What can we do about Climate Change?

We can do it!

Preventions can be taken to reduce the effects of greenhouse gases. By looking at the causes and effects of the man-made destruction, there has been catastrophic destruction that is taking place and changing the colorful and green earth to black and white, scary earth. If humans continue to behave in these directions then over a period of time there will be sudden catastrophe, which will take place on earth like tsunami (due to gradual melting of glaciers) that we human will not able to bear the effect of destruction.

So let’s all work smartly and sensibly.

Some of the simple, daily events that we can do to reduce the global warming are –

1.     Travel - drive less and car-pool in order to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide. Also, use of bicycle and a habit of walking to reduce the use of car for a shorter distance. This also gives our body some exercise.

2.     Buy local food, fresh food from farmer, don’t buy frozen food.

3.     Change of energy efficiency – a) Turn off the light when not in use.

b) reduce the use of hair-drier, c) use cloth line instead of dryer

4.     Eat less meat – more manure produced by the cows will be useful for the farmers to produce fresh food for us. Reduce eating frozen food.

5.     Planting of trees

6.     Recycle and reuse

7.     Bring awareness among your group of people you know – Family and Friends

Health Problems

Due to increase in the amount of annual rainfall, more contamination of water in the third world countries has led to mosquito-prone diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, etc. For examples, countries like Africa and India.

Some of the known infections have increased its severity in spreading the disease vastly among animals and humans are shown in the table below.

As we all studies in our biology classes, the bacterial diseases can be cured by antibiotics courses. Until a certain stage of the disease, depending on which disease it is. But viral disease can’t be cured even with antibiotics. This explains that the viral diseases are much more dangerous and harmful as compared to bacterial diseases.

S No.	Disease	Type of infection	Cause
1.	Avian Influenza	Viral	Usually occurs in wild birds via secretion and feces.  This disease is spread among humans from poultry.
2.	Cholera	Bacterial	It is a water-borne disease affecting people in the in the developing world. However, its bacterial once contracted to human can be a deadly.
3.	Malaria	Bacterial	This disease is transformed from one human to another by the vector, a female mosquito that sucks the human blood.
4.	Ebola	Viral	This disease occurs due to unusual pattern of monsoon/dry seasons.
5.	Plague	Bacterial	One of the oldest diseases caused by the spread of rodents and their fleas.
6.	Sleeping Sickness	Bacterial	This disease is caused by the Tsetse fly. The major source of this disease is cattle.
7.	Tuberculosis	Bacterial	Infection that is caused in lungs (major part of the body) and other organs too.
8.	Yellow Fever	Viral	Mosquitoes carry this disease. With change in temperature the disease gets spread to other new regions.

Asthma is another major health-concerned issue that is caused by the change in the global atmosphere. High amount of greenhouse gases are emitted out from more industries and leading to air-pollution. This pollution in the air is leading to allergies and difficulties in breathing; asthma.

Increase in Rainfall and Increase in Sea Levels

To maintain the global water evaporation from oceans, worldwide must be balanced by rainfall into the oceans. Earth's atmosphere contains only 0.001 percent of the Earth's water, yet the currents of air carries water vapor over land resulting in precipitation.

Increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, has led to warming at the surface, by nearly 0.6°C (1.0°F) during the twentieth century. It is widely believed that this trend will continue in the twenty-first century, leading to a higher sea-surface temperature, among other factors.

One perceptive consequence of a warmer ocean surface is a large vapor-pressure difference between the sea surface and the adjacent atmosphere. This would enhance the evaporation rate, and hence increase rainfall. For instance, a global warming by 4°C (7.2°F) is expected to increase global precipitation by about 10 percent. Research suggests that the increase is more likely to come as heavy rainfall, rather than as more frequent rainfall.

There are few changes suggested for the evidence in change of hydrologic cycle. First, due to global warming there had been an increase in night-time temperature. Daily minimum temperatures have increased at twice the rate of daytime temperatures since 1950 (roughly 1.0°C versus 0.5°C). This suggests an increase in cloudiness and/or humidity at night, and increased evaporation and cooling during the daytime. (This cooling varies according to body heat evaporating).

Second, satellite data suggest, mean (average) atmospheric water-vapor concentration has increased. This enables storms to generate more rainfall.

Third, amounts of rain have changed in different ways in various regions during the last 80 years, but they generally have increased in the middle and high latitudes, often in excess of 10 percent.

In the United States, annual rainfall has increased by about 10 percent during the twentieth century, on an average. The heaviest rainfall are expected to occur near Polar Regions, for two reasons. One, the warming rate has been and will continue to be the highest there, and warmer air can hold more water vapors. Two, the warming will reduce the extent of sea ice, thereby allowing more evaporation.

