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France, rest of Europe could see more local dengue outbreaks as world warms

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Climate change is expanding the range of dengue-carrying mosquitoes and making them more lethal. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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Description:
- The sunspots are the dark spots on the sun and the areas around it are the hotter areas (which explains why they seem to be more intensely red in the image)
- The higher the sunspot activity, the higher the amount of solar radiation emitted from the Sun.
-Hence, there is a general trend that periods with higher sunspot activity causes there to be higher annual surface temperatures on Earth.

Sunspots do have an influence on solar radiation as it changes the upper atmosphere chemistry. However, the amount of radiation received by the earth’s surface due to sunspots is less than 0.1%. Hence sunspots are not significant contributors to Earth's natural variability.

Example:
Number of sunspots rises and falls in a cycle of approximately every 11 years

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changes geographic distribution of terrestrial species :
- terrestrial species migrating towards the higher latitudes and altitudes where temperatures are cooler.

example :
about 170 species of birds tracked in North America have expanded their range northwards by 50km on average during the past four decades

changes in composition of terrestrial ecosystem :
- as the geographic distribution of terrestrial species changes the population densities in the ecosystems also change.
- as new terrestrial communities are form the existing food webs are disrupted.
- Terrestrial ecosystems are complicated as the way they evolve is still uncertain however observations like declination of species if they are unable to find a suitable place to migrate to.
- plant species would decline if they aren’t able to adapt as they cannot migrate unlike other species where they will continue to flourish as they migrate to new habitats

example:
In Australia, wallabies are migrating to higher altitudes. They have found herbfields in the mountains a suitable source of food, and have therefore flourished there . However, their overgrazing threatens to reduce these herbfields to grassy lawns.

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Group 1 - increase in atmospheric and ocean surface temperatures

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Group 1 - increase in atmospheric and ocean surface temperatures

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Atmospheric temp:
- concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are at and ever-increasing rate
- atmosphere today contains more greenhouse gas molecules
- more of the infrared energy emitted by the surface ends up being absorbed by the atmosphere
- some of the extra energy from a warmer atmosphere radiates back down to the surface, Earth’s surface temperature rises

Ocean surface:
- rising amounts of greenhouse gases preventing heat radiated from Earth’s surface from escaping into space as freely as it used to
- Most of excess atmospheric heat is passed back to the ocean
- thus, upper ocean heat content has increased significantly over the past few decades

example: Between etween 1993–2021, heat content rose by up to 6 Watts per square meter in parts of the ocean in America (dark orange). The global average surface temperature rose 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius between 1906 and 2005, and the rate of temperature increase has nearly doubled in the last 50 years

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group 6 - germaine, hui jing, zhiqi, kirsten

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group 6 - germaine, hui jing, zhiqi, kirsten

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Ocean acidification:

- Oceans= important natural carbon sinks as they contain phytoplanktons, absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis

- Increase in co2 emissions leads to oceans absorbing excessive amounts of co2.

- Carbonic acid is formed, and pH of the ocean is reduced.

- Carbonic acids dissolve calcium carbonate, which forms the skeletons and shells of aquatic creatures eg. corals, mussels and oysters

-> Coral reefs are eroding faster than new corals are formed. output>input

-> As coral skeletons shrink, species depending on them for food, habitat and shelter from predators are negatively affected :( & risk extinction

example:

- average coral cover in the great barrier reef (Australia) has dropped to 30% of the amount in the 1960s, partly due to acidification.

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Group's Input

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group 1: maegan, feivel, zhiqi, kirsten 

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group 1: maegan, feivel, zhiqi, kirsten 

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- Sunspots are areas in the sun where the magnetic field is 2500x stronger than Earth's
- The sunspots are the dark spots on the sun and the areas around it are the hotter areas (which explains why they seem to be more intensely red in the image)
- The higher the sunspot activity, the higher the amount of solar radiation emitted from the Sun.
- Sunspots have lower temperatures, causing the areas around it to radiate more energy and in turn more solar radiation on Earth, causing an increase in temperatures.
-Hence, there is a general trend that periods with higher sunspot activity causes there to be higher annual surface temperatures on Earth.
- Amount of sunspots increases and decreases in a cycle of approximately 22 years.
-Despite that, between 2000-2008, solar radiation emitted by the sun increased but the Earth's temperature continued increasing.
-> This example suggests that human activities play a bigger role in determining the Earth's temperature.

