Polar Ice

Polar Ice

 

Climate change has quickly become a growing problem in recent years. This sudden change in the earth’s climate is believed to be caused by emissions of CO2 gas, a common byproduct of fossil fuels, which are used to meet most of the energy demand of the world right now. The warming of the planet is causing the melting of the arctic sea ice, and this could cause major problems for the planet. Namely the rising sea levels that threaten to flood large areas of land, and loss of habitat. Our goal is to make a program that would attempt to model the change of polar ice levels over a period of time, and subsequently rising sea levels. This program would take into account ice and CO2, and attempt to find a direct correlation between them. We made a couple of models in the Python programing language, one to show polar ice levels if the current trend continues, and another that takes input for CO2 in PPM and outputs the size of the arctic sea ice for that amount of CO2 using the direct correlation that we will find between them. The raw data from the first program would then be placed in a graph, showing polar ice in relation to several factors that include temperature, CO2 levels in PPM, and sea level. The hypothesis that we created is that if international goals for combating climate change are met, the polar ice will return to preindustrial levels within one hundred years. We also hypothesize, that if the goals are not met but emissions of greenhouse gasses end within seventy-five years, the polar ice caps will take at least three hundred years to fully recover from the damage inflicted by humankind’s emissions of greenhouse gasses. If this is correct, it means that emissions must be ended soon, or the effects will take a much longer time to mitigate. The longer it takes for us to reverse this the harder it will become to go back.