February 22, 2012

You are here: Home / 2011 / Archives for October 2011

Global Warming and Polar Bears

October 25, 2011 By

Everyone knows that global warming is affecting polar bears, but do you know why polar bears are actully being affected? This article will look into the reason of this sad event.

The main threat to the polar bears is the reduction of sea ice, the polar bears habitat, all due to global warming. The polar bear, or put more scientifically the ursus martimus is in fact a marine mammal as most of its life, spent hunting is at sea not land. So obviously, with global warming destroying the arctic ice, it’s taking the polar bears habitat too!

So global warming is decreasing the population of polar bears, due to the loss of ice platforms meaning it’s further for the, marine mammals to swim in tougher conditions. On top of all this, hunting opportunities are lower, and with limited food to hunt.

It is perdicted that around two thirds of polar bears will dissapear by the year 2050!

Filed Under: Global Warming Tagged With: , , , , ,

What are Greenhouse Gases?

October 21, 2011 By

Greenhouse gases, well, these are a number of chemical compounds that would be found in the Earth’s atmosphere. The job of greenhouse gases is to allow sunlight access the Earth’s atmosphere freely, this will let sunlight make contact with Earth, some of the sunlight will then re-radiate in the opposite direction and back into space, this is called infrared radiation, or heat.

So the greenhouse gases are helpful to humans, as the infrared radiation heads back towards space, they collect and trap it into the Earth’s atmosphere. This helps humans because if it wasn’t for all the natural greenhouse gases then the Earth would be way too cold for humans to live. For example we would be living with an average temp of a freezing -2°F that’s a big, big difference to the average of 57°F we are living in today.

So where do greenhouse gases come from? Some greenhouse gases just come about naturally, others like carbon dioxide are human made. Things such as industrial gases are also greenhouse gases.

Filed Under: Pollution Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Change of Human Population Due to Weather

October 17, 2011 By

Weather has a huge impact of the way we live, it will change what we do, our moods and has had a massive part in the history of humans. They has been massive changes in the human population due to weather, putting climatic changes aside, extreme weather events have been historical and lowered the population scale dramatically.

Weather can cause loss of food (this is called famine) and two major examples of this are:

The Little ice age, this took place way back in the 1690s; a massive loss of crops was caused. Another was in Finland between 1696-1697, this famine was so bad that Finland had one-third of its population die!

Filed Under: Climate Change Tagged With: , , , , ,