Chapter 1. Foundations of Climate Change: What Is Climate Change?

Question 1

What is weather?

Answer 1

Weather refers to the exact state of the atmosphere at a particular location and time.

Question 2

What is climate?

Answer 2

Climate refers to the long-term patterns or statistics of the weather.

Question 3

Besides temperature, what other quantities tell the entire climate change story?

Answer 3

• Precipitation
• Humidity
• Cloudiness
• Visibility
• Wind

Question 4

What is the period on which climate is typically estimated?

Answer 4

The weather statistics estimate the climate over several decades, typically 30 years.

Question 5

What is climate change?

Answer 5

Sometimes referred to as global warming, climate change describes the long-term differences in the statistics of weather patterns measured over multi-decadal periods.

Question 6

Why do we say the warming is not uniform and why it’s important?

Answer 6

Because land warmed more than the ocean and the northern hemisphere warmed more than the tropics or the southern hemisphere; this is important because about 85% of the world’s population lives on land in the northern hemisphere, meaning that they have experienced more warming over the past 150 years than the average global warming.

Question 7

How do we know the oceans are heating?

Answer 7

Looking at the temperature and the sea level, both are getting higher.

Question 8

What are the two key contributing factors to the rise in sea level?

Answer 8

• The melting of grounded ice
• The oceans’ thermal expansion

Question 9

How do scientists estimate earth’s climate change beyond 170 years ago?

Answer 9

Reviewing long-lived, geological, chemical, or biological systems that have the climate imprinted on them.

Question 10

Mention proxies that cover different regions and different time frames to estimate climate change

Answer 10

• Tree rings: These measurements can reveal climate variations in regions where trees grow and experience sea-sons for the last millennium.
• Corals: Analysis of the skeletons of these sea creatures can yield climate conditions in the ocean over millions of years.
• Speleothems: These cave structures can yield estimates of the climate in the region around the cave over the past few hundred thousand years.
• Ice cores: Measuring the chemical composition of ice (mainly in Greenland and Antarctica) yields estimates of the climate over the past million years or so.
• Ocean sediment cores: Analyzing the composition of the mud at the bottom of the ocean provides information about the climate covering the past tens of millions of years.