An explanation for everyone.

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The climate

"Climate" is basically the planet's way of stabilizing it's temperature. Like an air conditioner trying to filter the heat coming in so you don't melt while sleeping, keeping your whole room at cool temperatures. Not too hot, not too cold.

But climate is not a device. And it is not set in stone. It is the consequences of a lot of things reacting to each other. It begins with the sun's radiation which heats up Earth. That heat is stored by the air, land and oceans, but they don't receive this radiation energy evenly.

The Sun's energy is mostly focused around the center of the Earth, because it's the part directly facing the Sun, so the radiation "crashes" into this area instead of spreading out. Like a kick onto the center of a soccer ball will shove it harder than kicked at any other angle. But then this energy is spread out by air, land and water.

Hot air is lighter than cold air, making them move differently. This starts a reaction that passes the heat around the globe, preventing land enviroments from reaching extreme temperatures.

In this case, extreme would not mean 50 degrees celcius, but easily 100 and above, which makes human life unsustainable. Temperatures below 50 celcius also fit this example. If not for our oceans and suitable atmosphere, we would not have a climate capable of sustaining life.

Radiation distribution also happens within the ocean's waters, which keeps the whole planet sort of equally warm by flowing that heat to all of the different icey places while bringing cold water from those to cool down hotter areas. Land also helps retention of that solar energy.

If our planet could not hold that energy within our surface's reach, it would never warm up, like our Moon. So now you should understand what is a planet's climate and why our planet has a climate capable of sustaining life. Let's go back to the beginning.

The Sun's radiation energy enters our planet's atmosphere, heating things up. That energy is actually very powerful, but it's intensity is lowered thanks to the ozone layer, which is part of our atmosphere. The ozone layer "grabs hold" of some of that radiation, not allowing all of it to strike us. Skin cancer would be one of the extremely common problems if we suddenly lost our ozone layer.

The ozone layer

That layer is made mostly of ozone, as it's name suggests. Ozone prevents most of the bad part of the sun's energy (ultraviolet) from getting into the Earth's atmosphere, while also preventing heat from escaping. It's essential.

We've had a problem with it in the past. Our industries were manufacturing products using gases that would destroy that layer by combining themselves with it, changing ozone into something else, a natural chemistry reaction. This has since been fixed by replacing the chemicals identified as harmful.

But now we have a different problem. Thanks to our changes, the ozone layer is getting too thick, causing too much heat retention. A certain level of heat is supposed to dissipate into space, otherwise we'll eventually fry as if we were in a cooking pot with it's lead permanently on.

This brings us to our current problem: global warming. Even though we are not getting extra radiation of the sun, we changed the density of the ozone layer, causing it to not let as much heat out as it was supposed to.

The extra energy that comes from this is making nature as a whole much more extreme, from natural disasters such as typhoons getting much more frequent and intense, temperature distribution getting much more erradic making colder areas much colder and hotter areas even hotter.

To put it simply, we made a hole in our planet's sunscreen back in the day. We overdid the fixing, so now we have a different problem to deal with: that sunscreen is so strong, it doesn't let as much heat dissipate as it should.

Maybe you'd also like to understand global warming and how it affects you.