Name: 什麼是氣候變遷？（What is climate change? - The Climate Question, BBC World Service）
Uploaded: 2023-12-26T06:36:35.000Z
Duration: 15 min
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

Hello and welcome to The Climate Question – I'm Jordan Dunbar. We're a

weekly podcast from the BBC World Service.

We speak to experts, activists, businesses and reporters from all over the world about the biggest issues when to comes to climate change.

Really, really, really looks like a James Bond film. I'm slightly nervous. We're standing on top

of the reactor. Atoms are being split, minds are being blown.

Ah! Are you OK? It's gone now I'm alright. I just throw it back into the water. That was some kind of sea creature

In this special episode I'm joined by experts and friends of our show to answer one of the most commonly searched

OK we've got Dr Rose Mutiso - Rose what do you do? I'm the research director at the Energy for Growth Hub. I work on

energy and climate, technology and policy in developing countries.

Dr Zeke Hausfather - what do you do? I'm a research scientist at Berkeley

Earth which helps produce one of the global temperature records.

Adam - complete the trio. Adam Levy. My surname is pronounced Levy, like, leave me alone. So I suppose

Thanks guys. A lot of people are too afraid to ask the really simple questions when it comes to big

news stories as they don't want to look stupid - but not me! Think of me as an

inquisitive five year old – I'm just going to keep asking 'Why why why?' on your behalf.

But first a what.... What is climate change? Zeke what does that term actually mean?

So when we talk about climate change, what we're really talking about is heat

being added to the Earth system. So as humans burn fossil fuels, we dig up

from underground, or as we cut down forests that have been standing for

hundreds of thousands of years, we are putting carbon dioxide into

the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas,

and the more greenhouse gas you have in the atmosphere the more of the sun's heat

gets trapped in the atmosphere and the warmer the surface gets and that's why

Wait a minute! I said simple. Adam, what are these greenhouse gases people keep talking about?

Greenhouse gases on their own are actually great, they exist naturally in the atmosphere. And if they didn't,

the world would be way too cold for comfort. So greenhouse gases on their own good,

they work like a nice, warm blanket, keeping the Earth from the cold space

around us helping insulate the planet. The problem is that we're adding to them hugely.

So it doesn't take a doctorate in climate science to understand that

if something insulates the planet and you add a whole bunch

more of it to the atmosphere, then you're going to have more of that insulation effect

and things are going to start to heat up. And that's exactly what we're seeing.

There's been so much coverage of climate change and this global warming

you'd think this is something we'd have changed by now. Another basic question.

Why haven't we just stopped adding to this 'nice warm blanket?'

All of the systems that underpin our lives, so how we produce food to eat, how we

create energy to heat our homes, how we create electricity to power our devices and our

machines, how we fuel our cars. All of these processes require energy inputs.

I focus on the energy sector, my energy sector is the biggest part of the problems.

How we produce and use energy, really a massive chunk of it. And so

for the most part, historically, we burn fossil fuels to produce energy,

whether it's heat, whether it's electricity, whether it's fuel, so think of your petrol or your jet fuel.

Fossil fuels are essentially remains from plants and animals from millions of years ago,

under heat and pressure and time create really efficient sources of energy. And so we

burn them. And we can create heat and electricity and everything. But then we

also produce carbon dioxide as a side effect.

OK some people will be thinking I like hot weather, what is so bad about the world heating up?

So the world getting hotter will have some very direct effects on places which are

already pretty hot, you know, if you're in a particularly hot city, and that

suddenly gets a chunk hotter, that's going to make it a lot harder to live in that city.

But beyond that, around the world, we're seeing a whole host of

really scary impacts of climate change already happening today. For example,

climate change is turbocharging all sorts of extreme weather events,

whether that's things like heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires.

Someone here was saying it was hotter here than in Africa.

Also the heat comes in the wake of Covid too, so you have Covid, then you have heat, it's almost biblical.

The effects that Adam mentioned are terrible. Floods, droughts and wildfires. But it's not

clear to me how the Earth warming would actually create them. It's 'why' time again...

Explain to me how the world getting warmer causes floods. That seems

to be the opposite of what I would have thought would happen.

So a hotter atmosphere works like a more effective sponge, it can hold more water.

And that means when you have really heavy downpour events, there's actually just

more water there in the atmosphere waiting to be rained out. And so when it rains, it pours.

On The Climate Question we have seen first-hand the effects that these impacts can have - we go around the world

to speak with people on the front line of climate change.

Floods have destroyed much of my country, Pakistan. The waters have killed some 1500 people, and displaced millions.

So sea levels rising, there's actually a couple different

factors driven by climate change that cause that. One very simple one that

people don't often appreciate is that as the oceans warm

warm water takes up more space than cold water. And so you get this thing called thermal expansion,

where the warming of the oceans literally causes the water to take up

more space and the sea levels rise because of that. But in addition to that

warmer temperatures cause ice sheets to melt, and not just melt from the top down, but

also to flow faster into the oceans. And we've already seen a huge increase in the

rate of ice loss from Greenland in particular, but also parts of Antarctica

over the last few decades. And so that's been increasingly driving the sea level rise

It's not just the wet stuff we also go from floods to fire.

Some parts of the world are also experiencing more drought as more water gets carried away from those areas.

And so if you have hotter and drier vegetation, if a fire starts it's easier for that fire to find enough

fuel to grow bigger and to spread much more rapidly and much more widely.

Some people will be listening and thinking that all sounds terrible but it hasn't hit them yet.

There's constantly things on the news to be worried about. But climate change will affect all of us...

Europe, for example, a lot of regions around the Mediterranean could potentially become

too hot for people to live in the way that they currently live in these regions.

But heat waves don't just affect regions we currently associate as hot.

Extreme heat is already affecting different parts of the world, the world over today.

And in fact, heat waves in the last couple of years in Western Europe

have claimed many thousands of lives. And these are relatively rich, relatively

cool parts of the world. You then extrapolate that to parts of the world,

which are really hot already, for example, certain Middle Eastern countries,

then you're risking these countries simply becoming too hot for habitation

in coming years. Sea level rise will affect coastal regions, but particularly

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什麼是氣候變遷？（What is climate change? - The Climate Question, BBC World Service）

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