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Global Temperature Anomalies from 1880 to 2019

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The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide can be converted into useful hydrocarbons by electrolysis. The design of the electrolysis cell is crucial in this process. The so-called zero-gap cell is ...

New findings suggest that Heinrich Events had no discernible impact on temperatures in Greenland, which could have repercussions for scientists' understanding of past climate ...

The alga Melosira arctica, which grows under Arctic sea ice, contains ten times as many microplastic particles as the surrounding seawater. This concentration at the base of the food web poses a ...

Anthropogenic climate change has, together with the intensive use and destruction of natural ecosystems through agriculture, fishing and industry, sparked an unprecedented loss of biodiversity that ...

New insights into the binding of carbon to mineral particles in permafrost can improve the prediction of greenhouse gas ...

The seven worst years for polar ice sheets melting and losing ice have occurred during the past decade, according to new research, with 2019 being the worst year on record. The seven worst years for ...

Oceanographers provide a reality check on the limitations of carbon dioxide removal and a warning that marine heatwaves need clear definitions so communities can ...

As climate change causes ocean temperatures to rise, one of Greenland's previously most stable glaciers is now retreating at an unprecedented rate, according to a new ...

A new global survey of 1000 forest areas shows how climate change since the peak of the last ice age has had a major impact on the diversity and distribution of tree species we see today. The results ...

Using a new detection method, scientists found a massive amount of methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, coming from wildfires -- a source not currently being accounted for by California state air ...

For several years, a team of researchers used underwater microphones to listen for seals at the edge of the Antarctic. Their initial findings indicate that sea-ice retreat has had significant effects ...

A new look at climate data shows that, by the end of the century, the heaviest days of rain and snowfall across much of North America will likely release 20 to 30 percent more moisture than they do ...

A new, inexpensive technology can limit the buildup of algae on the walls of photobioreactors that can help convert carbon dioxide into useful products. Reducing this fouling avoids costly cleanouts ...

Simulated volcanic eruptions may be blowing up our ability to predict near-term climate, according to a new ...

A new study, which used 44 years of data, shows that as the globe has warmed, altering the timing and amount of snow cover, snowshoe hares' winter transformation may be out of sync with the ...

Soil stores more carbon than plants and the atmosphere combined, and soil microbes are largely responsible for putting it there. However, the increasing frequency and severity of drought, such as ...

Throughout the Arctic, fallen trees make their way from forests to the ocean by way of rivers. Those logs can stack up as the river twists and turns, resulting in long-term carbon storage. A new ...

Six decades of river gage data gathered from nine rivers in Alaska highlight the cumulative and consequential impacts of climate change for local communities and ecosystems in the ...

Material left on the seafloor by bronze-age underwater volcanic eruptions is helping researchers better understand the size, hazards and climate impact of their parent eruptions, according to new ...

Research shows flooding events in the province have doubled in the last ...

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global warming; global climate changes; impact of climate change; climate shifts; projections of climate change; global warming potential; global warming and hurricanes; greenhouse effect and global warming; effects of global warming; solution to global warming; carbon sequestration; carbon sequestering; below-ground carbon allocation; carbon sinks; reef bleaching; ocean currents; melting sea ice; evidence of global warming; warmest on record; warmest year on record; kyoto; carbon dioxide; global warming ; co2; extreme weather conditions; sea ice; unusually high temperatures; unseasonable flowering; methane; sea level; polar ice caps; arctic ice; antarctic; ice sheet; ice mass loss; glacier; melting ice berg; ice sheet still losing mass; rate of loss; melting glaciers; snowpack; melting icebergs; gulf stream; glaciers; greenhouse gases; climatic mechanisms

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The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide can be converted into useful hydrocarbons by electrolysis. The design of the electrolysis cell is crucial in this process. The so-called zero-gap cell is ... New findings suggest that Heinrich Events had no discernible impact on temperatures in Greenland, which could have repercussions for scientists' understanding of past climate ...

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Gavin Schmidt: The emergent patterns of climate change

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Global warming is a gradual increase in the temperature of the Earth and represents one of the greatest threats that currently hangs over human life and the rest of the beings that inhabit the planet.

