Exam #1 (Climate-105) Flashcards
What are the major impacts from climate change?
Temperature and precipitation regime changes; Increases in extreme weather events; Increases in flooding; Sea level rise.
Examples: overall warmer temperatures, relatively more hot extremes than cold; regional changes in total precipitation, relatively less snow than rain, drought and wildfire, increasing riverine flooding events; rising global mean sea level (not reflected everywhere by relative sea level) and increases in coastal flooding events.
What is Drought?
A drought is a prolonged period of dry weather caused by a lack of precipitation that results in serious water shortages for some activity, population, or ecological system.
Example: in 2012 more than half the land area in the United States experienced either moderate or more intense drought.
What is Global Mean Sea Level?
The average height of all the world’s oceans.
It can be raised only by adding water mass (e.g., by ice sheet melting), changing the volume of existing ocean water (e.g., warming it), or changing the depth of the ocean’s basins by movement of the Earth’s crust.
What is Relative (local) Sea Level?
The height of the sea with respect to a land benchmark, averaged over a time period long enough that fluctuations caused by waves or tides average out.
Regional sea level trends vary from place to place, primarily because of ocean circulation and its interaction with the shape of the land and the seafloor, and gravitational effects, such as the centrifugal force from Earth’s rotation. Groundwater pumping may also contribute by moving water from crustal aquifers into the ocean.
Global Mean Sea Level
vs.
Relative (local) Sea Level
Local sea level varies from place to place; by definition, global mean sea level may vary only with time.
The distinction underscores both concepts.
What is Phenology?
A key component of life on earth, it refers to the timing of the annual cycles of plants and animals and their interconnections.
Examples include the timing of tree leaf-out, plant flowering, bird nesting, and wildlife migration.
What is Ocean Acidification?
Refers to an increase in ocean acidity caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide in the ocean reacts with seawater to produce carbonic acid, lowering the pH of the ocean.
What are Ecosystem Services?
An ecosystem refers to the animals, plants, and microorganisms that live in one geographic place as well as the environmental conditions that support them. Ecosystem services include the products and services provided by ecosystems.
Examples include food, fuel, timber, water, clean air, and medicines, as well as less material benefits, such as regulation of local climate conditions, aesthetic value, and cultural identity, among others.
What are Vulnerable Populations?
Populations that experience greater risk than the general population for adverse health impacts from climate change, with the risk varying depending on the type of climate impact and the geographic location.
Vulnerable populations include seniors, children, pregnant women, and homeless individuals; some communities of color; indigenous peoples; some immigrants and second-language-speaking populations; low-income individuals; certain occupational groups; and people with disabilities, pre-existing medical conditions, or mental illness.
What are Cascading Impacts?
Effects that result from interdependencies between systems and subsystems of coupled natural and socioeconomic systems in response to changes and feedback loops.
Example: exposure of people from water-borne illnesses from failure of water infrastructure.
What is Climigration?
The permanent migration of human communities due to climate change.
Example: The population decrease of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, after flooding by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
What is Supply Chain? (1)
The network of all the individuals, organizations, resources, activities, and technology involved in the creation and sale of a product.
Example: the delivery of source materials from the supplier to the manufacturer through to its eventual delivery to the end user. The network includes nodes, such as factories or retail stores, and links such as delivery trucks.
What is Supply Chain? (2)
The movement of materials as they flow from their source to the end customer.
Examples: purchasing, manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, customer service, demand planning, supply planning, and supply chain management.
Supply Chain (1)
vs.
Supply Chain (2)
The term can describe either the product network itself or the flow of goods or services within it.
Example: An extreme climate event can shut down a factory (a supply chain node), interrupting the transportation system (a supply chain link) that delivers its products.
What are Synergistic Impacts?
Impacts for which the interaction of one impact with another causes a greater effect than the individual impacts would alone.
Example: California wildfires exacerbated by climate change and reduced remediation because COVID-19 both reduced use of available convict labor and state funds available to pay them.
