Impact of Human Activity on Climate Change

Posted by Abdou Sani Boukari
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Leonardo DiCaprio won the Oscar at 2016 ceremony for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in the movie "The Revenant" (2015).

In his acceptance speech, the actor highlighted the importance of climate change, he said: "Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating..... Let us not take this planet for granted."

Indeed, Humans are changing the climate 170 times faster than natural forces, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal The Anthropocene Review.

For 4 billion-plus years, astronomical and geophysical factors, such as solar heat output and volcanic eruptions, were the dominating influences on Earth’s climate ; but over the past six decades, human activities like the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation “have driven exceptionally rapid rates of change,”

Natural forces still have an effect in modern times, “but currently on orders of magnitude less” than human activity. If we take a baseline of the last 7000 years, until recently, global temperature decreased at a rate of 0.01 °C per century. The current rate (last 45 years) is a rise of 1.7 °C per century – 170 times the baseline and in the opposite direction.