Climate change has become a bigger issue over the years, and it’s influencing our climate even though we don’t always see it.
And although global warming is a big part of climate change, it’s not the only one.
“I’d consider climate change to be unnatural changes to the environment that are caused by humans, such as global warming,” said senior and president of Green Haven Chloe Browne.
Margaret Orr, a PhD Candidate at the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, said that one of her undergraduate professors described climate change as a shift towards extremes.
“So she would say that if a place that’s already wet gets a lot of rain, it gets wetter,” Orr said “What is hot gets hotter, what is cold gets colder
Even though the weather is getting colder, the earth is still warming.
“It’s not that this recent cold snap was directly caused by global warming, but that it was made more extreme– more cold– by global warming,” she said.
An article by the Center for Disaster Philanthropy explains how warmer temperatures in the north and south poles cause problems that intensify cold weather.
According to the article, “There is a direct connection between human-caused climate change and increased occurrences of extreme cold. Specifically, warming temperatures are disrupting the polar vortex and pushing cold air into non-traditional areas.”
The polar vortex relates to another scientific problem, which is how the jetstreams that control our wind are affected by global warming.
“The jetstream that controls our weather is these winds that go across the whole planet’s latitudes horizontally,” Orr said. “It sort of acts as a barrier between the colder polar air at the really high Arctic latitudes and what we know here. So when there are fewer differences in temperature between those two areas and when global warming causes that jet stream to kind of curve, it can bring that colder air farther down.”
Though climate change is a huge problem, we need to stop catastrophizing and start taking action on our own.
“There are a lot of individual-level actions, and those can often feel like you’re not doing a ton– like carrying around your reusable water, air drying clothes, or not using a plastic straw,” Orr said. “Those little individual actions can feel like you’re not doing much, but they really do add up”
In the end, though, it’s good to start considering how your actions will affect the environment.
“Climate change is definitely a serious issue, and we should really be thinking about it because we only have one earth and we can’t get it back,” Browne said.
