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Climate Change and Global Warming Facts

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Introduction to Climate change Many people make Climate Change and Global Warming a scary and difficult thing to understand, but it's not. Climate change refers to general changes in climate patterns, including temperature, precipitation, winds, and other factors.

Scientists have warned that the world's climate has changed a lot, and has affected many living and non-living things.

Many places that were warmer are now getting colder, and many colder regions are getting much colder or even warmer (know as Global Warming).

For example, between 1901 and 2012, it is believed that the earth's temperature has risen by 0.89 °C. Rainfall amounts have also risen in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere since the beginning of the 20th Century. It is also believed that sea levels have risen up to about 19cm globally, with lots of glaciers melting in addition.

Some people do not believe that these are caused by human activities. They think it is all political and falsehood intended to cause panic among humans.

Well, whatever it is, we would like to know more, and take a few good points from this confusion, and use them to make our world a better place to live.

Tip...

Global warming (as well as global cooling) refers specifically to any change in the global average surface temperature. Do not confuse the two.

Climate change is a change of the composition of global atmosphere, observed over a period of time, and in comparison to other time periods, as a direct or indirect result of human activity.

Let's start by learning a few tricky terms that we may need to explain Climate Change better.

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Climate Change and Global Warming for Children

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Get basic facts, tips and information on Climate Change and Global Warming. What is Global Warming for kids? What is climate change for children? Explain climate change to children, what is Green House Gases? Effects of global warmimg, A helpful guide for children

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: June 12, 2020.

It's hard to think of many things powerful enough to disrupt life across our entire planet. Huge natural disasters-like earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, or tsunamis (freak tidal waves)-can affect many thousands of people, but their impacts are usually confined to just one region of the world. Terrorist attacks cause worldwide panic and horror, but their effects are usually quite localized. Catastrophic nuclear accidents, like the one that happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine in 1986, can spread "fallout" (toxic radioactive debris) across an entire continent-but even they do not affect the whole Earth.

Global warming, which is a gradual rising of Earth's temperature, is different from all these, representing a scale of threat greater than anything humans have faced in recent history. That's why some people now refer to it as "global heating" or the "climate emergency." Unless we tackle the problem soon, it could transform the planet we live on, making the climate (Earth's weather patterns) much more erratic, forcing many species into extinction, and making life much harder-especially for people in developing countries.

Photo: Is global warming too hot an issue for politicians to handle? This falsely colored image shows the amount of heat leaving different parts of Earth, as measured by NASA's Terra spacecraft. The blue areas are coldest, where thick clouds prevent heat from escaping. In the yellow areas, there is little cloud cover so the heat escaping is at a maximum. The red areas represent mostly ocean, where heat loss is midway between these two extremes. Picture courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).

What is global warming?

Imagine you live in a timber shack in Alaska. It's chilly up there, so you build yourself a huge log fire and pile on all the wood you can find. To start with, the fire seems a great idea-especially since it's so cold outside. The shack warms up slowly, but predictably, and it's soon pretty cosy. Since the shack is much warmer than the atmosphere and ground that surround it, it loses heat quite quickly. If the fire supplies heat at the same rate as the shack loses it, the shack stays at roughly the same temperature. But if you make the fire too big, the shack will get hotter... and hotter... and hotter. Before long, you'll start feeling uncomfortable. You might wish you'd never made the fire so big in the first place. But once it's burning, there's nothing you can do to stop it. The shack will keep getting hotter long after you stop piling wood on the fire.

Photo: Getting warmer? A NASA map of global sea surface temperatures produced using infrared measurements taken by a satellite in space. Red and yellow areas are hottest, green and blue are coldest. Picture courtesy of NASA on the Commons.

Global warming is working a bit like this. Thanks to a variety of things that people do, Earth is getting slightly warmer year by year. It's not really warming up noticeably-at least not in the short term. In fact, since 1900, the whole planet has warmed up only by around 0.8 degrees Celsius. By the end of the 21st century, however, global warming is likely to cause an increase in Earth's temperature of around 2-5 degrees Celsius. There is a 75 percent chance of a 2-3 degree warming and a 50 percent chance of a 5 degree warming, and scientists agree that the warming is most likely to be around 3 degrees. Now even a 5-degree warming might not sound like much to worry about, but 5 degrees is roughly how much difference there is between the world as it is today and as it was during the last Ice Age. In other words, when we came out of the Ice Age, the planet warmed by 5 degrees over about 5000 years. Modern climate change threatens to produce the same amount of a warming in as little as a century! Once something as big as a planet starts to warm up, it's very hard to slow down the process-and almost impossible to stop it completely. Global warming means Big Trouble.

What causes global warming?

Global warming is caused by a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect. A greenhouse (or glasshouse) is good for growing things because it traps heat inside and stays hotter than the atmosphere around it.

The natural greenhouse effect

Earth's atmosphere behaves like a gigantic greenhouse, though it traps heat a different way. Gases high in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, behave like a giant piece of curved glass wrapped right round the planet. The Sun's rays (mostly visible light and short-wavelength, high-energy ultraviolet radiation) pass straight through this greenhouse gas and warm up Earth. The warming planet gives off heat energy (longer wavelength infrared radiation), which radiates out toward space. Some of this outgoing radiation does not pass through the atmosphere, but is reflected back down to Earth, effectively trapping heat and keeping the planet about 33 degrees hotter than it would otherwise be. This is called the natural greenhouse effect and it's a good thing. Without it, Earth would be much too cold to support the huge diversity of life that it does.

