Climate change refers to significant, long-term changes in the global climate. The global climate is the connected system of sun, earth and oceans, wind, rain and snow, forests, deserts and savannas, and everything people do, too. The climate of a place can be described as its rainfall, changing temperatures during the year etc. But the global climate is more than the average of the climates of specific places.

A description of the global climate includes how, for example, the rising temperature of the Pacific feeds typhoons which blow harder, drop more rain and cause more damage, but also shifts global ocean currents that melt Antarctica ice which slowly makes sea level rise until New York will be under water. It is this systemic connectedness that makes global climate change so important and so complicated.

Global warming is the slow increase in the average temperature of the earths atmosphere because an increased amount of the energy (heat) striking the earth from the sun is being trapped in the atmosphere and not radiated out into space. The earths atmosphere has always acted like a greenhouse to capture the suns heat, ensuring that the earth has enjoyed temperatures that permitted the emergence of life forms as we know them, including humans. Without our atmospheric greenhouse the earth would be very cold. Global warming, however, is the equivalent of a greenhouse with high efficiency reflective glass installed the wrong way around.

Ionically, the best evidence of this may come from a terrible cooling event that took place some 1,500 years ago. Two massive volcanic eruptions, one year after another placed so much black dust into the upper atmosphere that little sunlight could penetrate. Temperatures plummeted. Crops failed. People died of starvation and the Black Death started its march. As the dust slowly fell to earth, the sun was again able to warn the world and life returned to normal.

Today, we have the opposite problem. Today, the problem is not that too little sun warmth is reaching the earth, but that too much is being trapped in our atmosphere. So much heat is being kept inside greenhouse earth that the temperature of the earth is going up faster than at any previous time in history. NASA provides an excellent course module on the science of global warming.

There are three positions on global warming: (1) that global warming is not occurring and so neither is climate change; (2) that global warming and climate change are occurring, but these are natural, cyclic events unrelated to human activity; and (3) that global warming is occurring as a result primarily of human activity and so climate change is also the result of human activity.

The claim that nothing is happening is very hard to defend in the face or masses of visual, land-based and satellite data that clearly shows rising average sea and land temperatures and shrinking ice masses.

The claim that the observed global warming is natural or at least not the result of human carbon emissions focuses on data that shows that world temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels have been equally high or higher in the past. They also point to the well understood effects of solar activity on the amount of radiation striking the earth and the fact that in recent times the sun has been particularly active.

In general, climate scientists and environmentalists either (1) dispute the data based on, for example, new ice core data or (2) suggest that the timing issue  that is, the rapidity with which the globe has warmed and the climate changed simply do not fit the model of previous natural events. They note also that compared to other stars the sun is actually very stable, varying in energy output by just 0.1% and over a relatively short cycle of 11 to 50 years quite unrelated to global warming as a whole. The data strongly suggests that solar activity affects the global climate in many important ways, but is not a factor in the systemic change over time that we call global warming.

As for the final position that global warming and climate change result from human activity (are anthropogenic), scientists attribute current atmospheric warming to human activities that have increased the amount of carbon containing gases in the upper atmosphere and to increased amounts of tiny particles in the lower atmosphere.

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Article source: https://warmheartworldwide.org/climate-change/ gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8quK3qjo4AIVyp3tCh1RvgkIEAAYAyAAEgLqwvD_BwE