Climate is a word that refers to the temperature and weather patterns that make up the daily environment that we live in.
Climate change happens when temperatures and weather patterns change over a period of time. This is different to the weather changing. Weather can change from day to day (one day it’s sunny and hot, the next day it’s cold, and that can be normal). When temperatures start to be higher or lower than they usually are for a longer period of time, this is climate change.
Climate change is a problem, because the world is full of living things that rely on the weather and its patterns to support their development, growth, and continuing existence. Plants and animals can be sensitive to changes in the weather, because they have adapted to live in certain conditions. When it begins to rain less, plants that rely on wet soil to grow can struggle. And when it gets very hot, animals that struggle to cool themselves down can find it hard to survive.
The Earth’s climate has always been through changes. You might have heard of ice ages, where the Earth becomes cooler and is covered in more ice sheets than we see today. There have been at least 5 ice ages in the history of the Earth, but the last one ended around 12,000 years ago. Changes like this are natural, and they happen over a very, very long period of time.
The changes that have happened more recently to the Earth’s climate have occurred more quickly than these natural periods of change. We are going through a period of global warming. Earth’s temperature is now an average of 1.42°C warmer than in the late 19thcentury (or 1800s). This might seem like a small number, but across the whole planet this can cause some big changes to the weather, and have a significant impact for life on Earth.
Humans are responsible for much of this change, particularly because of new technologies from the industrial age onwards, which were powered by fossil fuels (which release greenhouse gases) and an increase in demand for products and a higher quality of life, all of which require the use of resources which have an impact on the Earth.
UN Website: https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/what-is-climate-change
