Hello & welcome to Startup Story presents RaiBhoLo. Today's episode is a special feature on Climate change, the first step towards the Awareness Programme. What is climate change?
Climate change is reffered to the irregularities and changes in the climatic patterns of a particular region or area. Basically if there is an unexpected long term change in the average weather of a region and these changes abnormally affect that region's ecology and environment then it is considered as climate change.
Now as you must have understood the meaning of this term, let us talk about
The origin of the term Climate Change:
The term Climate Change evolved from another term Climatic Change, which was proposed by the World Metrological Organization (WMO) in 1966, as an umbrella term for all kinds of climatic irregularities and changes. But around the 70's the term Climate Change totally replaced Climatic Change, as the idea behind it was, that the new term would supposedly be focused entirely upon the man made causes behind Climate Change.
So now that we have known about the origin of the term let's dive deeper and take a look on
The History of the Study on Climate Change:
Evidently 'Climate Change' has been a matter of concern for more than a century now. It was in 1859, when a British Physisist John Tyndall became the first person to discover that the Carbon Dioxide or CO² present in the Earth's atmosphere has a tendency to absorb Sun's heat, eventually trapping that heat in to the Earth's atmosphere. Thus, resulting in the heating up of Earth's atmosphere.
Later on February 16, 1938 another English inventor and a steam engineer 'Guy Steward Callender in one of his studies concluded that the CO² released from the burning of fossil fuels is one of the reasons behind Global Warming. (For those of you who don't know what Global Warming stands for: it is the heating up of Earth's Atmosphere. We will be talking about it in detail in the coming episodes).
And finally in March 1958, Climate Scientist, Charles Keeling became the first ever scientist in world to confirm that the CO² levels in the Earth's atmosphere are actually rising and it is a matter of concern for the human kind and the environment. Later, in 1977 the US National Academy of Science also issued a report named as 'Energy & Climate' in which they supported the claim that burning of fossil fuels like Petroleum and Coal release CO² which in heavy amounts can be hazardous for the human health and Earth's atmosphere.
Later on June 23, 1988 National Aeronautics and Space Administration popularly known as NASA, had one of its scientist James Hansen present a testimony before before the US Senate in which they clearly stated that increase in CO² was directly responsible for the heating up of the Earth's atmosphere and changing the climate. It was the same year, when The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created, which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to Climate Change. As of February 2015, there were 195 IPCC member countries. The IPCC is basically an organization under the UN, which is responsible for providing regular updates on the matters of climate change, along with explaining it's impact and giving us an insight into what the future risks pertaining to Climate Change can be. In these regular updates or reports, the IPCC also underlines the scientific measures for the adaptation of the situation and for diminishing it's adverse affects. Many famous International Initiatives on Climate Change take regular inputs from the IPCC reports.
