The world and its water share a multitude of different climates and state changes. Sometimes the world is covered in ice and resembles a giant snow ball, sometimes there is no ice with an abundant quantity of water and scattered landmasses teeming with life adapted to sweltering temperatures, and sometimes there’s a mix between the two. Currently the world is advancing forward at an accelerating pace towards a warmer and wetter state. But what is the true link between water and climate change?
In the simplest terms, water serves as both a perpetuator of climate change and an indication of a change after it has occurred. Though the nature of its cause and effect can be confusing at first, it is best to realize the natural and interrupted climates of the world. While both typical occurrences in the planet’s history, its still a matter between equilibrium and imbalance.
Today, many people feel that the planet is unnaturally accelerating towards a world with no ice, more water, and increasing world temperatures. Although completely different from what has been known within human history, it is actually the planet returning to its state of equilibrium. The hot, humid, and wet world that everyone fears in the future is the natural state that the world has existed in for millions of years supporting its largest organisms. As it turns out, it was not always the warmth that caused their ends, but the killer of life, ice, which ultimately followed the event of an equilibrium disturbance.
While a typical range of possible disruptions to equilibrium can vary from sunspots, asteroids, volcanic eruptions and other factors, the formation of significant formation of ice helps alter climates and drives many surviving species further along the path of extinction. And as an effect of disruption, it is a lasting one. Water in the form of ice across the land and the sea limits the amount of liquid water available to absorb and store heat from the sun. The reflective properties of the ice and snow also aid to the disruption induced equilibrium of effect, while the ice itself locks large amounts of carbon and methane gas (a larger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) into deposits that will remain trapped until released through warming or tectonic plate shift or eruption. The severe cooling effect will also cut down on the number of large animals contributing to the carbon in the atmosphere, and slows the methane-producing bacteria that contribute to decay.
Although this type of climate change began from a disruption in planetary equilibrium, the water in its frozen form helps to perpetuate the change and stabilize the new era until a form of correction emerges from either new life or slow planet warming trends. In terms of today, the warming trend has continued from after the ice age and small ice age through to the present day. As the shift towards the traditional equilibrium emerged after a state of prolonged cooling, water began acting more as a storage unit for heat, thus perpetuating the climate change towards a warmer one. When the stores of trapped methane are released from the restricted stores, the gas will join human created ones and push the planet into a new phase mostly devoid of ice.
Though climate change and an exact equilibrium may not be known currently, it is certain that water is the main link between the two.