Artwork: The Greenhouse Effect: 1) When the Sun's radiation enters our atmosphere, it heats our planet. 2) Like all hot objects, Earth gives off some of its heat as radiation of its own. Some of this radiation passes straight through the atmosphere and disappears off into space. 3) However, some is reflected back again by the "blanket" of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The more greenhouse gases there are, the more heat is trapped and the hotter Earth becomes.

The enhanced greenhouse effect

The greenhouse effect would be nothing to worry about were it not for one important thing. Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries (when coal-burning steam engines were first used on a large scale), humans have been using energy in far greater quantities. Car engines, for example, which were invented in the mid-19th century, work by burning gasoline (petrol) with oxygen from the air to make heat in a chemical reaction called combustion. As a byproduct, combustion gives off (or "emits") invisible carbon dioxide gas (the gas our bodies breathe out). In a similar way, power plants use combustion to make our electricity-by burning fuels like coal, gas, and oil-so they give off carbon dioxide too. Most of the energy people use is made by burning these so-called fossil fuels-producing huge clouds of carbon dioxide, which are known as carbon dioxide emissions. The carbon dioxide drifts up into the atmosphere and makes Earth's greenhouse gas just a little thicker. This is called the enhanced greenhouse effect. As a result, more of the Sun's heat gets trapped inside the atmosphere and the planet warms up. To summarize: burning fossil fuels give off carbon dioxide, which increases the greenhouse effect and heats the planet-the process we call global warming. This is often described as an anthropogenic process, which simply means "humans caused it." Although a small minority of people dispute this, the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists believe that global warming is "very likely" caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.

Is global warming getting worse?

Photo: Warming Island: These photos taken from the USGS Landsat satellite in 1985, 2002, and 2005 show how a new island has appeared in Greenland following the melting of an arctic glacier. Melting glaciers are one indication that the world is warming up. Picture courtesy of US Geological Survey (USGS): Landsat.

Thanks to all the fossil fuels we burn, there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 420,000 years. However, the actual amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is still relatively small. Before industrial times, it was about 280 parts per million (ppm). Today, it's over 410 ppm. That means if you had a chunk of atmosphere about as big as your bedroom, all the carbon dioxide in it would take up 410 millionths of the space-or roughly half the volume of a shoebox. Doesn't sound much to worry about, does it? But the important thing is that the amount of carbon dioxide is rising: in the last 150 years or so, humans have increased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by around a third-and that's a very big change for something as finely balanced as our planet.

Most people have no idea how much carbon dioxide they generate each day. The Carbon for kids web page gives you some idea what your personal carbon dioxide emissions look like. The United States produces roughly 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide for each one of its citizens each year (down from a peak of 22.5 tonnes in 1973). Or to put it another way, that's enough carbon dioxide to cover the entire land surface of the United States 24 cm (10 in) deep. Most of this gas winds up in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

The problem is getting worse all the time. Currently, 80 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels. And the amount of energy people use is increasing too, not least because developing countries such as China and India are becoming more affluent. According to the US Energy Information Administration's 2019 forecast, world energy consumption will increase by 50 percent between 2010 and 2050, mostly due to growth in Asia, and over 75 percent of that energy will still be coming from fossil fuels. In summary, if things continue as they are, we'll soon be using nearly twice as much energy and still getting almost as much of it from fossil fuels. Without drastic action, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase-and Earth will continue to heat up. In other words, global warming will get worse.

Chart: Who emits most carbon dioxide? This chart shows the per capita (per person) carbon dioxide emissions for a dozen representative countries. The yellow bars show emissions for 2000; the orange bars show the picture in 2014. You can see a clear trend: developed countries are slowly reducing their emissions; developing countries show emissions that are steadily rising (but still much lower per capita overall). At the time this page was last updated (June 2020), these remain the latest available figures. 2011 figures from the United Nations Statistics Division: Millennium Development Goals Indicators website; 2014 figures from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, United States, courtesy of World Bank Database, published under a Creative Commons CC BY-4.0 licence.

What is climate change?

Climate is the pattern of weather in a particular place: how much sunlight and rainfall it gets, how windy it is, and so on. The world's weather is entirely powered by the Sun. Since Earth rotates on a tilted axis, different parts of our planet are heated by different amounts at different times of year, making some regions hotter than others and causing the seasons. The temperature variations between one part of the world and another cause differences in air pressure, producing winds, storms, and even hurricanes. The Sun's heat also warms the seas unevenly, driving ocean currents-which, in some ways, are like underwater winds-from one place to another. Links between the atmosphere and the oceans can produce complex weather patterns such as El-Niño-a kind of abnormal and erratic weather that happens every few years in the Pacific.

Scientists believe that greater amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and hotter temperatures on Earth, will significantly change the climate across the whole planet. This climate change is already beginning to happen in parts of the world. If you live in a chilly place like Alaska or Greenland, you might think a bit of global warming sounds like a great idea. But climate change doesn't necessarily mean things will get hotter. Some places will be hotter some of the time, but most places will simply see more erratic and extreme weather. That could mean heavier rainfall on occasions, more snow in some places, longer periods of drought, more storms and hurricanes, and more frequent heatwaves.

Photo: Will global warming bring more hurricanes?. Picture courtesy of NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL).