There has been decrease in rainfall that has been observed in some regions. In the Northern Hemisphere tropics, especially in Africa, a significant decrease in rainfall has occurred since 1950.  Thereby this region is under intense drought.

Changes in rain events, such as monsoon rains, can be either beneficial or harmful. For instance, decrease in rainfall can cause water shortages, and increase in rainfall can aggravate flooding. The potential impact of global warming by monsoon circulation is unknown. In the tropical Pacific, the sea-surface temperature, evaporation rate and rainfall amounts have all increased.

Finally, water vapor is one of the indicators used to measure the amount of greenhouse gases. Increased cloudiness heats the planet. The clouds are high or dark, as is the cases for most storms the clouds reduce the outgoing long-wave radiation more than the net incoming short-wave radiation.

Drought

Many of us are at times under the assumption that drought is defined as lack of rainfall but the real in core definition of drought is lack of rain over a long period of time. Heat evaporates the small amount of rain. This means rain does occur but it not sufficient enough for the living organisms to survive.

Droughts usually occur in hot dry areas of land. In most cases the area is dry because there is very minimal rainfall. The rain that does fall will be quickly absorbed into the ground. Therefore the land is very dry and not many plants and animals can live in condition as a result to thirst and starvation.

These are some of the major places where drought has occurred in the 90’s: 

Year	Place	Cause	Destruction
1931-1938	Great plains of the USA	Serve wind storms dried out the land and blew the top layer of the soil.	Cars, homes and farms destroyed in dust storms
1982-1983	Australia	No rain for more than one year	60% of Australia sheep and cattle dies
1972-1974	Africa	Decreases rainfall	The countries financial business went down
1976	Britain	It did not rain from June 1975 to September 1976. Drought are very rare in England	Water rationing was greatly needed in the larger cities of Britain

Most droughts tend to occur during summer, as the weather is hot and water is quickly evaporated. Droughts can last for years in most extreme cases. These types of droughts can devastate crops and livestock. This also affects the economy; if a farmer has lost his crop due to drought he will get no money to pay for the next seasonal crop.

Drought has a great effect on the food chain. This reason is supported by the fact, because drought dries the land and makes the conditions unfavorable for plants to survive without water and animals cannot survive without plants, water and other living creatures are very much linked. If drought is really long, measures are taken to help save the water. When a drought is too bad drastic measures such as never washing your car or only having one shower per day are not much fun and can sometimes lead to uncleanly environments which can cause bacterial related diseases and infections. Elderly people have trouble with living in very hot and dry environments.

So drought has its own effect on every one. Drought causes the land to be unhealthy as well as dry it out so much that large cracks in the earth's crust and no plants live within the dry climate it means that plant roots cannot hold the soil together. This is the effect that causes wind erosion.

UNICEF: Somalia suffers from worst drought in a decade...

Landslides

In the Oxford dictionary the definition of landslides is a mass of earth or rock that slides down a mountain or cliff.

Gravity causes the landslide movement. Factors triggering these movements are heavy rainfall, earthquakes, poor constructions practices, erosion, and volcanoes eruptions, etc.  There are two types of landslides; fast and slow.

Mudslides, mudflows, lahars are examples of fast-moving landscapes. Usually caused by heavy rains after volcanic eruption. After volcanic eruption the raise in chemicals caused the sky cloudy and forms the humid atmosphere, therefore resulting in rainfall. During rain, the dust and chemicals raised in the atmosphere are cooled down and causing lahars, mudflows. 

The other form of landslides is slow, causes erosion over a long period of time. Waterfalls erode lands by the continuous flow of water. 

Slow moving landslides don’t cause much affect to human lives and properties. On the other side, fast moving landslides cause a lot of effect to human live as this destruction is caused “suddenly”.  For example, water supplies, fisheries, sewage disposal system, forests dam, and roadways can be affected for a long period of time.

The development of countries after landslides depends on the economic structure of the country – developed or under developed or developing. The negative economic effects of landslides include loss of property, disruption of transportations, roads, medical costs for the injuries, rebuilding infrastructure such as electricity and water supply.

Areas that are prone to landslides include areas where landslides have occurred before; relatively flat areas changed by sudden change in slope. Other most common areas prone to landslides are based on drainage channels and hillsides areas where leach-field infected systems are used.

Case Study on fast-landslide: In July 2010, a heavy rain in Myanmar (Bangladesh) has caused major landslides and floods. This has forced around 10,000 people to move from their homes, 100 of them have died. This disaster has affected the roads and swept away the bridges and houses built on slopes were washed away due to landslides. Many houses and schools were destroyed, shortage in food supply and no electricity supply.