Papers I wrote for school

Climate change

Is climate change a natural cycle or man made. Climate change - A long term change in the Earth's climate, especially a change due to an increase in the average temperature. The effects of climate change include, The duration and intensity of heatwaves in cities that currently experience them; Increased droughts in dry areas and in dry regions, evapotranspiration may produce periods of drought, defined as below average levels of rivers, lakes and groundwater. Lack of enough soil moisture in agricultural areas. Rainfall has declined since 1970. Sea levels rising, shrinking land ice such as, mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets is releasing water into the Oceans. Ocean temperature is rising which results in water expansion.

Sunspots are the first cause of natural climate change. Sunspots are storms on the suns surface that one marked by intense magnetic activity can play host to solar flares and hot gassy ejections from the sun's corona. Studies have indicated that sunspot activity has doubled in the last century. The apparent results down here on Earth is that the sun glows brighter by 0.1% than it did 100 years ago.

The second cause of global climate change is variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun. The Milankovitch Theory which is named after the mathematician Yugoslav, who first proposed it. The Milankovitch theory is the astronomical or orbital theory of climate variations. The original Milankovitch theory identifies three types of variations in the earth's orbit around the Sun which could act as mechanisms to change the global climate.

The changes include the following.

-Changes in the tilt of the earth's axis (obliquity)

-Changes in the shape of earth's orbit (eccentricity)

-The shifting of the equinoxes (precession)

The three orbital variations together affect the total amount of sunlight received by the earth, and distribution of that sunlight at different latitudes and at different times. It is expected that changes in climate as a result of orbital variations would occur in tens of thousands of years. The Milankovitch theory of climate change has been used to explain the global climate of the last 2 million years, with changes between warmer interglacial periods and colder Ice Ages occurring over a 10,000 year cycle.

The last cause for natural climate change is variations in the sun's temperature. The Sun's output varies over time. Scientists track these changes using observations of sunspots and recently satellite measurements. As mentioned before the sun glows brighter by 0.1% than 100 years ago. This means the in the next 100,000 years the sun could glow twice as bright. The director, Sami Solanki, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany said, "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures","The sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently — in the last 100 to 150 years," Mr. Solanski said. Globally, 1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide weather records were first collected in 1860. To determine the sun's role in global warming, Mr. Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the sun's surface known as sunspots, which are