Climate change is nothing new. Earth's climate has been changing regularly for hundreds of millions of years, sometimes getting colder and sometimes warmer. Everyone knows about Ice Ages -those periods of history when Earth was far colder than it is now. The climate change people talk about today seems to be different. Most scientists believe it is caused by systematic global warming, itself caused by a gradual increase in fossil fuels. Whereas traditional climate change makes Earth as a whole either hotter or cooler, modern climate change is going to make the climate much more erratic-hotter in some places, cooler in others; drier in some places; wetter elsewhere. In a nutshell, climate change means the type of weather we experience will change-perhaps quite dramatically in some places-as the years go by.

Is climate change really happening?

" Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen."
IPCC Climate Change, AR5 Synthesis Report, p.2.

Scientists have been debating this question for about 20 years now. So what's the official position? According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which summarizes key scientific research on the issue carried out by thousands of scientists, greenhouse gases have "increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values" and "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to [this]... It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic [human-caused] warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica)." As one of the world's leading climate scientists, Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, puts it, the current scientific view of global warming is: "based on decades of research and thousands of studies. The extraordinary consensus reached is seen in the statements of many international and national professional bodies which have extensively and critically assessed the scientific evidence."

Prof. Rahmstorf has compiled a very useful climate change fact sheet (PDF format) summarizing the evidence in a couple of pages. The BBC has produced a handy, one-page summary called Climate Change Explained in Six Graphics, which contains charts showing climate trends over the last few years. Browse those charts and you will see that Earth's temperature has increased systematically over the last century, sea levels have risen significantly, and carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased almost exponentially. Most climate scientists believe these things are connected: they consider that the burning fuels cause the carbon dioxide emissions, which make the temperature increase, which causes the sea levels to rise. (If you want to see lots more charts, take a look at the official IPCC reports website.)

Since records of the weather date back only a hundred years or so, how can scientists confidently make claims that the climate has been changing over a much longer period? In turns out that Earth keeps a natural record of its own climate in many surprising ways. For example, as ice has formed year upon year at the poles, old ice has been buried underneath with bubbles of air trapped inside it. The bubbles act as a record of what the air was like on Earth when the ice formed-and thus what the climate was like in years gone by. Using drills, scientists can extract ice cores (long thin pipes full of ice), study the air bubbles at different depths, and calculate how much carbon dioxide they contain. If they figure out how old the ice is, they can use an ice core as a kind of graph of how carbon dioxide has changed over time. Scientists can also study changes in the climate using ocean sediments, samples of buried pollen, and other, once-living matter. Research like this can tell us what the climate was like hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Although most scientists believe in global warming, it's important to note that a very small minority do not. Most agree that Earth is warming but not that fossil-fuel burning and human carbon dioxide emissions are responsible. The "climate-change skeptics" argue that increases in Earth's temperature are either not happening at all or may be caused by other things, including natural variations in the climate that have been happening for millennia. In recent years, however, fewer and fewer scientists have dissented from the widely held position that global warming and climate change are really happening. People could still be wrong about global warming-but that's becoming increasingly unlikely.

Runaway world?

This chart shows why the world is in trouble.

Over the last few decades, the amount of energy people use (red line), their economic activity (yellow), the electricity they use (dark blue), the world's population (green), and their carbon dioxide emissions (light blue line) have all increased inexorably.

Can the world continue to develop at such a pace without experiencing an environmental and social catastrophe? On the other hand, would reducing energy or electricity consumption cause major economic upheaval and social problems of a different kind? How can countries balance the need to develop economically with the need to protect the environment?

Source: This chart was drawn in February 2018 using the latest available figures (up to 2014) from World Bank Open Data, and at the time of writing, June 2020, this is still the latest available data from this source. It's published in line with the World Bank's Terms of Use for Datasets, which are themselves published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). The datasets featured here are Electric power consumption (kWh per capita), Energy use (kg of oil equivalent per capita) (IEA Statistics © OECD/IEA 2014 (iea.org/stats/index.asp ), subject to iea.org/t&c/termsandconditions), GDP per capita (constant 2010 US$), Population, total, CO2 emissions (kt) (total). Why have I shown total CO2 emissions rather than per capita? Because it's total emissions that count toward the damage we do.

How can scientists predict what will happen in future?

If we know what's happened in the past, we can often figure out what will happen in the future. If you know it's rained every Tuesday for the last five years, you might hazard a guess that it will rain next Tuesday too-and you might well be right. Forecasting the weather is somewhat more complex than this, but it essentially means using data from the past to figure out the future. Forecasting Earth's climate-the long-term patterns of weather for the entire planet-is more complex still.

Scientists make forecasts of the climate using what is known as a computer model. This is a large and very complex program running on a supercomputer (one of the world's most powerful computers). It's essentially a collection of math equations that describe how different parts of the climate work. Each equation contains variables (quantities that change) like temperature, rainfall, amount of carbon dioxide, and sea-level and shows how one of these things affects the others. Taken all together, the equations describe roughly how the climate works. How can the scientists be sure of that? They go through a process called "calibrating the model". If they start the model with data from 1900, say, and ask it to run forward 50 years, it should predict the weather in 1950. The scientists can compare the model's predictions with the real data for 1950 and see how the model fares. If it makes accurate predictions, they can run it forward into the future to see what will happen in 2050, 2100, or even later. The further into the future the model runs, the less accurate it is likely to be.

One reason some people are skeptical about global warming is that they doubt computer models are good enough to model the climate decades into the future. To produce a computer model, scientists have to make certain assumptions about how the climate works. Since the climate is very complex and computers are only so powerful, these assumptions are usually simplifications. The skeptics are concerned that the computer models are too crude and simple and they may not reflect how things work in reality. But as time goes on, climate scientists have more and more data to work with, and computers become more and more powerful-so the models get better. How good are their predictions? A study published in 2019 found that climate models have accurately predicted the last 50 years of global warming.

