Climate & Atmospheric Science
The Tyler Prize:
Celebrating 50 years of Environmental Achievement
Climate & Atmospheric Science
The Tyler Prize:
Celebrating 50 years of Environmental Achievement
What is Climate Change?
To answer this question, it helps to begin with a different question:
Why is Earth neither a snowball nor a fireball?
Space is cold, and yet Earth, located in space, is relatively warm. How can this be? The answer is probably the first thing you would have guessed: The Sun heats the Earth.
But wait, if the Sun is constantly heating the Earth, why doesn’t the whole planet get really, really hot—too hot for life? The answer to this question is probably not as obvious to most of us. As the Earth warms up, it not only absorbs energy, but it also emits some of that heat energy back out into space.
So Earth is neither a snowball nor a fireball because it strikes a balance between the heat that it absorbs from sunlight and the heat that it radiates back out into space.
We are experiencing climate change today because that balance is changing:
less and less heat is able to escape.
Too much of a good thing?
Although some naturally occurring greenhouse gases are necessary to maintain a livable Earth, humans have artificially introduced dangerous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the past 200 years.
Many people have played a role in understanding this phenomena:
David Keeling (Tyler Prize Laureate) detected that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were consistently increasing.
Michael E. Mann (Tyler Prize winner 2019) showed that Earth's average temperature was also increasing.
Climate change is arguably the most serious problem humankind has faced.
Fortunately, there is still time to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change... but only if we take decisive and immediate action to transition away from fossil fuels.