ONUESOKE FOUNDATION: CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS CAUSES

· Climate is the average weather in a place over many years. Climate takes hundreds, thousands, even millions of years to change.

· Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time. Climate change can also be referred to a change in average weather conditions.

CAUSES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The earth’s climate is naturally variable on all time scale. Its long term state and average temperature are regulated by the balance between incoming and outgoing energy, which determines the Earth’s energy balance. Any factor that causes a sustained change to the amount of incoming or outgoing energy can lead to climate change. Factors that cause climate change can be divided into two categories- those related to natural processes and those related to human activity. Human are increasingly influencing the climate and the earth’s temperature by burning fossil fuels, cutting down rain forest and farming livestock.

All of us in our daily lives contribute our bit to this change in the climate. Give these points a serious thought:

· Electricity is the main source of power in the urban areas. All our gadgets run on electricity generated mainly from thermal power plants. These thermal power plants are run on fossil fuels (mostly coal) and are responsible for the emission of huge amounts of green house gases and other pollutants.

· We generate large quantities of waste in the form of plastics that remain in the environment for many years and cause damage.

· Cars, buses, and trucks are the principal ways by which people and goods are transported in most of our cities. These are run mainly on petrol or diesel, both fossil fuels.

· Timber is used in large quantities for construction of houses, which means that large areas of forest have to be cut down.

· We use huge quantity of paper in our work at school and in offices. Have we ever thought about the number of trees that we use in a day?

· A growing population has meant more and more mouths to feed. Because the land area available for agriculture is limited and also shrinking as a result of ecological degradation. High- yielding varieties of crops are being grown to increase the agricultural output from a given area of land. However, such high-yielding varieties of crops require large quantities of fertilizers, and more fertilizer means more emissions of nitrous oxide, both from the field into which it is put and the fertilizer industry that make it. Pollution also results from the run-off of fertilizer into water bodies.