There's more about how scientists make computer models of the climate in a great BBC news article Models 'key to climate forecasts' by Dr Vicky Pope of the UK's Hadley Centre. If you want to go one better, go to Climateprediction.net to run your own mini model of the climate. Using your computer's "down time", you'll be able to help some of the world's leading scientists produce even better models of our climate.

Photo: The model I'm currently running for Climateprediction.net to help scientists improve their ideas about global warming. My computer is processing some data for the year 1811 as you read this! Over 47,000 computers in the world are tackling the project, which works just like SETI@home.

What will be the impacts of climate change?

As Earth warms up, the oceans warm up too-very slowly but significantly. Water expands as it warms so, as the oceans are heated, the water they contain takes up more volume, and this makes the level of the seas rise. The seas also rise when glaciers and ice sheets melt, feeding more water into the oceans. Sea-level rise is one of the major impacts of global warming. That might not worry you if you live in the center of a country or up on high ground-in Colorado or Montana, USA, for example, or in Birmingham, England. But if you live near sea level in Florida or California, in a country like Bangladesh, or on a low-lying island such as one of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, there's a growing (but so far, still very slim) chance your home might disappear underwater. Currently, the world's sea levels are rising at 3cm (just over 1 inch) per decade. Scientists think sea levels could rise on average by anything from 10 cm to 1 m (4 in to 3 ft) by 2100.

Another very obvious consequence of global warming is that the North and South Poles are warming dramatically. According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), sea ice in the Arctic has reduced by about 8 percent over the last 30 years-that means an area of ice the size of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (or Texas and Arizona) combined has now disappeared. A few years ago, scientists were warning that, by 2100, the North Pole may be so warm that its ice disappears entirely in summer; now they're warning that could happen imminently. Antarctica, at the South Pole, contains around 90 percent of the world's ice. Here, some glaciers are melting rapidly, draining water into the oceans and causing concerns about large-scale rises in sea-level. But the exact effect of climate change is complex: it is also leading to greater snowfall, which is building up glaciers in some places at the same time as they are being eroded elsewhere. If all of Antarctica's ice were to melt, it has been estimated that global sea levels would rise by 80 meters (260 ft)! Fortunately, that's not likely to happen. Melting Antarctic ice is contributing only about 15 percent of the rise in sea level that is currently underway.

Why do these things matter?

The ecosystems in different regions of our planet are finely balanced. In the polar regions, for example, plants and animals are adapted to living in extreme cold, with little sunlight, and hardly any rainfall. In the tropics, plants and animals are used to a much warmer and wetter climate. As global warming gathers pace, many parts of Earth will see their climate change significantly. The poles may become too warm for many of the creatures that live there. If the climate change happened slowly, things would have time to adapt: plants that like the cool could gradually shift northwards and grow at higher latitudes. But with a relatively rapid climate change, plants and animals may not be able to adapt quickly enough-and many will become extinct.

Consider the Arctic, where average temperatures have risen twice as fast in recent years as for the rest of the world. Polar bears depend on sea ice for hunting and moving from one place to another. If all the summer sea ice disappears, as predicted, polar bears may be unable to survive. Hundreds of millions of migratory birds fly to the Arctic every summer to breed and nest. But global warming will alter the plants that can thrive in the Arctic. Around 50 percent of breeding habitats for some birds may disappear, threatening the species that depend on them. Caribou (reindeer) are already in decline in many places because their tundra habitats are starting to disappear.

Photo: Are caribou really heading for extinction? Picture by Karen Laubenstein courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service.

And it's not just the Arctic that will be affected: climate change will make life difficult for plants and animals all over the world. In the tropics, for example, warming oceans are expected to kill off parts of coral reefs, with disastrous effects on the complex, colorful ecosystems that depend on them. Some predictions say climate change could make 30-40 percent of the world's species extinct.

What impact will climate change have on people?

Humans, of course, are animals too-and, although we often forget it, we are also part of the complex global ecosystem. What's happening at the North Pole might seem remote and unimportant, but we are likely to feel the effects of climate change much closer to home. More erratic weather patterns could mean much greater storm damage and the loss of coastal areas to rising seas; the insurance industry has been worried about the effects of climate change for many years. Episodes of El-Niño are more intense and longer-lasting and already happening around three times more often than a century ago and are expected to double in future. Floods are likely to plague some countries, droughts others. On some predictions, climate change flooding could make around 100-200 million people permanently homeless by 2100. Ironically, even in a world of rising sea levels and often more severe rainfall, many more people are expected to suffer severe water shortages.

There will be other impacts too. Changes in climate will make it easier to grow food in some places, but much harder in others. There may be gains in production in parts of the United States, but countries such as those in Africa are predicted to lose out. Overall, the world's poorest people are expected to be hit hardest. Pests and diseases are predicted to spread much further to take advantage of global warming. Mosquitoes, for example, breed faster in warmer climates, spreading diseases to more people. In a warming world, some scientists believe that malaria will spread much more widely; according to some estimates, two-thirds of the world's people could be at risk-compared to just 45 percent at risk today. (But the science is complex, since many other factors are involved.)

Photo: Mosquitoes are expected to extend their range north, putting more people at risk from malaria. Picture by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) courtesy of National Institutes of Health Image Gallery.

What can we do to stop global warming?

The short answer is a simple one: to reduce the impact of climate change, we need to reduce global warming. That means producing fewer carbon dioxide emissions and it might mean using less energy or using it more efficiently (doing the same things with less energy or better technology). In practice, reducing emissions is both very simple and very hard.

