Lesson 2 Of The Informative Website Explaining Climate Change

Global warming has been causing headlines internationally as we are starting to see major changes in our environment. However, there are still those individuals who deny that global warming is actually taking place right now. The truth is that our planet is going through some major changes, which will be scientifically and mathematically proved in the remainder of this report. (1) Before getting into detail about “global warming”, these terms must be explained to respectively describe what is happening to our planet. In the informative website “Explaining Climate Change”, ‘Climate change’ refers to changes in atmospheric conditions over a long period of time, as in over many years to many centuries. For example, the winters in Alberta, Canada

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the last 50 years has been determined by air sampling, in which it has been calculated that the slope has increased 1.449807 ppmv/ year (The King's University College, Edmonton, Canada et al.). While looking further into Lesson 2 of the website, there is a graph that demonstrates as steep rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the last 250 years. More specifically, the graph shows a key in which different carbon dioxide concentrations were measured in different parts of the world, and surprisingly the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide pressure rise had the steepest rise of all five locations. Mauna Loa is a volcano located in Hawaii, which has erupted 33 times according to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory website. This volcano is also the largest on the planet, and its last eruption happened April 15, 1984. Mauna Loa has grown rapidly and in a short amount of time, as it became the largest in the world and it continues to erupt more frequently ("Mauna Loa Eruption History"). Mauna Loa’s eruptions are shown to correlate with the graph shown in Lesson 2, which have greatly contributed to the sharp rise of

There are other factors involved between this relationship such as altered vegetation, land surface characteristics, and ice-sheet extent. These factors all explain the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide, but the majority of this correspondence is due to the feedback between carbon dioxide and climate in the carbon cycle ("Global Climate Change