Project ClimateLearn Blog

The time is 10:15 pm. There is no electricity, and my neighbour's generator set is on. I can barely think through the noise, so I try to sleep instead, but even that is proving to be too much to handle. It feels as though the sweltering heat is accentuating the noise of the generator. I can hardly believe that the month is December. The rainy season should be giving way to the cool Harmattan wind, but it's hard to say if there was a rainy season at all. The rains came and went so haphazardly for several months that I wonder how our farmers have coped since most of Nigeria’s agriculture is rain-fed.   I suppose these variations are largely due to global warming. I have read of melting Arctic sea ice, deforestation in the Amazon and the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, and the loss of coral reefs, but I have never quite understood how these events affect me. It was not long ago that they felt so far away, but this present discomfort brings it close to home. It is amazin...

1. Ov er the last 50 years, human activities – particularly the burning of fossil fuels – have released sufficient quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to affect the global climate. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by more than 30% since pre-industrial times, trapping more heat in the lower atmosphere. The resulting changes in the global climate bring a range of risks to health, from deaths in extreme high temperatures to changing patterns of infectious diseases. 2. From the tropics to the arctic, climate and weather have powerful direct and indirect impacts on human life. Weather extremes – such as heavy rains, floods, and disasters endanger health as well as destroy property and livelihoods. Approximately 600 000 deaths occurred worldwide as a result of weather-related natural disasters in the 1990s, some 95% of which took place in developing countries.   3. Intense short-term fluctuations in temperature can also seriously affect h...

The temperature increase in the atmosphere is more specifically referred to as global warming. But the climate change is the term currently favored by scientists, as it explicitly includes not only Earth's increasing global average temperature, but also the climate effects caused by this increase. Any gas, which has the property of absorbing infrared radiation emitted from Earth's surface and reradiating it back to Earth's surface, is called greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor are the most important greenhouse gases. Other greenhouse gases include, but are not limited to, surface-level ozone, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons. Though a naturally occurring phenomenon, the greenhouse effect results in a warming of Earth's surface and troposphere - the lowest layer of the atmosphere. Of the greenhouse gases, water vapor has the largest effect. Some important causes of greenhouse effect incl...