It's very simple for any one of us to reduce our personal carbon dioxide emissions. You can replace the incandescent lamps in your home (ones that make light by getting hot) and use energy-saving fluorescent lamps instead. You can switch your utility company so more of your electricity is made from renewable energy. Or you could bicycle, walk, or take the bus from time to time instead of using your car. You could put on a sweater instead of turning on the heating, open your windows instead of using the air-con, and drive with better fuel economy in mind. These things are all very easy to do and will make an immediate difference. But are they enough?

Photo: Solar panels like these could help us to tackle global warming by producing energy without emitting carbon dioxide.

The real problem is that the global trends are working against us. Developing countries like India and China are becoming more affluent as people there escape from poverty. More people are buying cars and aspiring to the same kind of lifestyle that people enjoy in the United States and Europe. With global energy and fossil-fuel use still increasing, major climate change seems almost unavoidable. That doesn't mean we should give up trying to stop it. With a dramatic international effort, we might be able to halt the growth in carbon dioxide emissions by 2100. If we can keep carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to below 550 ppm (roughly twice what they were before the Industrial Revolution and about 45 percent higher than they are today), flooding caused by climate change in low-lying countries like Bangladesh will be reduced by as much as 80-90 percent.

While it's easy for individuals to make a difference to global warming, governments are finding it much harder. One concern is that measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions may mean using less energy and could harm economic growth. So if one country voluntarily tries to clean up its act, the fear is that it may find itself at an economic disadvantage to other nations. This is why the United States refused to support an international climate-change treaty called the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty excluded developing nations such as China-and the US government believed all countries should take part.

All the time the world's governments continue to debate and disagree, global warming is getting steadily worse. The longer it takes to reach agreements, the worse things will get. In October 2006, the British government published a report by a distinguished economist called Sir Nicholas Stern. The Stern Review argued that it makes sense to invest money and tackle climate change now, because the cost of putting off action will be greater tomorrow. (It's rather like going to the dentist for a filling now to stop your teeth falling out later.) Stern claims global economic activity (measured by something called gross domestic product, or GDP) could fall by up to 20 percent if the effects of climate change are really severe. By contrast, investing in measures to stop climate change now would cost only one percent of GDP-20 times less. With the publication of the Stern report, scientists, economists, and politicians finally appeared to be talking the same language.

Interestingly, some noted climate change skeptics have now reversed their position. Several years ago, Professor Richard Muller of the University of California at Berkeley was distinctly dubious about global warming, so he set up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project to test the evidence fairly and with an open mind-just as you would expect a good scientist to do. By July 2012, he had announced in the New York Times a much stronger belief in human-caused climate change than even the official IPCC verdict: "Global warming [is] real... and humans are almost entirely the cause."

Even so, governments have continued to dither and put off firm action. In December 2015, at an international summit in Paris, France (COP21), 195 nations finally agreed a deal to try to limit global temperature rises to less than 2°C. While the negotiators congratulated themselves on a momentous achievement, critics were quick to point out that little is changing: the world is still on course for a much higher temperature rise and potentially devastating climate change. One of the world's most influential climate scientists, James Hansen, described the Paris agreement as "a fraud... a fake... worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned." And temperatures will keep on rising. Each January since 2013, journalists have found themselves writing the same headline: measured one way or another, last year was "the hottest ever." In January 2017, scientists discovered that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded; in January 2018, they revealed 2017 was the hottest year on record without an El Niño; and, as swathes of southern Australia went up in bush-fire flames, 2019 was declared the second hottest year on record. Global warming means many more headlines like this in the future. At the end of 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we now have just 12 years to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, which would "require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society."

The clock is ticking.

Even with all these warnings, there remains a distinct lack of urgency in tackling climate change. What will it take to make us wake up to global warming? And when we finally do, will it already be too late?

Find out more

On this website

You might like these other articles on our site covering related topics:

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Articles

Books

General introductions

Impacts

Politics

This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein. Simon and Schuster, 2014. Klein argues that climate change requires nothing less than rethinking our entire economic system.

Heat: How to stop the planet burning by George Monbiot. Allen Lane, 2006. A melodramatic title? A powerful book about turning climate change around.

Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled a Climate Crisis by Ross Gelbspan. Basic Books, 2008. The politics of climate change and its skeptics. Gelbspan's earlier book The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription, Perseus Books, 1998, is also worth a look.

The Carbon War by Jeremy Leggett. Routledge, 2001. The monumental challenge we face in overcoming a carbon-based economy.

For younger readers (ages 8-12)

Eyewitness: Climate Change by John Woodward. Dorling Kindersley, 2008: A clear and straightforward guide presented in easily-digestible, picture-story format.

Earth Matters by Lynn Dicks et al. Dorling Kindersley, 2008: A colorful guide to the many challenges Earth faces in the coming years and decades, with a particular emphasis on climate change. I wrote the polar section of this book.

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Global warming for kids: A simple explanation of climate change

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: June 12, 2020. It's hard to think of many things powerful enough to disrupt life across our entire planet. Huge natural disasters-like earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, or tsunamis (freak tidal waves)-can affect many thousands of people, but their impacts are usually confined to just one region of the world.

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A: Since the Industrial Revolution, the global annual temperature has increased in total by a little more than 1 degree Celsius, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 1880-the year that accurate recordkeeping began-and 1980, it rose on average by 0.07 degrees Celsius (0.13 degrees Fahrenheit) every 10 years. Since 1981, however, the rate of increase has more than doubled: For the last 40 years, we've seen the global annual temperature rise by 0.18 degrees Celsius, or 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit, per decade.

