Global Warming Versus Climate Change: We Used to Have Winter

Editor’s note: This post is part of the Green Moms Carnival, which is hosted on our very own MC Milker’s blog The Not Quite Crunchy Parent. This month’s topic is global warming.

I recently assisted in a historical slide show of our small mountain community, and when this slide came up of the US Forest Service ranger station in 1931, a senior citizen who had lived in our valley since she was a young girl said, “We used to have winter.” This statement sent butterflies to my stomach, and it made me reflect on what my own grandparents used to tell me about winter. Their stories of trudging to school in several feet of snow always felt like old exaggerated tall tales, but were they? What will we tell our grandchildren about winter?

When talking to children about what is happening to our seasons, I feel it is important to use correct terminology.

We really aren’t experiencing just global warming, but we are experiencing climate change. The term “climate change” includes changes in weather systems as part of its definition, rather than simple “global warming”, which refers to the overall warming of average temperatures.

These terms are not interchangeable, and I believe that climate change more accurately portrays the long term crisis we are potentially facing. This issue in semantics may not seem important in the big picture, but I believe in equipping children with the proper terminology. The Grinning Planet describes the difference between climate change and global warming:

Climate change is about much more than how warm or cool our temperatures are. Whereas “global warming” refers to increasing global temperatures, “climate change” refers to regional conditions…


Even though the main threat right now is warming planetary temperatures, climate change can also mean global cooling…


It’s worth remembering that global warming is based on an increasing average global temperature. Some parts of the planet (such as the Arctic) are getting warmer much faster than other areas. It’s even possible that some regions could actually experience regional cooling at the same time the planet as a whole is experiencing global warming.

Climate change more accurately describes what is happening and what could happen if we don’t fix this problem now. Global warming is more of a mainstream term, and yes, I sometimes err and use the terms interchangeably, but we owe it to our children to try to teach them accurate terminology for a problem they will be addressing in throughout their entire lifetimes. Let’s hope they don’t have to tell their grandchildren, “We used to have summers where we could go outside.”

Michigan press offers online read of its Santa book about global warming

A children's book author hopes that her new Christmas story will help kids realize that they can have an impact on global warming.


"Santa Goes Green" (Mackinac Island Press, $15.95) is the story of a boy, Finn, who writes Santa and asks him to help raise awareness about global warming. Finn is interested in the issue because he has adopted a polar bear, and polar bears are losing their habitat.

Finn tells Santa he does not need any toys for Christmas, but instead he wants the jolly old elf's help. "Santa can do anything in (Finn's) mind," says author and publisher Anne Margaret Lewis.

The book has sold about 13,000 copies since the small Traverse City children's books publisher put a previewable version of the entire book online last month (at mackinacislandpress.com). Now in its second printing, it's a runaway hit.

Success has come without the embrace of mass-market booksellers, although Borders Books bought some for its Great Lakes-area stores. Librarians across the country are ordering "Santa" and other books, too, says associate publisher Brian Lewis. "It's really word-of-mouth people buying copies," he says. "It's this organic growth that we love."

ExtraordinaryMommy.com blogger Danielle Smith, bought "Santa" and other titles after looking at them online. She began touting the books. "People get to see every single page and every single detail," she says.

The "Santa Goes Green" "artistry is so rich, and the story is so sweet and well-told," Smith says. "I think that it resonates this time of year. And green is something we try to do in little bits and pieces, and when you have it in front of you, it's tangible on a child's level."

The project is a Lewis family affair. Anne, who has written 10 children's books, has been married to Brian for 22 years. And their son, Cameron, who is 6, gave Anne the idea for the book.

The Lewises married several years after they met in northern Michigan while windsurfing. She worked part time, then full time at Sleeping Bear Press, a small publishing firm that Brian started and sold six years ago. Before that, he also sold Lewis Publishers, an environmental publishing company started with his father in 1984. Then in 2004, Anne started Mackinac Island Press.

Theirs is not the only new, green Santa book. Another is "When Santa Turned Green" (Thomas Nelson Publishers, $15.99), but what makes the Lewises' book different is that you can see the whole book online before committing to buy it. "This mechanism has opened the door," says Brian Lewis. "We don't have to rely entirely on someone in New York City" to decide the fate of their product.

Early last summer, Anne and Cameron were reading a "National Geographic" article about how global warming has melted glaciers, which in turn reduced places for bears to live and hunt. "He asked how we could help the polar bears, so we started going around the house every time we left a room and shut the lights off. Then we would say, "We just saved another polar bear,' " she says. "I was trying to convince him that you can make a difference, and it worked."

That got Lewis to wondering whether she could write a book that would pass along the feeling. "I wanted it to be about polar bears because of how it came to be," she says. "And then I thought, who would a child think is the most powerful person who could help him do that? Santa. The story just started evolving."

Such a story of self-sacrifice fit into her writing style. "I tend to hide messages in books because I want (children) to learn through characters and the actions of characters that they can have fun or be a loyal friend," Lewis says. "My message is that kids can make a difference."

Global Warming is Hot Stuff !!

Global warming is a hot topic (no pun intended). Some scientists believe the Earth is warming up. While that may be hard to believe in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, if it's true it could mean big changes for our planet.

How do you keep a whole planet warm?

Light from the sun warms land, water, and air. In turn, the warmed-up land, water, and air give off heat, which rises up toward the sky. Gases in the Earth's atmosphere capture some of that heat and prevent it from escaping into space. This heat trap keeps the ground, oceans and air at fairly stable, predictable temperatures -- warm enough to allow thousands of plant and animal species (including humans, like us) to thrive.

