Troy Knight Speaker Blog Post

This was a special week of class because we had the privilege of Troy Knight coming into class and speaking on the topic and facts of climate change. It was truly interesting to listen to someone speak who was clearly as knowledgeable on these important climate change issues as Troy is. I enjoyed when we went through the long history of Earth's timeline as I feel like that was valuable information to know and understand because it really gives you an idea of how truly short humans have been on this earth in perspective of the overall picture of Earth's timeline. We also discussed several of the basic ingredients for climate on Earth including Earth temp, sun, and atmosphere. We then discussed the most recent climate change and warming causes that Troy described to us as: sun, greenhouse effect, orbit, albedo, and global circulation. This was something that I enjoyed learning about because we as a society and a world need to take a deep look at what these causes are and do whatever we can to address this problem so that we can limit the effects of climate change that we as humans are causing. We also talked about these warming causes more specifically by breaking them down into each category. The first was sun: long term trend. Orbit: last 6000 years, 1 degree Celsius cooling in the last 6000 years. Albedo: volcanism. Global Circulation: El Nino. Greenhouse Effect: 33 degree Celsius warming of earth, critical to survival. Changes in Greenhouse Effect: Natural abundance of  greenhouse gases. This is all great information to know because in order for us to begin to try to combat climate change, we must first fully understand the great and growing problem that is at hand.