GEOG 5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Subsolar Point, Geologic Time Scale, Northern Hemisphere
Document Summary
Discussion on climate change needs to be framed in a different way. No time to debate whether it"s real or whether people are to blame. Need to figure out how to mitigate its worst effects. Satellites can measure this --> satellite images back to the late 70"s. Weather: conditions in the atmosphere at a given place and time. Can vary hour to hour and due to temperature, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, humidity. Climate: weather patterns that occur in a place over a period of years. Determined by earth"s distance from sun, distribution of water and land, vegetation - but moreover by temperature and precipitation. Because climate changes over hundreds of years, organisms have adapted to them. Plants and animals may not have time to adapt. Snowball earth theory: at one point, the entire earth was frozen in ice. About half of the radiation coming from the sun is absorbed by either the land or the water land or the water.
