Climate Change Primer

Chapter 1

Foreward: “As you read these, please take into account that numbers, names and circumstances have changed a great deal over the past six years, and so have I. Especially at the start, my time championing poor persons’ biochar involved a great deal of repetition of facts well-documented and well-understood by scientists, climate change activists and policy-makers in the North, but not yet in the South. Today, the whole world seems to be on board the biochar bandwagon and Warm Heart’s foundational commitments to the climate and the rural poor may be less unique today. The rise of Biochar.Life and our connection with some of the best development organizations in the world is the result. Perhaps over the next six years, I will spend less time writing and more time in the field, delivering the promise of biochar to millions of the world’s poorest people.” Dr. D. Michael Shafer, October 2022

What is Climate Change?

Climate change refers to significant, long-term changes in the global climate.

The global climate is the connected system of sun, earth and oceans, wind, rain and snow, forests, deserts and savannas, and everything people do, too. The climate of a place, say New York, can be described as its rainfall, changing temperatures during the year and so on.

But the global climate is more than the “average” of the climates of specific places.

The Climate System

A description of the global climate includes how, for example, the rising temperature of the Pacific feeds typhoons which blow harder, drop more rain and cause more damage, but also shifts global ocean currents that melt Antarctica ice which slowly makes sea level rise until New York will be under water.

It is this systemic connectedness that makes global climate change so important and so complicated.