In the past few months we have experienced such bizarre weather. I mean, even though we experienced the lighter side of hurricane Irene in the first few weeks of school we still live in New Hampshire and things like this don’t happen up here. In my speech I’ll be going over what climate change is, what the government is doing about it, some of the effects it has had on the US weather and finally going to briefly touch up on the phenomena of the whole situation. So what is climate change?
The united states environmental protection agency defines it as “any significant change in measures of climate (such as temperature, precipitation, or wind) lasting for an extended period. ” Climate change is the preferred term for what’s going on earth right now because it helps state that there are other changes happening in addition to just the temperature changing. Global warming is believed to be a part of climate change and is not believed to be the correct term for all of what’s going on in the weather now.
Climate change is believed to be caused by a few factors. The few factors include natural factors, natural processes within the climate system and human activity. Natural factors include possible changes in the suns energy and how it reflects on the earth and the slow changes of the earths orbit around the sun. Natural processes within the climate system include some changes in the oceans circulation.
Finally human activity that contributes to climate change is one that change the atmospheres makeup such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Whatever all that means right? I can sit up here and give you guys all these facts and numbers and it wont really mean much to you guys but I can tell you these really eye opening ones that might make you think twice about what this all means. In the past century alone the global temperature has gone up 1. degrees fare height and within the last 30 years the rate of warming has been 3 times greater than the rate over the last 100 years! Whats a few degrees, right? The increases may appear minor compared to short-term weather changes from night to day . In global climate terms, however, warming at this rate would be much larger and faster than any of the climate changes over at least the past 10,000 years. (according to EPA) Sounding like a bigger deal now… Whats being done about it!?