Focusing on the first future situation

Climate Change


Once that I had completed a some broad research into a large amount of different situations earth could face in the future and narrowed down my choices to just three of these situations to focus on and create designs for, it knew it was time for me to begin some deeper research into each of these three topics. Although I already have some basic knowledge of climate change, artificial Intelligence and natural pandemics I believe that it is important for me to look into each of these subjects so that I can make sure my understanding is a little more firm because this way I will be able to achieve far better design concepts than if just went off what I already know. I would like my designs not to be too far fetched so learning about each of this possible futures for mankind will make my ideas far more believable and less made up of guess work.

So the first subject I wanted to focus on is climate change. This is the area that I know the most about out of the three topics I have chosen to look at due to the fact that I learnt about it throughout my whole time at secondary school and it is something that is always being brought to the public attention. What I do know is that climate change, or 'Global Warming' as it is also referred to is a theory of how the worlds weather is slowly shifting and changing as time goes on either due to natural events or the effect of the rapid progression of mankind. It something that could effect the world in a large variety of ways in the future which makes the final result and even build up rather difficult to predict. This means there could be a large amount of different design routes I could go down for this particular topic which is wonderful and frustrating. There being a lot of different effects on the future means that I will get a lot of creative freedom but at the same time I was really trying to limit how much I give myself to do so that I don't go off on a tangent or get flooded with too much research. Hopefully with a little bit more research into the topic including what I learnt from the 'End of the world night' documentary I will be able to come up with a solid design route to follow down.




The beginning of my further research 


So to start off my further research I decided to do the very basic thing and look at what the Wikipedia result was for climate change so that I would be able to get a brief little summary of the topic and hopefully some interesting facts and figures thrown in as well. Below is their description of what climate change is and this really helps to just sum it up as a whole. 


Wikipedia description found from:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

"Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years). Climate change may refer to a change in average weather conditions, or in the time variation of weather around longer-term average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change is caused by factors such as biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics, and volcanic eruptions. Certain human activities have also been identified as significant causes of recent climate change, often referred to as global warming. Scientists actively work to understand past and future climate by using observations and theoretical models. A climate record — extending deep into the Earth's past — has been assembled, and continues to be built up, based on geological evidence from borehole temperature profiles, cores removed from deep accumulations of ice, floral nd faunal records, glacial and periglacial processes, stable-isotope and other analyses of sediment layers, and records of past sea levels."


Although this is a little wordy it certainly helps to summarise what this effect is as a whole and what are a few of its many causes. This much I pretty much already knew but just reading it over helped to solidify the concept in my head, I proceeded to read through the Wikipedia page on this topic to see what other information it had to give. A large amount of it revolved around the many different causes for climate change and the physical effects it has had to the Earth's environment over the years. A easily summary of a large chunk the information that was in this article can be found in the visual image below that is one that I am pretty sure I have seen in a text book before and just simply shows the different effects climate change could have to earth.

From reading over the climate change wikipedia page and the global warming one as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) grouped with the knowledge I already possessed I notcied that  the rising of the sea levels seems to be the most focused on topic as it one of the effects of climate change that could seriously effect not just earth, but mankind as well. This instantly made me think of about a scientific theory which I had learnt previously in secondary school and had nearly completely forgotten. It is called the 'The Greenhouse Effect'. This is a theory that explains the reason for earth's constant temperature increase and why the polar ice caps are beginning to melt and causing the sea level to rise. I decided that this would be a good area of climate change to focus my attention on and create designs for due to the fact that it is one of the most well known outcomes as it will have one of the worst effects on earth and it's inhabitants so my work would be able to send a powerful message via this topic. Plus I have learnt about it previously so my knowledge is fat greater tuned to the information on The Greenhouse Effect over many other effects of global warming.





The Green House Effect 


I had to keep my research on this effect short and sweet due to the fact that it all gets a little too technical and scientific for me when I only really need to the basics in order to create a good and realistic design narrative. After having a skim through the Wikipedia page talking about this topic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect) in order to refresh my memory of what it is made up of I remembered there were some very simple but useful diagrams of The Greenhouse effect that was able to sum it up in one image in some of my old geography textbooks so I had a little look at Google Images and found a few which were simple and easy to understand. Below are the couple that I picked out that help to explain the theory in very simple terms.