The result? A planet that has never been hotter. Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since 2005-and the 5 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2015. Climate change deniers have argued that there has been a "pause" or a "slowdown" in rising global temperatures, but numerous studies, including a 2018 paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, have disproved this claim. The impacts of global warming are already harming people around the world.

What causes global warming?

A: Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO ₂) and other air pollutants collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth's surface. Normally this radiation would escape into space, but these pollutants, which can last for years to centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter. These heat-trapping pollutants-specifically carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, and synthetic fluorinated gases-are known as greenhouse gases, and their impact is called the greenhouse effect.

How is global warming linked to extreme weather?

A: Scientists agree that the earth's rising temperatures are fueling longer and hotter heat waves, more frequent droughts, heavier rainfall, and more powerful hurricanes.

In 2015, for example, scientists concluded that a lengthy drought in California-the state's worst water shortage in 1,200 years-had been intensified by 15 to 20 percent by global warming. They also said the odds of similar droughts happening in the future had roughly doubled over the past century. And in 2016, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine announced that we can now confidently attribute some extreme weather events, like heat waves, droughts, and heavy precipitation, directly to climate change.

The impacts of global warming are being felt everywhere. Extreme heat waves have caused tens of thousands of deaths around the world in recent years. And in an alarming sign of events to come, Antarctica has lost nearly four trillion metric tons of ice since the 1990s. The rate of loss could speed up if we keep burning fossil fuels at our current pace, some experts say, causing sea levels to rise several meters in the next 50 to 150 years and wreaking havoc on coastal communities worldwide.

What are the other effects of global warming?

A: Each year scientists learn more about the consequences of global warming, and each year we also gain new evidence of its devastating impact on people and the planet. As the heat waves, droughts, and floods associated with climate change become more frequent and more intense, communities suffer and death tolls rise. If we're unable to reduce our emissions, scientists believe that climate change could lead to the deaths of more than 250,000 people around the globe every year and force 100 million people into poverty by 2030.

Global warming is already taking a toll on the United States. And if we aren't able to get a handle on our emissions, here's just a smattering of what we can look forward to:

Disappearing glaciers, early snowmelt, and severe droughts will cause more dramatic water shortages and continue to increase the risk of wildfires in the American West.

Rising sea levels will lead to even more coastal flooding on the Eastern Seaboard, especially in Florida, and in other areas such as the Gulf of Mexico.

Forests, farms, and cities will face troublesome new pests, heat waves, heavy downpours, and increased flooding. All of these can damage or destroy agriculture and fisheries.

Disruption of habitats such as coral reefs and alpine meadows could drive many plant and animal species to extinction.

Allergies, asthma, and infectious disease outbreaks will become more common due to increased growth of pollen-producing ragweed, higher levels of air pollution, and the spread of conditions favorable to pathogens and mosquitoes.

Though everyone is affected by climate change, not everyone is affected equally. Indigenous people, people of color, and the economically marginalized are typically hit the hardest. Inequities built into our housing, health care, and labor systems make these communities more vulnerable to the worst impacts of climate change-even though these same communities have done the least to contribute to it.

Where does the United States stand in terms of global-warming contributors?

A: In recent years, China has taken the lead in global-warming pollution, producing about 26 percent of all CO2 emissions. The United States comes in second. Despite making up just 4 percent of the world's population, our nation produces a sobering 13 percent of all global CO2 emissions-nearly as much as the European Union and India (third and fourth place) combined. And America is still number one, by far, in cumulative emissions over the past 150 years. As a top contributor to global warming, the United States has an obligation to help propel the world to a cleaner, safer, and more equitable future. Our responsibility matters to other countries, and it should matter to us, too.

Is the United States doing anything to prevent global warming?

A: We've started. But in order to avoid the worsening effects of climate change, we need to do a lot more-together with other countries-to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to clean energy sources.

Despite the lack of cooperation from the Trump administration, local and state governments made great strides during this period through efforts like the American Cities Climate Challenge and ongoing collaborations like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Meanwhile, industry and business leaders have been working with the public sector, creating and adopting new clean-energy technologies and increasing energy efficiency in buildings, appliances, and industrial processes. Today the American automotive industry is finding new ways to produce cars and trucks that are more fuel efficient and is committing itself to putting more and more zero-emission electric vehicles on the road. Developers, cities, and community advocates are coming together to make sure that new affordable housing is built with efficiency in mind, reducing energy consumption and lowering electric and heating bills for residents. And renewable energy continues to surge as the costs associated with its production and distribution keep falling. In 2020 renewable energy sources such as wind and solar provided more electricity than coal for the very first time in U.S. history.

Is global warming too big a problem for me to help tackle?

A: No! While we can't win the fight without large-scale government action at the national level, we also can't do it without the help of individuals who are willing to use their voices, hold government and industry leaders to account, and make changes in their daily habits.

Wondering how you can be a part of the fight against global warming? Reduce your own carbon footprint by taking a few easy steps: Make conserving energy a part of your daily routine and your decisions as a consumer. When you shop for new appliances like refrigerators, washers, and dryers, look for products with the government's ENERGY STAR ® label; they meet a higher standard for energy efficiency than the minimum federal requirements. When you buy a car, look for one with the highest gas mileage and lowest emissions. You can also reduce your emissions by taking public transportation or carpooling when possible.

