Climate change is a thing that everyone has heard about but no one really knows what is going on. Climate change is a change in the patterns of temperature or precipitation over very long periods of time. Climate is very different from weather because weather is the day to day conditions of the atmosphere. The factors of climate change could be split into two factors, human and non-human. Human factors are the leading force for climate change.

We have factories that spew tons of thick black smoke everyday and we also use non-renewable energy. We also have a lot of deforestation. This is a critical part of climate change because trees and plants are the things that could potentially change climate change for the better. They take in carbon dioxide and change it into the air that we need to survive. Since climate change is the trapping of heat in the atmosphere, having less greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide could reduce the speed of climate change. Another huge human factor is pollution. Whenever people produce a product, there would almost always be a waste that comes with it. An example of this is when making dyes and nuclear power plants. In dye factories, there would be tons of poisonous waste that is produced everyday. For nuclear power, at the end of the day, there would be tons of radioactive waste piled up. Since these wastes are poisonous and radioactive, these are serious threats to the environment. These solid and liquid wastes contribute to even more pollution. These factors are negatively impacting the biosphere and hydrosphere. There are rivers that look nothing like the clear water sources they used to be. Now they are a sickly and smelly brown in color. These radioactive and poisonous rivers are not the environment that fish and crabs can live in. Even if the water is filtered, no human would want to drink smelly brown water.

For non-human factors affecting climate change we have, solar radiation, mountains and volcanoes. Solar winds coming, mostly from the sun are just rapidly moving particles of energy. The rapidly moving particles escape from the sun’s gravity and form radioactive solar winds. But since the earth has a metal core and is spinning, it is able to make a magnetic field to protect itself. But, even that is not enough. The magnetic field is not enough to protect against all of the solar winds, therefore, some solar winds would get to earth. Mountains are also a leading force in climate change. Whenever there are huge mountains along the coast, there would always be a desert behind it. An example of this includes the Himmalais and the Gobi desert. When the winds from the coast go inland, it is carrying a lot of moisture. The winds blow the clouds to the mountains where the clouds have to go higher and higher. When it goes higher, the air cools and starts to rain. That is why the lands between the mountains and the coast are fertile lands. The air almost always rains on that side. When the winds lose all of their moisture and go on the other side of the mountain, they start to fall down and as they come closer to Earth’s surface, they start to heat up. The heated winds proceed to blow, draining moisture away from the back of the mountains. The last non-human factor of climate change is volcanoes. When some volcanoes explode, it causes a lot of ash to fill the air. A well known example of this is in A.D 79. Mt Vesuvius. This explosion covered the lands of Pompeii with volcanic ash. It is said that the explosion was so big, it sent a plume of ash that people hundreds of miles away could still see it. The ash was so thick that the civilization of Pompeii was left almost unchanged for almost 1500 years.