Climate Change in the Era of Globalization

RUNNING HEAD: CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

Climate Change in the Era of Globalization

POLS 263- AS01

Instructor: Jean-Christophe Boucher April 4th, 2017

Climate Change in the Era of Globalization 2

“Climate change is the inevitable and urgent global change with long term

implications for the sustainable development of all countries”- United Nations.

(Sustainable Development, n.d.) How has climate changed affected your life and have

you noticed climate change being a detriment to your quality of life?

The atmosphere occupies 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, 0.03% carbon

dioxide, and a small percentage of other gases (California Institute of Technology, n.d.).

Carbon and other gases such as, methane, water vapor, nitrous oxide and ozone within

the atmosphere are often called greenhouse gases. The name stems from the idea of an

actual greenhouse since greenhouse gases absorb or trap energy. In the case of the

atmosphere, the energy trapped by the greenhouse gasses comes from the sun, then the

gases act as a layer over the earth’s atmosphere (Department of Ecology State of

Washington, n.d.). Furthermore, this would not be a detriment to the earth’s atmosphere

since the heat being trapped helps prevent the earth from getting too cold, however the

earth’s overall temperature keeping rising rapidly to the points of concern leading to the

concept scientists and environmentalists are calling global warming. Although global

warming is frequently used interchangeably with climate change, climate change without

a doubt goes beyond global warming. The New Zealand Ministry for the Environment

(About Climate Change, n.d.) states, “The process is often called global warming but its

better to think of it as climate change because it is likely to change other aspects of

climate as well as temperature, and bring about more extreme climate events such as

floods, storms, cyclones, and droughts.”

Prior to the 18th, and 19th century, climate change was merely a concept that

scientists believed naturally occurred and was no cause for concern. However, in the

1800’s, particularly the Industrial Revolution, the use of coal sped the process up of

greenhouse gas emissions significantly and with improved and increasing agriculture and

sanitation population growth increased vastly as well (American Institute of Physics,

2017). These occurrences led to the first documented change of climate. From the 1800’s

to mid-1900, during the time when Europe maintained majority of the world’s power,

scientists like Arrhenius and Langley amongst others continued to strive to prove that

human activity does in fact influence climate change by creating equations and models to