The first week’s learnings of the Climate Change course have included:

• Key principle is ‘blanket Earth‘.
  “A blanket traps heat and re-radiates some of it back to whoever is lucky, or unlucky, enough to be rolled up in it”
• Climate is a system.
  “containing a series of components that interact with one another”
• Differences between Climate and Weather
  – weather is what we see daily (temp, humidity, wind, sun) that can change by the hour.
  – climate looks at how weather changes over a long period of time (typically 30 years).
  – climate system=interactions between atmosphere and oceans, land masses, vegetation & gases in the atmosphere + sun
• why do we get the two confused?
  – we do not stop to think about the differences
  – eg of weather change: front brings rain to a summer day
  – eg of climate change: changing El Nino and la Nina weather patterns; desertification of once-green areas due to deforrestation