And while new federal and state standards are a step in the right direction, much more needs to be done. Voice your support of climate-friendly and climate change preparedness policies, and tell your representatives that equitably transitioning from dirty fossil fuels to clean power should be a top priority-because it's vital to building healthy, more secure communities.

You don't have to go it alone, either. Movements across the country are showing how climate action can build community, be led by those on the front lines of its impacts, and create a future that's equitable and just for all.

This story was originally published on March 11, 2016 and has been updated with new information and links.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can't resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can't republish our material wholesale or automatically-you need to select stories individually; you can't republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should to let us know when you've used one of our stories.

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What is global warming? Global warming causes, effects, extreme weather, facts, and relation to climate change.

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Climate Change: What Happens If The World Warms Up By 2°C?

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Climate Change: What Happens If The World Warms Up By 2°C?

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Climate Change: What Happens If The World Warms Up By 2°C?

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People are seeing change all over the world. Arctic sea ice is melting earlier and forming later. Glaciers are disappearing. Heat waves, storms and floods are becoming more extreme. Insects are emerging sooner and flowers are blooming earlier. In some places, birds are laying eggs before they're expected and bears have stopped hibernating.

So what's going on? Our planet is getting warmer, and even a small increase in temperature can change our climate. And when our climate changes, we're all affected.

A Natural Greenhouse

Earth is the only planet we know of that can support life. The reason Earth is different than the rest relies on a number of factors. We get just the right amount of energy from the sun (if we were any closer, we would burn up; if we were any further, we'd freeze). Our atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the Earth that absorbs ultra violet radiation and prevents temperatures from rising too high or getting too cold. The greenhouse effect is the process that causes the surface of the Earth to be warmer than it would be if we had no atmosphere. Without these three factors, most like on Earth couldn't exist.

The Greenhouse Effect

Natural Cycles

Several natural cycles of the Earth keep it and its atmosphere in perfect balance. Carbon is essential to life and the carbon cycle keeps it moving throughout all Earth's systems. Water is one of the most important things to our survival, and the water cycle keeps it moving around and around our Earth and atmosphere - even through our bodies.

Weather Versus Climate

Weather is what's happening with the atmosphere that surrounds us. It's not the same as climate, which refers to the pattern of weather we expect to see in a particular place. The weather is always driven by the sun's energy, whether it's warm outside or snowing due to the circulation of warm air to cold places and cold air to warm places by the atmosphere. This, combined with the movement of the oceans and the amount of moisture in the air creates everything from perfect sunny days to terror-filled tornadoes.

Even though the weather changes frequently, the climate of a particular place should always be about the same. In Alaska, for example, there shouldn't be any tropical-like weather. In California, it shouldn't snow too much in the winter.

The fact is, while the Earth's climate has changed many times over millions of years (ice ages, for example, happen naturally every 100,000 years or so), it really shouldn't be changing much during any one person's lifetime. We're still recovering from the last ice age, which is said to have wiped out the dinosaurs. While temperatures do rise gradually over time after an ice age, today our planet's surface temperatures seem to be rising faster now than they were 100 years ago. And this is what has many people worried.

Balancing Act

Our planet is always changing and its systems are constantly working together to keep a kind of balance. All forms of life, including humans, depend on this balance for their existence.

All living things are connected to each other in ecosystems by food chains and food webs. Plants get energy from the sun. Herbivores (species that don't eat meat) get energy by eating plants. Carnivores (that eat meat) get energy by eating herbivores. This is how energy flows through all ecosystems - starting from the sun.

When any one part of an ecosystem chain breaks, the survival of the entire system, along with every living thing that depends on it for survival, hangs in the balance. For example, if someone decides to spray a poisonous pesticide on plants to keep bugs from eating them, then lizards may accidentally ingest that poison when they eat the plants and cats may be poisoned, too, when they catch and eat the lizards. With no cats around, the rat population could explode - and rats carry diseases that are even more dangerous for humans.

Another example is when a volcano erupts. If the eruption is very big, it could do a lot of damage besides killing thousands of people. A volcanic eruption spreads huge amounts of ash and gases into the atmosphere and around the globe, which could cause temperatures worldwide to fall. And when temperatures change dramatically like this, it affects crop patterns and could lead to massive food shortages.

Temperature Rising

Whether you believe in global warming or not, the fact is that the 11 hottest years recorded in the last 100 years have all happened after 1995. The world is definitely getting warmer.

When the world's temperatures get warmer, a few things happen. The water cycle speeds up, causing more rain, droughts, wildfires and extreme heat waves. There will be more greenhouse gases in the air, as the atmosphere reaches capacity of how many gases it can absorb. Arctic ice will melt sooner and faster and won't be as thick or expensive when it reforms. The oceans will warm and cause sea levels to rise more quickly, which can cause flooding on land and water contamination. Glacier ice will melt.

Greenhouse Gases

These gases help keep the world from being too hot or too cold. But the amounts of some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing, making our planet warmer. Greenhouse gases include water vapor (mostly natural source), carbon dioxide (mostly human source), methane (mostly human source) and nitrous oxide (mostly human source).

Far North & South

The most global warming has been seen in the Earth's coldest places, like the Arctic, Antarctica, Alaska and parts of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia.

Arctic temperatures are rising twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth. There has been a huge amount of ice loss in the last 20-30 years. While some is natural, global warming seems to be the main culprit. Ice shelves that have been around for tens of thousands of years have collapsed due to lower temperatures, which causes sea levels to rise. Permafrost has started to melt, which results in forests and even towns and cities to crumble as the ground beneath them thaws.

