The worlds climate and conspiracy often go hand in hand, whether in mainstream news or social media feeds. Large groups of people all over the world often choose one side of the argument or the other:s climate change real or just a conspiracy theory? 

Climate change and its causes are creating changes in the weather that is being seen all over the globe. Climate change is the long-term, or yearly shifts in temperature and weather patterns. Weather is the daily changes in temperature, status of the air, and atmosphere of a certain time and place. Greenhouse gasses, human activities, and change in the Earth’s rotation and orbit are all key components to the major shift in the Earth’s global climate. 

Greenhouse gasses can be broken down into three different categories, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. Carbon dioxide or CO2 warms the atmosphere, so when many admissions of carbon dioxide are admitted it creates a hole in the Ozone layer which causes UV rays to hit the earth’s surface. Nitrous oxide or N2O, commonly known as “laughing gas”, is a colorless gas that is stored in the form of liquid and is mostly used as an anesthetic. This particular gas also deplete’s the Ozone layer but 300 times as much as CO2. Lastly, methane or CH4 is an odorless, colorless, highly flammable gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, although methane has a shorter lifespan than carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, it is the most effective for trapping heat. Greenhouse gas emissions are one of the main reasons the climate is having a very dramatic change. Ms. Pedlar was asked what she thought had the largest impact on global climate change. “So I think that the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the contributing factors to the rise of those levels are coming from fossil fuel use. I think that those are the things that contribute the most to greenhouse gas emissions, which I think is the number one cause of global climate change. I think it’s also one of the things that we as humans can control the best.” 

Human activities play a larger role in climate change then most would believe, 95% of the world’s warming has come from human activities. Human activities are responsible for almost all of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. This can come from burning fossil fuels for heating, electricity, and transportation. Transportation takes 27% of greenhouse emissions, electricity takes 25%, industries takes 24%, commercial and residential takes 13%, land use and forestry takes 13%, and agriculture takes 11%. The highest by the year was between 2007 – 2008, reaching up to 7,000 – 8,000 total million metric tons of CO2 equivalents. Mr. Trent was asked which part of the environment he believes is getting depleted the most, “I believe our ocean probably being depleted the most, a lot of people would argue atmosphere but there has been a lot of jumps in the last 50 years to change the way that we interact with our atmosphere, it generally it’s been in a more positive light. There hasn’t been a lot of attention put on the oceans in the last… well ever, as far as I’ve read into it.” 

Changes in the Earth’s rotation and orbit would fall into the category of natural processes, which means we cannot stop or help these events. Although natural processes cannot be singled out to be the cause of climate change. When the Earth changes it’s rotation this causes long periods of cold or warm weather. For example the ice ages or the periods between ice ages, which would be the warmer peaks. The global temperature was about 11 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it is today, which is a large amount considering the warmer and more extreme temperatures.

There can be many different causes to global climate change, none of which can be completely blamed. Even though greenhouse gasses have the largest impact on the earth, human activities are the cause of those emissions. Climate change has caused higher temperatures, which is leading to the melting of the polar ice caps, which causes rising sea levels. We still have time to slow climate change, but not enough to stop it in our lifetime.