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URBANISATION

Description:
- The increase in proportion of people living in towns and cities, usually in developing countries, named urban areas.

Impact:

- Urbanisation consumes much of the world's energy, 78%, due to more fossil fuels being burnt, increased petrol powered vehicle use, factories emitting more greenhouse gases and many other reasons which contributes greatly to the rise in temperatures of the Earth.

Example:
- London grew from 600,000 to 1.1 million residents in the 1800s to the 1940s due to industrialisation and the growth of urban factories having a need for more labour workers.
- Singapore's population also increased from around 1 million people to 5 million people in 1950-2010 alone.

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Description:
- The Industry sector produces the goods and raw materials we use every day.
-Direct emissions that are produced at the facility, and indirect emissions that occur off site but are associated with the facility's use of electricity.
- These are caused by producing burning fuel for power or heat, through chemical reactions, and from leaks from industrial processes or equipment.
-Most direct emissions come from the consumption of fossil fuels for energy. > to run machines and factory processes.
-A smaller amount of direct emissions, roughly one third, come from leaks from natural gas and petroleum systems, the use of fuels in production.

Impact: This also gradually increases the production of greenhouse gases which warms the Earth's surface and contributes to Global Warming

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group 2: Megan see, Rachel, Ashani, Kaylea

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group 2: Megan see, Rachel, Ashani, Kaylea

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Description:
Large- scale volcanic eruptions cause global temperatures to decrease because large volumes of carbon dioxide, water, sulfur dioxide, dust and ash are released into the atmosphere
- The sulfur based particles, dust and ash spread around the lower atmosphere area of the earth
-These particles also absorb and reflect solar energy back into space
- This temporarily offsets the greenhouse effect and lowers temperatures until they grow large and fall down the Earth

Example: The volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 led to a drop in average global temperature of about 0.6 degrees celsius over 15 months after the eruption

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Sunspots

-Occurs when strong magnetic fields emerge through the solar surface and allow the area to cool slightly which appears as a dark spot on the sun
-Sunspots have lower temperature, causing surroundings areas to radiate more energy, which results in higher temperature on the earth
- about 0.1% more Solar energy reaches the Earth, which can increase global average temperatures by 0.05-0.1℃.

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The sun has a major impact on Earth: It provides the light and energy that are vital to life on our planet and dramatically shapes Earth's climate. But the sun's activity is not always constant, and areas of the sun can cool or even erupt dramatically. Can the sunspots that appear on our star's surface affect the weather here on Earth? And how?

It turns out that individual sunspots themselves don't affect the weather, but the changes in solar activity that they reveal can affect temperature, wind and weather on the planet.

What are sunspots?

Sunspots are darker areas on the sun's surface that come and go over days. Sometimes there are several sunspots on the sun, and they can even occur in swarms. Other times the sun has no spots. Sunspots form when intense magnetic activity on the surface of the sun exposes the star's cooler layers. However, these cooler patches only occur in great numbers when the sun is particularly active. So while a particular dark spot may emit less energy than the rest of the sun, the increased activity of the sun overall sends slightly more energy toward .

How do sunspots affect Earth?

There is no direct link between a single sunspot appearing and a short-term cooling in Earth's temperature. "It will reduce the amount of light hitting the Earth by about 0.1%," said Greg Kopp, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "It would take the Earth's energy system several months of such continual decrease to notice this effect energetically, but a sunspot doesn't persist that long."

Earth's system is too large to be affected by small dimmings from sunspots on short timescales, said Kopp, who likens it to dumping a bathtub of ice into a swimming pool. "You wouldn't notice a change in overall water temperature, but if you did it every hour for days on end, you would eventually feel a change," he said.

But sunspots are a sign of solar activity. "Solar variability does cause Earth-climate effects on long timescales," Kopp said. Climate is a 30-year average of weather. "If the climate is warmer or cooler due to the sun, the average weather will be warmer or cooler too."

