GEOG 204 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Enteric Fermentation, Methane Emissions, Orbital Eccentricity
29 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Human activity has been established with great confidence by a wide range of studies at global and regional scales. Some important climatic change theories have focused on variations in the amount of solar radiation received by the atmosphere. A composite sequence of these variations due to pertubations in the earth"s orbit around the sun was calculated in the early years of the twentieth century by a serbian mathematician named milankovitch. Modifications to the rate of photosynthesis are likely to have significant impacts on many living organisms, reducing productivity in aquatic life such as plankton, and terrestrial plants. Changing the land cover from trees to grass, for example, reduces leaf area index, increases the reflectivity, or albedo, of the ground surface, decreases its roughness, and alters root distribution and depth. These changes affect the proportion of available water that runs of the ground surface or evaporates, thereby affecting soil moisture and possibly rainfall.
