The Low Carbon Partnership
Solar Power
What is Climate Change?
The word ‘climate’ means the average weather conditions over a number
of years; including temperature, wind and rainfall. When we talk about
climate change, we mean the unusual changes in the Earth’s weather patterns
that have happened over the last 100 years.
It is true that the weather is always changing and sometimes the weather changes in ways we really don’t expect. For instance, we might have a warm sunny day in the middle of winter or a cold windy day in the middle of summer. Recording the temperatures of each day helps us find the average temperature for the whole year. Doing this in many different parts of the world lets us find the average global temperature. When all temperatures are taken together, we would expect any ups and downs in the year to cancel each other out and the average temperature to stay roughly the same from one year to the next. However, scientists have found that the temperature is not staying the same and our planet is actually getting warmer each year. This is called ‘global warming’ and it is a major part of climate change.
Extreme changes in climate
are nothing new on Earth. In its long history,
there have been times when the Earth’s climate warmed, causing ice to melt
and sea levels to rise so that much more of our planet was covered in water.
At other times the Earth has been very cold; these ‘ice ages’, saw huge
areas of the planet covered in snow and ice. These might sound like drastic
changes in the Earth’s climate, but they happened very gradually over thousands
of years.