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Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, cloud forests are dying, and wildlife is scrambling to keep pace. It has become clear that humans have caused most of the past century's warming by releasing heat-trapping gases as we power our modern lives. Called greenhouse gases, their levels are higher now than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

We often call the result global warming, but it is causing a set of changes to the Earth's climate, or long-term weather patterns, that varies from place to place. While many people think of global warming and climate change as synonyms, scientists use "climate change" when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet's weather and climate systems-in part because some areas actually get cooler in the short term.

Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas, and a range of other impacts. All of those changes are emerging as humans continue to add heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, changing the rhythms of climate that all living things have come to rely on.

What will we do-what can we do-to slow this human-caused warming? How will we cope with the changes we've already set into motion? While we struggle to figure it all out, the fate of the Earth as we know it-coasts, forests, farms, and snow-capped mountains-hangs in the balance.

Understanding the greenhouse effect

The "greenhouse effect" is the warming that happens when certain gases in Earth's atmosphere trap heat. These gases let in light but keep heat from escaping, like the glass walls of a greenhouse, hence the name.

Sunlight shines onto the Earth's surface, where the energy is absorbed and then radiate back into the atmosphere as heat. In the atmosphere, greenhouse gas molecules trap some of the heat, and the rest escapes into space. The more greenhouse gases concentrate in the atmosphere, the more heat gets locked up in the molecules.

Scientists have known about the greenhouse effect since 1824, when Joseph Fourier calculated that the Earth would be much colder if it had no atmosphere. This natural greenhouse effect is what keeps the Earth's climate livable. Without it, the Earth's surface would be an average of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) cooler.

In 1895, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius discovered that humans could enhance the greenhouse effect by making carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. He kicked off 100 years of climate research that has given us a sophisticated understanding of global warming.

Levels of greenhouse gases have gone up and down over the Earth's history, but they had been fairly constant for the past few thousand years. Global average temperatures had also stayed fairly constant over that time- until the past 150 years. Through the burning of fossil fuels and other activities that have emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases, particularly over the past few decades, humans are now enhancing the greenhouse effect and warming Earth significantly, and in ways that promise many effects, scientists warn.

Aren't temperature changes natural?

Human activity isn't the only factor that affects Earth's climate. Volcanic eruptions and variations in solar radiation from sunspots, solar wind, and the Earth's position relative to the sun also play a role. So do large-scale weather patterns such as El Niño.

But climate models that scientists use to monitor Earth's temperatures take those factors into account. Changes in solar radiation levels as well as minute particles suspended in the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions, for example, have contributed only about two percent to the recent warming effect. The balance comes from greenhouse gases and other human-caused factors, such as land use change.

The short timescale of this recent warming is singular as well. Volcanic eruptions, for example, emit particles that temporarily cool the Earth's surface. But their effect lasts just a few years. Events like El Niño also work on fairly short and predictable cycles. On the other hand, the types of global temperature fluctuations that have contributed to ice ages occur on a cycle of hundreds of thousands of years.

For thousands of years now, emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere have been balanced out by greenhouse gases that are naturally absorbed. As a result, greenhouse gas concentrations and temperatures have been fairly stable, which has allowed human civilization to flourish within a consistent climate.

Now, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution. Changes that have historically taken thousands of years are now happening over the course of decades.

Why does this matter?

The rapid rise in greenhouse gases is a problem because it's changing the climate faster than some living things can adapt to. Also, a new and more unpredictable climate poses unique challenges to all life.

Historically, Earth's climate has regularly shifted between temperatures like those we see today and temperatures cold enough to cover much of North America and Europe with ice. The difference between average global temperatures today and during those ice ages is only about 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), and the swings have tended to happen slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years.

But with concentrations of greenhouse gases rising, Earth's remaining ice sheets such as Greenland and Antarctica are starting to melt too. That extra water could raise sea levels significantly, and quickly. By 2050, sea levels are predicted to rise between one and 2.3 feet as glaciers melt.

As the mercury rises, the climate can change in unexpected ways. In addition to sea levels rising, weather can become more extreme. This means more intense major storms, more rain followed by longer and drier droughts-a challenge for growing crops-changes in the ranges in which plants and animals can live, and loss of water supplies that have historically come from glaciers.

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Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, cloud forests are drying, and wildlife is scrambling to keep pace.

