Climate Change

Climate change has been brought about by a variety of human activities, mainly through burning of vast quantities of fossil fuels.

Billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide [CO₂] every year for over two hundred and seventy years has raised the levels of CO₂ from around 280 parts per million to over 420ppm. The amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased along with human emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750. Emissions rose slowly to about 5 gigatons—one gigaton is a billion metric tonnes—per year in the mid-20th century before skyrocketing to more than 35 billion tons per year by the end of the century.

Proof of Climate Change

Apart from measurements of surface temperature rises, one of the most obvious signs are in global ice loss.
Mountain glaciers are shrinking everywhere, in the Peruvian Andes, Puncak Jaya on the island of New Guinea, the Alaskan ranges, the Himalayas, in the Alps
In Chile, a glacier called HPS-12, retreated eight miles between 1985 and 2017. Sea ice has receded drastically; and as it does so less solar radiation is reflected back into space, and so the heat is absorbed by the ocean, disrupting currents and ecosystems; Arctic Ocean sea ice has reduced by 40% since the 1980’s. The great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are melting adding enormous volumes of water to the world’s oceans.
Every year 400 billion tons of ice melting, adding 1mm to global sea levels each year; we are losing huge areas of land. In the vast boreal (forested) regions of the Arctic, permafrost is thawing, upending homes, buildings & other infrastructure, releasing CO₂ and methane [CH₄], a particularly potent greenhouse gas.