Climate Change Flashcards
Air Pollutants
Ozone, lead, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide
How Air Pollutants Affect the Economy
Fixing it costs money - People don’t go to work and industry slows - More illnesses and diseases to treat
Clean Air Act
Established in 1963 - Established funding for the study and cleanup air pollution - Has improved air quality in US air - We changed gasoline contents (removed lead from it)
Thermal Inversion
When warm air sits over cold air, holding everything in - The pollutants cannot escape from the warm air
Global Warming
We don’t know why it’s happening - Not every location on Earth has the same response to climate change - Losing about 35,000 km of sea ice per year
How to tell if a computer model is accurate
Compare to other models - Get computer model to predict past data then you compare it to what really happened
Ocean Acidification
The ocean takes up excess CO2 and it is chemically converted to CARBONIC ACID (this causes the pH of the ocean to decrease and become more acidic) - Ocean is a carbon sink - Ocean takes up CO2, chemical reaction occurs (CO2 to carbon acid)
Natural causes of climate change
Solar cycles (sun gets hotter) - Earth’s tilt and orbit (there’s more variation that impacts amount of solar radiation reaching earth) - Volcanoes warm in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses released (sulfate aerosols cause cooling)
Weather
Day-to-day changes
Climate
Long term trends in temperature and precipitation
Monitoring / Measuring Worldwide
Air, surface, temperature, humidity, precipitation - Data logger
As CO2 Increases
Temperatures also increase (and vice versa)
Greenhouse Effects
Carbon dioxide - Methane (livestock, landfills, can produce energy)
Chloro Fluro Carbons (CFC’s)
Aerosol spray cans back in the 50’s - Found in some coolants
Nitrous Oxide
In coal plants and cars
Tropospheric Ozone
A colorless gas and a secondary pollutant created by the reaction of nitrogen oxides and volatile carbon - Not very important
How to find CO2 levels
Ice cores that provide data from thousands of years ago - The deeper you drill, the older the ice is, which contains some of the gasses
