The first week’s learnings of the Climate Change course have included:
- Key principle is ‘blanket Earth‘.
“A blanket traps heat and re-radiates some of it back to whoever is lucky, or unlucky, enough to be rolled up in it”
- Climate is a system.
“containing a series of components that interact with one another”
- Differences between Climate and Weather
– weather is what we see daily (temp, humidity, wind, sun) that can change by the hour.
– climate looks at how weather changes over a long period of time (typically 30 years).
– climate system=interactions between atmosphere and oceans, land masses, vegetation & gases in the atmosphere + sun
- why do we get the two confused?
– we do not stop to think about the differences
– eg of weather change: front brings rain to a summer day
– eg of climate change: changing El Nino and la Nina weather patterns; desertification of once-green areas due to deforrestation