Читать книгу Climate Change For Dummies - Elizabeth May - Страница 19

This book could easily be called Climate Emergency For Dummies. Although “global warming” is the common term for the climate changes that the planet’s experiencing (and scientists agree that average global temperature is increasing with the buildup of GHGs), the term doesn’t tell the whole story. The Earth’s average surface temperature is certainly going up. But while the average keeps rising, the variations around the average are also getting larger and larger. So some areas of the planet may actually get colder or experience more extreme bouts of rain, snow, or ice build-up. Consequently, most scientists prefer the term “climate change.” In the following sections, we look at how different places around the world will experience climate change.

Much of this section is pretty depressing. But nothing is exaggerated — the information here is all based on peer-reviewed scientific reports. Just how serious could the global impact of climate change be? The first global comprehensive scientific conference, which was held in Toronto, Canada, in 1988, described the potential effects of climate change this way: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.”

Of course, different parts of Earth have very different climates now, and climate change won’t affect every part of the planet in the same way. The following sections explain in general terms how some parts of the world are being affected by climate change.