Climate change explained in 5 minutes | CBC Kids News

What do we want? Climate justice! We cannot afford new oil and gas. Climate change. People, including kids, are pretty riled up about it. It's a big deal, but do you know what it actually means? This is Can Explains Climate Change in five minutes or less. First things first, climate change is real. That's not just an opinion, it's based on scientific consensus. That means that scientists agree that our climate is changing and the main cause is human activity. But what is climate change? It's the change in Earth's climate due to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We're going to come back to that in a second. The Earth's climate has changed throughout its history. So what people are really referring to when they talk about today's climate change is the climate change crisis. That's because the changes that are happening are happening at a faster rate than any time in the past 10,000 years. Okay, but wait, what's the difference between climate change and global warming? Many people use global warming and climate change to mean the same thing. But global warming is actually just one part of climate change. Specifically, global warming refers to the rise in global temperatures due mainly to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. In the past 120 years, humanity has created lots of amazing technologies to make modern life possible. We found natural resources to heat our homes, fuel our cars, fly us around the world, and even make the device you're watching this video on possible. But those technologies are mostly dependent on fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases do exist naturally, but human activities have increased the release by a lot. Greenhouse gases trap heat from the sun in Earth's atmosphere. The more heat they trap, the hotter the planet gets. The Earth's temperature has increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to 150 years ago. The last time the globe was this hot was 125,000 years ago, before the last ice age. That warming causes changes in many ways. Earth is made up of many delicate ecosystems, and even changes that may seem minor could have big impacts. For example, as the Earth warms, ice sheets and glaciers begin to melt, adding water to the oceans, causing sea levels to rise. Plus, sea levels are also rising because warmer water expands. Crazy, right? We're all affected by climate change, but some places are seeing more change more quickly. The Arctic is one of the places where climate change is happening first and fastest. So over the last 40 years, the Arctic has actually warmed up four times faster than the rest of the world. That brings us to tipping points. So if you think about a curve that is really quite gentle, and maybe that's where we are now, you hit a tipping point, and then suddenly it goes right up and the changes start accelerating. Once we cross a tipping point, changes will start happening a lot faster. Some examples of tipping points are losing the Amazon rainforest or the North Pole not freezing up over the winter. It took a long time for the planet to get these things in the first place, so we don't want to lose them. To sum it up, climate change is the changes happening to Earth's climate at a faster rate than it would happen naturally without human activities. In particular, the burning of fossil fuels. Global warming is a consequence of those activities. If we don't reverse course and stop the Earth's temperature from rising rapidly, we will continue to experience disastrous effects like extreme weather events, sea levels rising, and extinction of species. But not all hope is lost. We've seen climate marches, we've seen all the protests, and these are all the things that are going to make change. It's not just our leaders and politicians in a closed room who are making decisions for us. They're going to make decisions based on what they hear. Well, that's it for Canada Explains. Did you learn something new? I know I did. For CBC Kids News, I'm Isabel McNeil. Bye!