These images show the basic breakdown of how the solar radiation from the Sun is getting caught in the Earth's CO2 clogged atmosphere and ricocheting around inside which is what is causing Earth's temperature to rise so dramatically. But what is cause all of this Carbon Dioxide build up? Us. Humans beings. We over the course of our evolution and progression have managed produce and cause this unnatural amount of CO2 to become trapped in Earth's atmosphere. In this article about global warming (http://www.climatehotmap.org/about/global-warming-causes.html) it states that;
"As we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas for energy or cut down and burn forests to create pastures and plantations, carbon accumulates and overloads our atmosphere. Certain waste management and agricultural practices aggravate the problem by releasing other potent global warming gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide." Below I have also posted a pie chart of the breakdown of how much Carbon Dioxide along with other gases that mankind have created in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately many different messages and campaigns have been sent out even since the 1950s to try and get people to under stand the danger of this situation that we are getting our selves in and we need to reduce our own personal carbon footprints as well as the worlds to reduce the risk that climate change could produce but a large amount of mankind still believe that global warming is some sort of myth and doesn't need to be taken seriously which is a huge mistake as it will get us into a hell of a lot of trouble later down the line.

So with a constantly growing increase of Carbon Dioxide in Earth's atmosphere due to people not listening to the risk and warnings, there has been a huge issue of more and more solar radiation getting caught and heating up the Earth's temperature. One of the main issues we are facing currently with the temperature of our planet constantly getting hotter is the fact that the growing heat is melting the polar ice caps of the North and South Pole, destroy large ammounts of lands that are home to a wide array of different creatures. With each piece of ice that is melting into the ocean it has increased the water level quite drastically causing the sea to slowly rise and this means that huge areas of land are going to become below sea level and will become essentially completed flooded and inhabitable. This is going to reek havoc due to the fact that Earth is already over populated and with us losing whole cities under water all the people are going to have to evacuate to other areas of the countries.

There was a brilliant piece of text in a article I was reading from this website (http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-sea-level-rise/) which talks about just how badly the world will become submerged under the water in the future if the sea levels do rise to far. It states that;

"When sea levels rise rapidly, as they have been doing, even a small increase can have devastating effects on coastal habitats. As seawater reaches farther inland, it can cause destructive erosion, flooding of wetlands, contamination of aquifers and agricultural soils, and lost habitat for fish, birds, and plants.When large storms hit land, higher sea levels mean bigger, more powerful storm surges that can strip away everything in their path. In addition, hundreds of millions of people live in areas that will become increasingly vulnerable to flooding. Higher sea levels would force them to abandon their homes and relocate. Low-lying islands could be submerged completely. Most predictions say the warming of the planet will continue and likely will accelerate. Oceans will likely continue to rise as well, but predicting the amount is an inexact science. A recent study says we can expect the oceans to rise between 2.5 and 6.5 feet (0.8 and 2 meters) by 2100, enough to swamp many of the cities along the U.S. East Coast. More dire estimates, including a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, push sea level rise to 23 feet (7 meters), enough to submerge London."

Also below there is a video that shows a simulation of exactly which parts of the Earth are going to become submerged if the water does rise dramatically which I found really interesting to watch.

I feel like after doing this large bit of research into the first of the three future situations I want to focus on for BA6 I know now exactly which effect of global warming I want to focus on which is Earth's rising sea levels. It think it is important that I only stick with one looking at one effect of climate change because if I delve into any more areas I will end up over whelming myself with work and I need to limit how much I actually do otherwise I might get a bit lost with it all. But now that I do know my area of focus and I feel like I have done plenty of research for it I am now able to move on and start thinking about what designs I want to produce from this theme. I will also have to move on and look at the two other further situations I am creating character concepts for to so that I can keep my work and ideas flowing.