Climate change

The world's climate is changing. This has been true throughout the history of the world, but what we're seeing today is different. Today the earth's average temperature is increasing faster than normal, year by year, due to the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is the trapping of the heat from the Sun by certain gases in Earth's atmosphere. It's also the reason that the earth is warm enough for us to live on. Without it, we would all freeze to death.

While the greenhouse effect is a good thing, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing and the greenhouse effect is getting stronger. Human activity, like power stations, cars, and farming, are producing more greenhouse gases. As we increase the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere, the earth gets warmer because those gases trap more heat.

And that's what people mean when they talk about climate change. Climate change is the increase in temperature and changes in weather patterns that result from humans releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. While nothing in science is ever completely certain, only highly likely, the science of climate change is quite solid. At this point, the vast majority of climate scientists believe that humans are the main cause of the increased temperatures we're seeing worldwide.

We have the technology to take action to prevent unnatural climate change from continuing, but so far we've taken relatively little action, especially in the U.S.A. The reasons for this are complex, but they mainly fall into two categories: economic and political