Climate Change

Climate change is a major concern, at least to most people. Some people are genuinely panicked about it while others are not worried at all. The reason that there are such different opinions is that it is not at all clear what the consequences of climate change will be. What is clear is that it is happening and it will have an impact on the way that we live our lives and we need to be prepared for that.

Climate change occurs when the average weather changes, it is not simply that the temperature has gotten warmer for a brief period. Climate change actually involves all parts of the weather, that would be temperature, wind and precipitation. Climate change can occur on the local level but usually when people talk about it they are talking about a global scale. The scientific evidence suggests that we are at the current time experiencing a period of climate change as the temperatures on a global scale do seem to be rising by a fairly significant amount.

While there is a general agreement that climate change is happening what is not clear is exactly what is causing it. At least part of the cause is natural, the earth's climate has changed many times over the years so it is a given that it is going to happen again. Exactly why this is the case is not clear. At the same time it is widely believed that people are responsible for a big part of climate change. The reason for this is that we have released large amounts of greenhouse gases into the environment which has caused a change in weather patterns.

The big question is what are going to do about climate change? It is clear that we are going to have to make a concerted effort to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that we produce; of course this is easier said than done. In addition it is not clear that even if we stopped producing greenhouse gases that the process of climate change will stop. That means that in large part we are going to have to live with the consequences. There will be major changes in the way that we live as the result of climate change and we need to be prepared for that.

One of the reasons that it is so hard to reduce greenhouse emissions is that all countries are worried that it will hurt their economy to do so. As a result nobody wants to do it unless everybody else does it as well so that they are not at an economic disadvantage. This creates a problem since the rapidly industrializing countries like China and India don't want to risk slowing their economic growth. However since they are responsible for so much of the greenhouse gases any attempt to limit them would be meaningless if these countries didn't take part.