04. The Syllabus: A. Understanding Sustainability and Climate Change
Fields Of Change: A Sustainability Handbook
THE SYLLABUS A. UNDERSTANDING SUSTAINABILITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE The Syllabus Across 12 months of training sessions, Football For Future delivered six specialist sport and sustainability training sessions for the Move for the Planet Community. The following sections summarise the training sessions from this first-of-its-kind programme.
The Sun
The Greenhouse Effect The greenhouse effect is the
The Earth
process by which greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap heat and warm the Earth.
The main environmental change scientists have observed in the last couple of centuries is climate change . The primary cause is human activity which results in the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. As the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases, the average global temperature of the Earth increases due to the greenhouse effect. Simply put, the greenhouse effect is how the Earth’s atmosphere retains heat. Solar radiation from the sun hits the planet, warming it. This radiation - or heat - bounces back off the Earth’s surface, some of which is trapped by the atmosphere due to the presence of ‘greenhouse’ gases - mainly carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) . This process is what keeps Earth a comfortable temperature for life - without it, the planet would be a cold wasteland like Mars. However, our problem is that increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere results in more heat retention - like thickening the glass in the greenhouse.
Below is a graph showing CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere and global temperatures over the last 800,000 years 7 . You can see that the level of CO 2 has changed cyclically. However, the amount of carbon had not exceeded 300 ppm (parts per million - a unit of measurement for concentration of a substance within a mixture) for the best part of a million years - this level was exceeded in 1950, and has continued to shoot upwards since.
When talking about environmental change, the timescales can be hard to grasp. So let’s convert the Earth’s lifespan into a sporting timeframe - 90 minutes. The dawn of life on our planet came around 11 minutes in, approximately 4 billion years ago. Half time was 2.3 billion years ago, and the dinosaurs were not around until just over 85 minutes in. Humans did not evolve until one second before the 90th minute. What this means is that when we are talking about environmental change, we are seeing changes on human timescales that previously operated on geological timescales. Or, to return to our 90 minute analogy, changes in the environment which usually happen over minutes are now happening over fractions of a second, as human activities are the primary cause.
Atmospheric CO 2 This is the famous ‘hockey-stick graph’ - you can see the fluctuating but broadly stable levels of CO 2 in the atmosphere for most of the last thousand years, before a sudden and dramatic increase after the industrial revolution in the 1800s.
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