Human Impacts on Weather and Climate

"Well, I would have a hard time recommending a thousand-page academic survey. Yes. It’s not written for the broad public, but anyone could pick it up and learn something important about the climate system and why it is so complicated to make accurate predictions and the wide range of influences we have. A lot of attention is paid towards carbon dioxide but there are other greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide and methane, and then there are trace gases, some of which are human produced, like chlorofluorocarbons and their derivatives that also have effects. Sometimes they are waste products from producing refrigerants, some of them are the refrigerants themselves. Right. And there’s an irony, which of course there always is in human actions, that some of the chemicals that are problematic from the standpoint of their climate influence, were introduced as a solution to chemicals that ate away at the ozone layer in the 70s and 80s that led to the Montreal Protocol. So one generation’s solution became the next generation’s problem. When we burn anything it releases particulates into the atmosphere which scientists call aerosols, and these can change the amount of sunlight that hits the earth and they can precipitate out and, for example, change the colour of snow. Yes. This can lead to accelerated melting and can change the reflectivity of the snow. When people change the land surface, by turning forests into crop land, they can change weather patterns that have a regional and, perhaps, global effect. Well, people have a big footprint on planet earth and Mike Hulme, the author of another book I’m recommending, eloquently explains that climate change is not a problem that can be solved but it’s one that we can manage for better or worse."