Climate Change Lab Report

Climate Change AND Humans

Abstract:

In order to find out the real cause of climate change, I use a lab resource developed by faculty at Columbia University and analyze the data provided to look into global climate change. After processing the data, I can conclude that the increasing global temperature can be ascribed to ‘Anthropogenic’ changes i.e. human activities.

Introduction:

The increase in devastating natural disasters in our Earth planet has aroused the awareness of humans about climate change. And climate change issue has become a majority discussion in every event nowadays. Many scientists attributes climate change to increasing global temperature i.e. global warming and they claim that human activities emitting greenhouse gases are worsening the problem of global warming. But are their claims believable? Therefore, I do this lab exercise and write this lab report to find out that whether there is a correlation between climate change and human activities. If the answer is positive, how can human activities largely affect the Earth’s climate?

Method:

I use the scientific data about The Vostok core drilled in East Antarctica which are provided by faculty at Columbia University. They include ice age, gas age, and the concentration of dust, CO2, CH4 and deuterium (δD) throughout the 160,000 years. Then I use deuterium as a proxy of temperature and transform function formula [Temperature (deg‐C) = ‐55.5 + (δD + 440) / 6] describing the empirical relationship between temperature and deuterium concentration to get the temperature throughout the 160,000 years. Next, I use the data to plot different graphs showing the relationship between different factors such as the changes of temperature at Vokstok , changes of CO2, CH4, dust concentration over the 160,000 years and then use a statistical function called R2 to measure how closely two factors are related.

Besides, CO2 and CH4 are the most important factors in my investigation as they...