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Know the gases that cause the greenhouse effect and understand the effects of their increase. To associate human activities with the various types of emissions and pollution, capable of causing climatic alterations.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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By Holly Shaftel,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The scientific method is the gold standard for exploring our natural world. You might have learned about it in grade school, but here's a quick reminder: It's the process that scientists use to understand everything from animal behavior to the forces that shape our planet-including climate change.

"The way science works is that I go out and study something, and maybe I collect data or write equations, or I run a big computer program," said Josh Willis, principal investigator of NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission and oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "And I use it to learn something about how the world works."

Using the scientific method, scientists have shown that humans are extremely likely the dominant cause of today's climate change. The story goes back to the late 1800s, but in 1958, for example, Charles Keeling of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Waimea, Hawaii, started taking meticulous measurements of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) in the atmosphere, showing the first significant evidence of rapidly rising CO ₂ levels and producing the Keeling Curve climate scientists know today.

"The way science works is that I go out and study something, and maybe I collect data or write equations, or I run a big computer program, and I use it to learn something about how the world works."

- Josh Willis, NASA oceanographer and Oceans Melting Greenland principal investigator

Since then, thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers have come to the same conclusion about climate change, telling us that human activities emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising Earth's average temperature and bringing a range of consequences to our ecosystems.

"The weight of all of this information taken together points to the single consistent fact that humans and our activity are warming the planet," Willis said.

The scientific method's steps

The exact steps of the scientific method can vary by discipline, but since we have only one Earth (and no "test" Earth), climate scientists follow a few general guidelines to better understand carbon dioxide levels, sea level rise, global temperature and more.

1. Form a hypothesis (a statement that an experiment can test)

2. Make observations (conduct experiments and gather data)

3. Analyze and interpret the data

4. Draw conclusions

5. Publish results that can be validated with further experiments (rinse and repeat)

As you can see, the scientific method is iterative (repetitive), meaning that climate scientists are constantly making new discoveries about the world based on the building blocks of scientific knowledge.

"The weight of all of this information taken together points to the single consistent fact that humans and our activity are warming the planet."

- Josh Willis, NASA oceanographer and Oceans Melting Greenland principal investigator

The scientific method at work

How does the scientific method work in the real world of climate science? Let's take NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign, a multi-year survey of Greenland's ice melt that's paving the way for improved sea level rise estimates, as an example.

1. Form a hypothesis
OMG hypothesizes that the oceans are playing a major role in Greenland ice loss.

2. Make observations
Over a five-year period, OMG will survey Greenland by air and ship to collect ocean temperature and salinity (saltiness) data and take ice thinning measurements to help climate scientists better understand how the ice and warming ocean interact with each other. OMG will also collect data on the sea floor's shape and depth, which determines how much warm water can reach any given glacier.

3. Analyze and interpret data
As the OMG crew and scientists collect data around 27,000 miles (over 43,000 kilometers) of Greenland coastline over that five-year period, each year scientists will analyze the data to see how much the oceans warmed or cooled and how the ice changed in response.

4. Draw conclusions
Inone OMG study, scientists discovered that many Greenland glaciers extend deeper (some around 1,000 feet, or about 300 meters) beneath the ocean's surface than once thought, making them quite vulnerable to the warming ocean. They also discovered that Greenland's west coast is generally more vulnerable than its east coast.

5. Publish results
Scientists like Willis write up the results, send in the paper for peer review (a process in which other experts in the field anonymously critique the submission), and then those peers determine whether the information is correct and valuable enough to be published in an academic journal, such asNature or Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Then it becomes another contribution to the well-substantiated body of climate change knowledge, which evolves and grows stronger as scientists gather and confirm more evidence. Other scientists can take that information further by conducting their own studies to better understand sea level rise.

All in all, the scientific method is "a way of going from observations to answers," NASA terrestrial ecosystem scientist Erika Podest, based at JPL, said. It adds clarity to our way of thinking and shows that scientific knowledge is always evolving.

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The scientific method and climate change: How scientists know - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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By Holly Shaftel, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory The scientific method is the gold standard for exploring our natural world. You might have learned about it in grade school, but here's a quick reminder: It's the process that scientists use to understand everything from animal behavior to the forces that shape our planet-including climate change.