However, there is absolutely no evidence that the sun's activity is responsible for the climate change we've seen over recent decades, which is caused by humans pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

The solar cycle

Sunspots have been counted every day , and the observations are kept at the Royal Observatory of Belgium's World Data Center for the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations. This catalog of sunspots provides visual evidence for the solar cycle - a roughly 11-year period during which the number of sunspots goes from low to high and then back down to low.

(Image credit: Royal Observatory of Belgium)

Sunspots have been counted every day , and the observations are kept at the Royal Observatory of Belgium's World Data Center for the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations. This catalog of sunspots provides visual evidence for the solar cycle - a roughly 11-year period during which the number of sunspots goes from low to high and then back down to low.

Tracking sunspots is one way to track solar activity, "but it's really the level of radiant energy the sun puts out across the wavelength spectrum that causes changes," to Earth's weather, Kopp said. For instance, shorter wavelengths of light produce more energy, so emitting more long wavelength light and less short wavelength light could, for instance, reduce the energy released by the sun.

The present Solar Cycle 25, which began in 2020, looks like it will be stronger than predicted. When there are a lot of sunspots there's a very slight increase in the energy output from the sun, according to the National Weather Service.

"Years having higher numbers of sunspots generally correspond with warmer times on the Earth, not cooler times," Kopp said.

"It's about 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer on average when it's most active," Kopp said. "That does have an effect both globally and regionally on Earth's temperatures, winds, fires and weather patterns."

Sunlight and temperature

(Image credit: NASA)

Scientists have long studied how the sun affects the global surface temperature on Earth. The output of light energy from the sun as experienced on Earth's upper atmosphere is called total solar irradiance (TSI). TSI falls if there's a sustained drop in solar activity, which reduces the energy that hits Earth. However, TSI varies at most by 0.15% across the solar cycle, meaning its impact is dwarfed by human-caused climate change and other effects, according to . For example, one study found just 0.1 C warming resulted from an increase in solar radiance in recent solar cycles, which was dwarfed by the impact of other natural phenomena such as the warming caused by volcanoes and the climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean.

Overall, scientists have found that sunspots' net effect on climate over long periods is at a nearly insignificant level. When the effect of general solar variation can be detected, it's very slight and regional, not global, a 2001 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research found.
Originally published on Live Science.

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How is the Earth's climate is affected by what happens on the sun?

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Description:
With greater number of human population, forests need to be cleared to make space for agriculture > so as to meet rising demand for food
-Agriculture contributes to about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually by;
(1) Burning of fossil fuels to produce energy for farm machinery
(2) Nitrogen in chemical fertilizers converts to nitrous oxide and
(3) Livestock rearing and natural decomposition processes release methane. Hence, it increases carbon concentration in the atmosphere.

Example:
In paddy rice fields, decomposition is rapid due to the high amount of moisture in  the soil > contributes to 5 -20% of total methane emissions.

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Description:
Since fossil fuels have high carbon content, the burning of fossil fuels produces large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases which contributes to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Which in turn increases the temperature on a global scale.

Fossil fuels are burned to create energy for human activities such as agriculture, industries and urbanisation.

Example:
The use of fossil fuels increased steeply since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, contributing to more than 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

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Description:
- The large-scale removal of forests which contribute to the enhanced greenhouse effect
- Forests are removed for humans to  (1)obtain resources (e.g. timber, wood) and (2) for land - for urban development or agricultural needs)

- Deforestation results in the increased level of carbon dioxide as it reduces the number of trees that absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis
-Thus when trees are cut down or burnt, the stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
-Clearing of forests > exposes the soil beneath to sunlight > increases soil temperature and the rate of carbon oxidation.

Example:
Globally, tropical deforestation contributes to about 20% of annual greenhouse gas emissions.

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Dominant sources of agricultural greenhouse gases (GHGs) include carbon dioxide (CO₂) from tropical deforestation, methane (CH₄) from livestock and rice production, and nitrous oxide (N₂O) from fertilizing or burning croplands. Agriculture is responsible for about half of global methane emissions.

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https://html.learning.moe.edu.sg/f533ea6f-3f14-4b2c-828b-39c7fe85036c/20220601020518/index.html

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How Meat Production Contributes to Climate Change

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How Meat Production Contributes to Climate Change

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXjeQLoDXeA

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How Meat Production Contributes to Climate Change