by Gerald Koh

Created on: June 10, 2008

If there is one thing that refuses to respect national borders, it is the environment that we live, and thrive in. As the years have gone by, environmental degradation and preservation have become major issues because of the negative environmental impacts economic development and globalization has brought upon in many parts of the world. Examples are aplenty- increased industrial pollution that leads to global warming; the clearing of land or marshes to make way for companies looking to build a new factory, governments wanting to build a new town, or even farmers seeking to eke out more profits have irreversible effects on our global environment. Yes, that's right. Our environment.

Climate change refers to the changes in the whole Earth's climate or a region's climate over time, describing changes in the state of our atmosphere over time scales ranging from decades to millions of years. These changes can be caused by natural processes on Earth or external entities (e.g. variations in sunlight intensity), or, more recently, human activities. Climate changes reflect variations within our atmosphere, oceans and ice caps, and human activity. External factors that can affect our climate are e.g. changes in solar radiation or/and the Earth's orbit.

There are many factors that drive climate change. Prime examples of such factors that are negating the Earth's atmosphere are the trapping of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere causing global warming and the human needs of building irrigation, clearing forests and harvesting crops.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recently completed an experiment project, the "BBC Climate Change Experiment"- where BBC teamed up with a consortium of research organizations led by the University of Oxford, which includes the British Meteorological Office and the University of California (Berkeley) among others. Funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the experiment sought to predict the future of our global environment. At a glance, the experiment's results predict that the UK could have a 4 rise in temperature by 2080, and that by then, summer temperatures in the UK would reach 40 and winters would also be warmer. Other parts of the world are also expected to have temperature increases, varying from city to city, and from town to town. New Zealand, for example, faces a smaller temperature rise than that of the UK because it is surrounded by an ocean, whereas Central Asia will warm much more than New Zealand and the

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