The Scholar - Climate Change Essay

Although I created this website to showcase my current writing projects to form a sort of online portfolio, I didn't think it would be complete without featuring my very first publication...

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When I was thirteen, I worked with a PhD tutor as part of a programme with Exeter University to study climate change. My final project after months of seminars and research was to write an essay debating whether climate change could be justified as being human-induced if there is evidence of the planet's climate changing naturally long before we walked its surface.

The essay intially explores a selection natural phenomenon, such as volcanic eruptions and the albedo effect, which can cause the planet's climate to change in order to evaluate the claim that 'the climate has always been changing so humans can't possibly be making any difference'. I opened the piece with a study of the permo carboniferous glaciation of the Karoo Ice Age which was largely fuelled by the evolution of plants, affecting the regulation of the planet's CO2 levels.

I then went on to correlate the levels of warming seen in recent centuries with the increasing developments of mechanisation and the industrial revolution. This charted the increase of emissions against directly proportional changes in the Earth's average temperatures. It also used data from industries such as concrete production and other manufacturing processes to explain spikes in emission levels as these practices developed global prominence.

The essay illustrates that although the climate has been changing through natural phenomenon long before human intervention, the planet has previously been able to return to a stable equilibrium. Data of the current warming deviates substantially from the natural cycle of periods of warming being followed by periods of cooling. The exponential increase in temperatures which continue to rise to this day are evidence of human-induced climate change as we enter the new epoch of the Anthropocene.

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I'm still frustrated that, as a child, I could grasp these concepts whilst politicians and world-leaders pervaded climate denial. I didn't know that my essay was going to be published, as my PhD tutor submitted it on my behalf, but I'm glad that it could be shared in the magazine alongside other young people's work to share my passion for climate justice in an effort to combat misinformation.