BIOL 3510H Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Plate Tectonics, Carbon Cycle
22 Nov 2017
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Document Summary
Climate change & the habitability of earth: humans are the driving factor of the increase of co2 emissions in the atmosphere, this is bad because this has generally increased the global land and ocean temperatures. Temperature can be effected by natural events i. e. el nino or volcanic erruption. Temperature changes are most noticeable in the arctic in terms of the loss of sea ice. The carbon dioxide cycle is long and slow therefore the earth won"t be able to respond accordingly as we are also increasing emissions at a larger rate. In short we"re producing faster than the earth can recover. The temperature would continue to rise for awhile because the earth would still continue to trap an increase of energy before the carbon dioxide concentration would stabilize. This would take approximately 50 years, this includes the feedbacks such as melting polar ice which leads to an increase in trapped energy. Water vapour would take a few days.
