Explain Like I'm 5: What Exactly is Climate Change?
Man am I glad you asked! You’re probably comfortable hearing or saying “climate change” in context, but could you really define it if asked? Here I’m going to walk you through the science of climate change in the hopes that you’ll leave feeling comfortable enough to explain the basics to a friend (or a smart dog). This article is just an 8 minute read and will give you a solid foundation in climate change!
As I’m writing this, it is blazing hot and sunny outside – par for the course in a Texas summer. Wherever you are reading this article, you might be experiencing different weather, but we’re both sharing a climate. Weather refers to the specific events you can witness at one time and place, like a thunderstorm, tornado, or heat wave. Climate refers to long-term averages and patterns over a larger region or even the whole globe. A climatologist once told me that weather was like a certain outfit you can wear, while climate is like your whole entire wardrobe (whoop to Dr. Bombardi). These definitions are important, because when we talk about climate change we are talking about the long-term, not about a few hot or cold seasons in one specific place.
Now that we’re clear on the “climate” bit, what exactly is changing? The climate has been constantly changing and fluctuating ever since earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. These days, climatologists use tools like thermometers and weather balloons to collect data, but we can also be pretty certain about what the climate was like before there were humans here to measure! We are able to learn about earth’s past climates through studying things like rocks, fossils, pollen, tree rings, and ice cores. To give you a little taste of how that works, let’s look at tree rings. When you cut down a tree and count the rings to see how old it is, you can also learn a lot more about the tree’s life; for example, if one ring is very wide then you know there was a very rainy year that gave the tree plenty of water. This process is called dendrochronology, and the data you collect can be layered with other methods of study until we get a clear picture of historical climate. Scientists have been able to use methods like these to reconstruct earth’s climate and even specific weather events dating back hundreds of millions of years.
What we know from millions and millions of years of data is that earth’s climate likes to fluctuate. The graphs go up and down and up and down as far as the eye can see in an absolutely undeniable pattern. This should sound a little familiar, as every year the earth’s temperature goes up and down as we move from warm to cold seasons. When you change the time scale to look at hundreds or thousands of years at a time instead of just one, there is still a wave pattern of warm to cold. You can think of this bigger pattern as warm and cold seasons, but instead of lasting a few months the “season” last thousands of years. We call the cold seasons “glacial periods” and the warm seasons “interglacial periods.” We are living in an interglacial period if you’re curious.
So why should you care about dendrochronology and interglacial periods? It’s important because I want to show you that climatologists have been around the block, much like J. Lo, and know what to expect. Remember here that we’re talking about overall climate – not specific weather forecasts. Based on what we know, climate is NOT acting the way it should be right now. Instead of our comfortable pattern of warm and cool waves, the climate has only been getting warmer, then warmer, then warmer still for decades. Not only are temperatures going up when we don’t expect them to, they are rising at a scary fast rate. Temperatures haven’t risen this fast in the last 2000 years and we are nearing the warmest temperatures that the earth has seen in 11,000 years.
Why is that so bad? We’re not really concerned about frying like a cracked egg on the sidewalk, but rising temperatures make it much harder to grow the food we need to survive as a species. And temperature isn’t the only thing that’s changing – the earth is made up of lots and lots of complex processes (think food chains, photosynthesis, water cycles, rock cycles, ocean currents, etc) and the earth’s temperature is inextricably linked to every single one. In past interglacial periods where temperatures shot up too fast, mass extinctions occurred on scales that would make Thanos jealous.
That’s why we care. That’s why Al Gore has been raising the alarm for all these years. It’s not just your vacation property on the beach that’s in danger of rising sea levels, it’s the life of every person and animal on the planet that’s at stake. If you don’t have chills right now, read that sentence again in a colder room. I want you to have a healthy fear of climate change because it is real, it is happening now, and 98% of climate scientists think that human activity is causing it all. Now with that little bit of fear, I also want you to have some hope. Because humans are the ones causing climate change, we also have a chance to change course for the better! I believe that good changes begin with understanding the problem. I want more people to be educated about the environment, so much so that I’m going to literally write the guidebook. I invite you to poke around through my other articles and soak up everything you can. And don’t worry, when you’re trying to explain interglacials but can’t remember the word, this article will be right here for you to look at again.
Ready to learn how carbon dioxide fits into this mess? Check out this article next.
Here are the websites I used to check my facts and figures:
http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/climate-change/
https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/articles/five-common-claims-made-by-climate-change-skeptics
