How many of you can tell the difference between global warming and climate change? Is there a real difference or are they just two similar ways of referring to one same topic? Together let’s discover what makes them different to finally understand what everyone is talking about!
Tomato - Tomatoe! Potato - Potahto! Anyone who is a real FRIENDS fan will understand the reference! But in this case, the difference is quite big! Global warming and climate change differ both in the way it is measured in time and geographically. But before talking about warming and change, let’s make sure that we all know what the difference is between weather and climate.
Let’s start with the easy one: weather. It is the atmospheric condition over a short period of time, for example a few minutes, an hour, or a day. It can be rain, snow, wind, clouds, a big thunderstorm or even floods. It never snows for a month without it stopping! The English might say that it always rains in the UK but it does occasionally stop! Sometimes…
This is what we call weather!
So what’s climate? It is the atmospheric condition over a long period of time (usually 30 years). When we talk about climate we are talking about rainfall patterns, average temperatures or humidity. Everything on a BIGGER scale. Let’s take for example the Amazon rainforest! Its average humidity is 88% during the rainy season. You will NEVER see someone tell you that the average humidity today was 20% or that it started snowing! Even during the dry season, the humidity is still around 77% meaning that it might rain more or less, the average temperatures or the average humidity rate remain similar.
In other words, the weather might change a lot during a week but the climate remains the same. This is what clearly differentiates climate from weather!
Now let’s go to Level 2! #PokemonEvolution! Time to become a real explorer! What IS the difference between Global Warming and Climate Change?
To understand global warming we have to go back in history… (pause)… Once upon a time, when the dinosaurs once ruled the earth… no, I’m joking! Global warming is actually the long-term heating of our planets surface since the pre-industrial period (1859-1900). Who was born around that time to give you an idea? Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Marie Curie (1867-1934, the first woman to win a Nobel prize), Thomas Edison (1847-1931) or even Queen Victoria (1819-1901). This is when we started burning fossil fuel, letting many greenhouse gases escape into our atmosphere, creating the beginnings of the greenhouse effect.
Now, if you are like me, you must have the feeling that Thomas Edison was alive a very, very, very, veeerrrryyy long time ago… Well, we’ve been ejecting greenhouse gases since then! Obviously not in the same quantities as today, and clearly Vincent Van Gogh had other ear-ssues than thinking about gases he couldn’t imagine would be so impactful to our planet. Data shows us that the average temperature has risen 1ºC since then, increasing about 0.2ºC per decade.
Let’s go to Climate Change! Let’s think on a more regional scale for now. Climate change is the long-term change of the usual weather in every region of our planet. This means that not everyone is suffering the same effects, depending on where you live. Why is this happening? The usual weather that we were once used to is changing due to human activities and it has a real impact on our planet. Greenhouse gases create a blanket that does not allow heat to escape, and therefore traps it. This heat then raises average surface temperatures in every region, which also raises the average temperatures of our oceans. To make things more understandable, let me explain it with food… Imagine you have a nice, yummy pizza (with a bit of basil, pineapple, etc.) in an oven. By the time it is ready, if you don’t open the door, the pizza will start suffering. The basil will turn black, the pineapple will dehydrate and start looking like a pimple, the crust will end up too hard, and what seemed like a nice pizza now looks like sh… let’s say… not nice at all! Different consequences happened to each ingredient, at a different speed, but one thing is sure, it was a bad pizza change.
This is exactly what data records are showing us! Our climate is changing because there is a change in land and ocean temperatures. There is a loss of ice in our poles. A loss of glaciers in our mountains. There is a rise in sea level. Imagine what Van Gogh would think about all this! I am sure he would ear-up with anger!
Climate change, due to global warming (everything makes sense now right?), is causing important changes in our weather around the world causing heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, droughts, and more clouds in our skies (the next time you experience turbulence on a plane, think about the clouds…). How can we avoid such extreme weather changes causing climate change and caused by global warming? The answer is easy: let’s stop warming our planet.
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