Climate change

We all experience weather parochially, but local and regional weather is embedded in interlocking weather systems spanning the entire globe. So when human activity changes the climate, it becomes the global issue par excellence-one that will only gain in stature in the growing academic field of global studies. Climate change concerns not only every nation's future climatic regime but also the functioning of the planet as a whole. In addition to a warming world, extreme weather events are increasing in frequency, the oceans are be-coming more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ice masses from glaciers to the Arctic to Greenland are melting, sea levels are rising, and many plant and animal species are facing extinction. Some of these changes are now irreversible and will affect the Earth for thousands or tens of thousands of years (Archer 2009). Climate change is therefore about the conditions in which all humans will live, however much we may think we have isolated ourselves from the weather, as complacent New Yorkers learned when Hurricane Sandy, intensified by human-induced climate change, devastated the city in 2012.