Environmental Chemistry and Engineering

Environmental Climatic Factors

Climate change includes both global warming driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale. There are six main climate regions: tropical rainy, dry, temperate marine, temperate continental, polar, and highlands. The tropics have two types of rainy climates: tropical wet and tropical wet-and- dry.Human activity is the main cause of climate change. People burn fossil fuels and convert land from forests to agriculture. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have burned more and more fossil fuels and changed vast areas of land from forests to farmland.