11: Climate and The Environment
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- 11.1: Carbon Cycle
- Carbon, just like all other elements, cycles through the environment and is constantly in the process of changing forms and locations. In this section, as in many other pieces of scientific literature, we will periodically refer to carbon by its chemical symbol, C. There is no new carbon in the world, rather, all carbon is continuously recycled from one form to another.
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- 11.2: Human Impacts on The Carbon Cycle
- The development of coal-fueled steam power, and later transportation following the discovery of large oil deposits, had enormous influence on the economic and social structure of the world. As the world accelerated in the production and transportation of manufactured goods, the production and consumption of fossil fuels grew. As economic growth continued to increase, so did the production of carbon dioxide through fossil fuel combustion.
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- 11.6: Other climate influencers
- The Earth's climate is continually changing. If we are to understand the current climate and predict the climate of the future, we need to be able to account for the processes that control the climate. One hundred million years ago, much of North America was arid and hot, with giant sand dunes common across the continent's interior.
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- 11.7: Quaternary Climate — Information From Ice Cores
- In Module 5.2 we saw the major drivers of the climate—the energy that comes from the Sun (insolation) and the properties of the planet that determine how long that energy stays in the Earth system (albedo, greenhouse gases). In this section, we will look at the recent natural changes in Earth's climate, and we will use these drivers to understand why the climate has changed.
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- 11.8: Climate Change – An Effect of Global Warming
- In this section, we will discuss the effects of climate change, both those that have already been observed, as well as future predictions based on scientific climate models. Here, the differences between the terms global warming and climate change become apparent.
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- 11.9: Looking Forward- Climate Strategies
- While the situation surrounding global climate change is in serious need of our attention, it is important to realize that many scientists, leaders, and concerned citizens are making solutions to climate change part of their life’s work. The two solutions to the problems caused by climate change are mitigation and adaptation, and we will likely need a combination of both in order to prosper in the future.
Thumbnail: Alternate version of the greenhouse effect. (CC BY-SA 4.0; A loose necktie via Wikimedia )