Climate change or Global warming? What do you call it?

Even though both are accurate and real, but they bring different meanings. It’s not your fault

if you think global warming is climate change because it is a type of climate change. The broader

term covers changes beyond warm temperatures such as changes in cloud patterns. If you have

been hearing the news lately, then you might have heard about President Trump making claims

that the scientists stopped referring to global warming and started calling it climate change because

“the weather has been so cold” in winter. But it is a false statement and researchers have been

using both the terms for almost a decade now.

However you call it, the threat is real. “OUR PLANET IS HEATING UP!”. Do you know

how much? When the readings were taken in 2017, researchers found that the Earth had warmed

by roughly 2 degrees (more than 1 degree) since 1880. The number may look like its small, but by

taking the surface of an entire planet into account, it is actually high which explains why much of

the worlds ice is starting to melt and the ocean levels are rising. If the greenhouse gases continue

unchecked, scientists say, the global temperature would ultimately exceed 8 degrees which is a big

threat to mankind.

Greenhouse gases are not new to us. We have known about it for more than a century. But

nothing has changed. Greenhouse gas that has been emitted since the industrial revolution has

caused high levels of air pollution. Specifically, Carbon Dioxide or CO2 has increased 43 percent

above the pre-industrial level so far.

Are we responsible for the increase? Many do not take the blame for this increase as CO 2 is

naturally found in the atmosphere even before the industrial revolution started. Hard evidence,

including studies that use radioactivity to distinguish industrial emissions from natural emissions,
shows that the extra gas is coming from human activity. Carbon dioxide levels rose and fell

naturally in the long-ago past, but those changes took thousands of years. Geologists say that

humans are now pumping the gas into the air much faster than nature has ever done.

Finally, the greenhouse gases which are being released by human activity are the cause of air

pollution and global warming. Necessary measures had to be taken to contain the threat and

eradicate it in the future. Carbon taxes, carbon trading and so on, these are just shorthand

descriptions of methods to put a price on emissions, which economists say is one of the most

important steps society could take to limit them. Moreover, researches have been done to convert

CO2 into harmless gases. I hope such measures would come into practice soon. Lets protect the

earth together