Without heat trapping, the earth's surface would be about 60 degrees Fahrenheit colder than it is now. If you’re living in a place like Wisconsin, that means you’d have to wear boots and a heavy coat in July. BRRRRR! (We won’t even talk about January!) The earth’s overall temperature has changed often across the eras -- the long periods of time we use to measure the Earth’s age. We know this because paleontologists have studied the fossils of plants and animals, and because geologists can read the earth’s history in rocks and soil. In hotter eras, dinosaurs clomped across warm green landscapes filled with plants. In colder eras, the wooly mammoth survived in rugged terrain of ice and snow.

For the past 10,000 years, the earth has had relatively stable temperatures. But, for the past 100 years or so, scientists have noticed the Earth seems to be warming up more than usual. This phenomenon is called global warming.



What is the greenhouse effect?

You now know the Earth’s surface and atmosphere stay warm when gases in the air trap heat from the sun. Have you ever been inside a greenhouse, the all-glass buildings where plants are grown? They’re very warm, because the glass walls allow the sun’s rays in but prevent the heat from getting out.

Think of the earth as being inside a giant greenhouse. The gases act like a greenhouse’s glass walls -- they keep heat from escaping into space, and the earth stays warm.

Try this easy experiment: Take two jars and put a teaspoon of water in each jar. Put a lid on just one jar. Place both jars in a sunny spot. After a few hours, check on the jars. You’ll see that the open jar hasn’t changed, but the closed jar will be steamy and hot inside. What happened? The heat from the sun could not escape from the closed jar.



The greenhouse gases

The main gases that cause the greenhouse effect are:

* water vapor
* carbon dioxide, or CO2
* methane
* nitrous oxide

Some "greenhouse gases" occur naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere. But scientists measuring the gases say the amount of gases in the atmosphere has increased in the past few decades. For instance, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 30% greater than what it was 150 years ago. Scientists believe CO2 levels will rise another 30% during the next 50 years.

The increase in greenhouse gases is expected to raise the average global temperature of the planet by 2 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 50 to 100 years.

Most of the increase is due to human activities, like:

* burning gasoline to drive cars and trucks
* burning oil, coal or wood to produce electricity
* for heating, cooling, and other purposes burning forests to clear land

All these activities, and many others, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. With greater amounts of greenhouse gases in the air, more heat will be trapped, and the Earth will get warmer...and warmer...and warmer.



What might happen if Earth heats up?

If Earth gets hotter, some of the following things might occur:

* New coastlines would have to be drawn on maps! Because water expands as it is heated, and because oceans absorb more heat than land, sea levels around the world would rise. Cities on coasts would flood.* Temperate places that now receive frequent rain and snowfall (like Wisconsin) might become hotter and drier. Inland lakes and rivers would shrink. Forest fires could occur more often. Frequent periods of drought would make it hard to raise crops for food. There would be less water available for drinking, showers, irrigation, even swimming pools!

* Plants and animals unable to take the heat may go extinct, and be replaced by heat-tolerant species.

* Hurricanes, tornadoes and other storms caused by changes in heat and water evaporation might occur more frequently and be more intense.



Global warming: It is more than just a game of up-and-down on a thermometer.

There’s a lot of debate going on about global warming. Some scientists say it’s nature’s way -- something that has happened in the past and will likely occur again. Other say global warming is occuring faster because of human beings and that human beings can stop it, or slow it, if they so choose.

One thing is certain: We do not yet know enough about how Earth works to accurately predict what the increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans will do to the planet. The relationships among land, water, air, plants and animals do not follow a simple pattern, where one action automatically leads to the same result.

For instance, an increase in carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) may warm the Earth, and with the greater warmth more trees might grow. Trees absorb carbon dioxide to make wood and grow larger. With more CO2 captured in trees and less CO2 in the atmosphere to hold in heat, the Earth would cool down. Right? On the other hand, trees are also very good at trapping the sun’s heat. So with more trees, the Earth would get warmer. Right?

We really don’t know for sure. After all, the Earth is a big place -- a place that’s worthy of your attention and study. Perhaps someday you’ll unlock yet another of Earth’s secrets.



YOU can help slow global warming!

Just because we’re not absolutely certain of how more greenhouse gases will affect the Earth doesn’t mean we should sit back and do nothing.

Besides increasing greenhouse gases, burning too much gasoline and other fossil fuels creates air pollution and wastes energy. Who wants to breathe bad air, or always look up at a dirty sky?

You can help slow global warming by:

* Walking, riding your bicycle, or taking the bus instead of always going by car.
* Not wasting electricity (turn off the lights, the radio, the TV and the computer when you’re not using them).
* Reducing, reusing or recycling all kinds of items, from soda pop cans to clothes, to save energy and raw materials.
* Planting trees to help absorb excess CO2, and to provide shade and windbreaks to keep buildings at more even temperatures so they will require less energy for heating or cooling.



Glossary

* Era: The longest division of geologic time, measured in millions of years.
* Fossil fuels: A fuel such as oil, which comes from decomposed living matter from another geologic era.
* Geologist: Someone who studies the origin and structure of the Earth.
* Greenhouse: A glass-enclosed building used to raise plants that need controlled temperatures and humidity.
* Greenhouse gases: Gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. They include water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide.
* Paleontologist: Someone who studies fossils, such as skeletons or leaf imprints.