Earth | Graphic by Monica Brutto | The Wright State Guardian
Over the last 100 years, the Earth has been rapidly warming due to human activity and greenhouse gasses, which can have large impacts all across the globe.
Weather versus climate
Dr. Volker Bahn, associate professor of biological sciences at Wright State University, put an emphasis on the difference between weather and climate.
According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, weather refers to short-term changes in the atmosphere, while the climate refers to what the weather is like over a long period of time in a specific area. This is why there can be a cold spell in the weather during the winter, but the climate is still warming, Bahn explained.
According to the National Weather Services, weather observations did not begin until the 1800s. Bahn explained that “recordkeeping” before this was more indirect, where people calculated based on ice or trapped gasses to reconstruct paleoclimate, which is much less accurate compared to the measurements now.
Why the change matters
Bahn stated that the globe has gone through warming and cooling processes in the past, but what is so crucially different between those times and now is the rapid rate at which temperatures are rising.
“This has happened in the past plenty of times,” Bahn said. “We had a glacier reaching to here just 20,000 years ago, right? So, this has happened before, but it’s still 20,000 years versus 100 years for this big climate change.”
Dr. Don Cipollini, WSU director of environmental sciences and professor of biological sciences, explained that the Dayton area, as well as other parts of the U.S., are a lot warmer than what is normal for this time of the year.
“It should not be 65 degrees on January 10. People like it because it’s warm and more comfortable, but it’s really not good in terms of what our environment and things that live out there are used to and adapted to, so it’s way out of the ordinary,” Cipollini said.
How we got here
According to Cipollini, the rapid rate at which the globe is warming has been occurring for decades, primarily due to human resources creating greenhouse gasses, which trap heat in the atmosphere and make the globe warmer little by little.
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t fluctuations. We have warm years and cold years, but the long term average is an increase, and it’s predicted to continue to increase until we really try to clamp down and do something about it by controlling emissions, for example,” Cipollini explained.
According to Bahn, these changes have been steadily going up since the time of the Industrial Revolution, which coincided with the turn of the century.
Impact and what this means
Potential effects of a continuously warm winter, according to Cipollini, could lead to a big insect year, pest problems and diseases that survive better over the winter.
The global temperature rate of increase is not natural, which humans can see through severe weather, including increasing droughts, storms, severity and wildfires, or even rising water levels that impact coastal communities, losing glaciers and rivers running dry.
Cipollini explained that these problems can continue to get more severe, leading to death and conflict when resources, such as clean water, become limited.
Cipollini explained that hot temperatures are often more dangerous to people than cold temperatures. There are areas across the globe, such as Europe, where air conditioning is not a usual commodity, so when summers are hot, this can lead to heat stress and heat strokes.
Effect on oceans
According to Bahn, the oceans suffer greatly from the rapid rate of warming, too. Not only are the water levels rising, but the ocean absorbs emitted carbon dioxide, leading to a rise in the ocean’s pH levels. This causes species, including coral, to become softer in the more acidic water; coral and other shallow habitats are crucial nurseries for most of the ocean.
Bahn and Cipollini explained that species and environments cannot adapt quickly enough for the current rate of temperature increase.
Moving forward as a society
Cipollini described that the way to combat this is to turn away from the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and even natural gas. Although it is cleaner in many ways than burning coal or oil, natural gas is still a fossil fuel and produces greenhouse gasses.
Bahn pointed out that these changes cannot happen overnight, explaining a dark forecast of the future.
“But, we’re also going to see these consequences play out even if we were to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions significantly, which we’re still not talking a lot about,” Bahn said. “So, the biggest thing we can do is to try to move in that direction as a society, as a world, toward more cleaner, sustainable forms of energy,” Cipollini said.
