What is climate change?
According to the Met Office ‘Climate change is the long-term change in climate and is usually used in the context of man-made climate change’.
The greenhouse effect is the term used to describe the warming of the Earth. The diagram shows this. If there were no greenhouse gases the Earth would be a frozen, lifeless ball in space, but too many gases and the planet warms up causing dangerous climate change.
Due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels, greenhouse gases have increased and so increased the heat trapped in the atmosphere. The main greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide CO2.
We can expect our climate to change to be hotter and wetter with more extreme weather.
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