Because the far north and south have very fragile ecosystems, when one part of the chain breaks the effects can be seen almost immediately. As the ice disappears, so are tiny sea creatures called krill are dying - and so are the many fish, birds and whales that eat them. Polar bears spend most of their time on sea ice hunting seals and other sea animals. As the ice melts, the bears' hunting season is shortened and female bears, with lowered body weights, can't seem to produce cubs. Warmer summers also mean certain pests' life cycles are longer than before. For example, the spruce bark beetle, which is only supposed to live for one summer, is now surviving for two. This tiny bug destroys an unimaginable number of trees in Arctic forests - and now it can do it two years in a row instead of just one.

Polar Bear on floating ice

The World Ocean

Most of the Earth's surface is covered by a single ocean. All forms of life - even those that don't actually live in the ocean itself - depend on it for survival. For example, our ocean helps control the Earth's temperature with its currents, by constantly keeping cold and warm water moving. Ocean water dissolves lots of substances, including carbon dioxide gas. All ocean creatures and even sea birds depend on microscopic plankton - tiny plants that take in carbon dioxide to grow - for food and survival.

But when the ocean warms (which it has been), it can't dissolve as much carbon dioxide, plankton can't survive and the currents change (which greatly affects the weather and other things on dry land). Also, the sea level rises, so certain islands that are currently above water may actually disappear in the next 100 years.

The effects of global warming on things that live in the ocean are massive. We already talked about plankton, but what about other species? Coral reefs - home to many ecosystems and living creatures - can die as water temperatures rise. Sea turtles depend on beaches to lay their eggs, but many beaches are disappearing thanks to rising sea levels. Whales, who depend on krill who depend on plankton, die. Fish stocks fall, translating into food shortages for humans.

Where is global warming going?

We All Live On Land

What changes are we seeing on land as a result of global warming? We're seeing longer periods of drought, more wildfires, growing deserts (which can't support farming), glacier melt and deforestation. In fact, every second a chunk of forest the size of a football field is cut down or burned somewhere in the world.

In terms of living things, the effects of global warming are causing huge changes and disruptions. Plants and insects are moving upward (north) and causing distress to the natural, original ecosystems of those areas. Birds are also moving further north and some are even laying their eggs earlier, which can be a problem when it's out of sync with insect hatchings (since birds are insects' main predators). The winter of 2006 was so warm that mountain bears in Spain decided not to hibernate (sleep for the winter).

And what about us humans? How does and will global warming affect us, our lives and our survival as a species? First off, all human needs fresh water to survive. But changing rainfall patterns and melting glaciers will cause severe droughts, during which crops will fail, causing huge food shortages. We can also expect more heat waves. In 2003, Europe experienced such an extreme spell of hot weather that more than 20,000 people died as a direct result of the heat. Also, mass extinction of many other species we depend on for survival will mean big trouble for humanity.

Our Energy Use

There is no doubt that it's our own fault the world's temperature is rising and global warming is happening. We depend too much on fossil fuels that release deadly amounts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We need to start considering alternative sources of energy quickly, like nuclear, solar and wind. We cut down trees, which use carbon dioxide in their natural life cycles, so less of the poisonous gas can be absorbed naturally.

Humans are high energy consumers. Every day, we each exhale 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of carbon dioxide into the air. We keep ourselves warm in cold places by burning huge amounts of fuel. We use tons of energy pumping, cleaning, heating and then disposing of water. The food we eat is a huge source of greenhouse gases: fossil fuels used in fertilizers and farm machinery, food processing, transportation, packing and cooking. Construction requires all kinds of building materials that can only be made with massive amounts of energy. Our major sources of transportation are huge consumers of energy - ships, jets and cars. Electricity isn't captured magically - it takes the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuel to convert energy into electrical current. And all the "things" in your life - clothes, cell phones, toothbrushes, etc. - are made using energy... and so are the packages all these things come in.

You CAN Help!

The problem seems so big, it may be hard for you to imagine that anything you do can really help at all. But it will. Here are some changes you can make in your life to help prevent global warming:

Plant trees

Start a seed bank (keep the seeds of many varieties of plants stored away safely)

Switch every light in your house to an energy-saving bulb

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Wear a sweater instead of turning up the heat in your house

Wear lighter clothing when it's hot instead of turning on a fan

Turn lights, computers and all your chargers off and unplug them when they're not in use

Only do full loads of laundry

Take shorter showers

Skip the car ride and use your bike, or walk or take the bus

Don't buy bottled water; drink tap water, and filter it if you like

Eat lower on the food chain (less meat) and eat fewer processed foods

Knowledge is power. Change can only happen if all of us read about, listen to and discuss what's happening in the world today.

Planet Power

If scientists are right, each one of us is at least a little bit responsible for global warming. So each of us has to decide what we're going to do about it, and what kind of world we want to live in.

Our planet has been around for almost 5 billion years. It's gone through so many changes during that time - global warming may be the Earth's next big change.

No matter what changes lie ahead, our planet isn't going anywhere. And neither are we. But what we do now could have a big effect on what our lives could be like in the near future. This is our planet - let's make sure in the future it stays as wonderful a place to live in as it is now.

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People are seeing change all over the world. Arctic sea ice is melting earlier and forming later. Glaciers are disappearing. Heat waves, storms and floods are becoming more extreme. Insects are emerging sooner and flowers are blooming earlier. In some places, birds are laying eggs before they're expected and bears have stopped hibernating.

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Global Warming 101 | National Geographic

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a repost - original at http://climate.nasa.gov/warmingworld/

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Global Warming Report | Scholastic.com.pdf