Climate change is an ongoing problem that affects everyone in different ways. It has many causes, including human activity, natural events, and changes in the Earth's atmosphere. The effects include rising temperatures, melting ice caps, changing weather patterns, and increased risks for disease and death.
Human activity, primarily the combustion of fossil fuels, which emits carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is to bear responsibility for global warming, which is the progressive heating of the Earth's surface, oceans, and atmosphere.
Climate change is based on the long shift in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth's local, regional, and global climates—for instance, conditions becoming warmer, wetter, or drier—over several decades or more.
Effects of Global Warming on the enviroment
Extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, cyclones, blizzards, and rainstorms are becoming more common as a result of global warming. Such occurrences will become more common and more intense in the future.
1. Temperature: Since the 1950s, it is very likely that most land areas have become warmer at all times of year as a result of human activity. Temperatures at night have risen at a faster rate than those during the day. Future climate change will result in more extremely hot days and fewer extremely cold days.
2. Flooding:Warmer air holds more water vapor. When this turns to rain, it tends to come in heavy downpours potentially leading to more floods.
3. Droughts: Climate change influences a variety of drought-related factors, including how much rain falls and how quickly it evaporates. It is expected to exacerbate and increase the frequency of droughts across much of the world. Due to limitations in the amount of data available about past droughts, it is frequently impossible to confidently attribute droughts to human-induced climate change.
4. Oceans: Rising sea levels as a result of thermal expansion and melting of glaciers and ice sheets, as well as warming of the ocean surface, which leads to increased temperature stratification, are ongoing effects. Large-scale changes in ocean circulation are also possible. The oceans also serve as a carbon dioxide sink, absorbing much of what would otherwise remain in the atmosphere, but increased CO2 levels have resulted in ocean acidification. Furthermore, as the temperature of the oceans rises, their ability to absorb excess CO2 decreases. The oceans have also served as a heat sink, absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere.
5. Wildfires: Warmer temperatures typically cause soil and underbrush to be drier for longer periods of time, increasing the risk of wildfires. Hot, dry conditions increase the likelihood of wildfires becoming more intense and burning for a longer period of time once they begin.
6. Heat Waves: Heat waves with high humidity have become more common and severe in the last 30–40 years. The frequency of extremely hot nights has more than doubled. The area where extremely hot summers are observed has increased by a factor of 50–100. Heat waves with high humidity endanger human health, whereas heat waves with low humidity create dry conditions that fuel wildfires. The mortality rate from extreme heat is higher than the combined mortality rate from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes.
7. Tropical Cyclones: Global warming not only causes changes in tropical cyclones, but it may also exacerbate some of their effects through sea level rise.
8. Land: Soils will heat up as a result of climate change. As a result, the size of the soil microbe population could increase by 40–150 percent. Warmer conditions would favor the growth of certain bacteria species, altering the composition of the bacterial community. Elevated CO2 levels would accelerate plant and soil microbe growth, slowing the soil carbon cycle and favoring oligotrophs, which are slower growing and more resource efficient than copiotrophs.
