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Eat your heart out.

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CommonLit | Your food choices affect Earth's climate

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Are you a meat-eater, vegan, or something in between? In this text, Janet Raloff discusses a study about how your diet can affect the Earth's climate.

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Going green?

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CommonLit | Explainer: Global warming and the greenhouse effect

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In this text from Science News for Students, Agnieszka Biskup explains what the greenhouse effect is and why temperatures on Earth are rising.

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Animals can't bear it.

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HAWT

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It's been really, really hot this summer. How hot? Last Friday, the Washington Postput out a series of maps and charts to illustrate the " record-crushing heat." All-time temperature highs have been measured in "scores of locations on every continent north of the equator," the article said, while the lower 48 states endured the hottest-ever stretch of temperatures from May until July.

These were not the only records to be set in 2018. Historic heat waves have been crashing all around the world, with records getting shattered in Japan, broken on the eastern coast of Canada, smashed in California, and rewritten in the Upper Midwest. A city in Algeria suffered through the highest high temperature ever recorded in Africa. A village in Oman set a new world record for the highest-ever low temperature. At the end of July, the New York Times ran a feature on how this year's " record heat wreaked havoc on four continents." USA Today reported that more than 1,900 heat records had been tied or beaten in just the last few days of May.

While the odds that any given record will be broken may be very, very small, the total number of potential records is mind-blowinglyenormous.

There were lots of other records, too, lots and lots and lots-but I think it's best for me to stop right here. In fact, I think it's best for all of us to stop reporting on these misleading, imbecilic stats. "Record-setting heat," as it's presented in news reports, isn't really scientific, and it's almost always insignificant. And yet, every summer seems to bring a flood of new superlatives that pump us full of dread about the changing climate. We'd all be better off without this phony grandiosity, which makes it seem like every hot and humid August is unparalleled in human history. It's not. Reports that tell us otherwise should be banished from the news.

It's true the Earth is warming overall, and the record-breaking heat that matters most-the kind we'd be crazy to ignore-is measured on a global scale. The average temperature across the surface of the planet in 2017 was 58.51 degrees, one-and-a-half degrees above the mean for the 20 th century. These records matter: 17 of the 18 hottest years on planet Earth have occurred since 2001, and the four hottest-ever years were 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. It also matters that this changing climate will result in huge numbers of heat-related deaths. Please pay attention to these terrifying and important facts. Please ignore every other story about record-breaking heat.

You'll often hear that these two phenomena are related, that local heat records reflect-and therefore illustrate-the global trend. Writing in Slate this past July, Irineo Cabreros explained that climate change does indeed increase the odds of extreme events, making record-breaking heat more likely. News reports often make this point, linking probabilities of rare events to the broader warming pattern. "Scientists say there's little doubt that the ratcheting up of global greenhouse gases makes heat waves more frequent and more intense," noted the Times in its piece on record temperatures in Algeria, Hong Kong, Pakistan, and Norway.

Yet this lesson is subtler than it seems. The rash of "record-crushing heat" reports suggest we're living through a spreading plague of new extremes-that the rate at which we're reaching highest highs and highest lows is speeding up. When the Post reports that heat records have been set "at scores of locations on every continent," it makes us think this is unexpected. It suggests that as the Earth gets ever warmer, and the weather less predictable, such records will be broken far more often than they ever have before.

But that's just not the case. In 2009, climatologist Gerald Meehl and several colleagues published an analysis of records drawn from roughly 2,000 weather stations in the U.S. between 1950 and 2006. There were tens of millions of data points in all-temperature highs and lows from every station, taken every day for more than a half-century. Meehl searched these numbers for the record-setting values-i.e., the days on which a given weather station saw its highest-ever high or lowest-ever low up until that point. When he plotted these by year, they fell along a downward-curving line. Around 50,000 new heat records were being set every year during the 1960s; then that number dropped to roughly 20,000 in the 1980s, and to 15,000 by the turn of the millennium.

This shouldn't be surprising. As a rule, weather records will be set less frequently as time goes by. The first measurement of temperature that's ever taken at a given weather station will be its highest (and lowest) of all time, by definition. There's a good chance that the same station's reading on Day 2 will be a record, too, since it only needs to beat the temperature recorded on Day 1. But as the weeks and months go by, this record-setting contest gets increasingly competitive: Each new daily temperature must now outdo every single one that came before. If the weather were completely random, we might peg the chances of a record being set at any time as 1/n, where n is the number of days recorded to that point. In other words, one week into your record-keeping, you'd have a 1 in 7 chance of landing on an all-time high. On the 100 th day, your odds would have dropped to 1 percent. After 56 years, your chances would be very, very slim.

The weather isn't random, though; we know it's warming overall, from one decade to the next. That's what Meehl et al. were looking at: They figured that a changing climate would tweak those probabilities, goosing the rate of record-breaking highs and tamping down the rate of record-breaking lows. This wouldn't change the fundamental fact that records get broken much less often as the years go by. (Even though the world is warming, you'd still expect fewer heat records to be set in 2000 than in 1965.) Still, one might guess that climate change would affect the rate, so that more heat records would be set than we'd otherwise expect.

That's not what Meehl found. Between 1950 and 2006, the rate of record-breaking heat seemed unaffected by large-scale changes to the climate: The number of new records set every year went down from one decade to the next, at a rate that matched up pretty well with what you'd see if the odds were always 1/n. The study did find something more important, though: Record-breaking lows were showing up much less often than expected. From one decade to the next, fewer records of any kind were being set, but the ratio of record lows to record highs was getting smaller over time. By the 2000s, it had fallen to about 0.5, meaning that the U.S. was seeing half as many record-breaking lows as record-breaking highs. (Meehl has since extended this analysis using data going back to 1930 and up through 2015. The results came out the same.)

What does all this mean? On one hand, it's very good evidence that climate change has tweaked the odds for record-breaking weather, at least when it comes to record lows. ( Other studies have come to the same conclusion.) On the other hand, it tells us that in the U.S., at least, we're not hitting record highs more often than we were before, and that the rate isn't higher than what you'd expect if there weren't any global warming. In fact, just the opposite is true: As one might expect, heat records are getting broken less often over time, and it's likely there will be fewer during the 2010s than at any point since people started keeping track.

This may be hard to fathom, given how much coverage has been devoted to the latest bouts of record-setting heat. These extreme events are more unusual, in absolute terms, than they've ever been before, yet they're always in the news. How could that be happening?

While the odds that any given record will be broken may be very, very small, the total number of potential records that could be broken-and then reported in the newspaper-is mind-blowingly enormous. To get a sense of how big this number really is, consider that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a database of daily records from every U.S. weather station with at least 30 years of data, and that its website lets you search for how many all-time records have been set in any given stretch of time. For instance, the database indicates that during the seven-day period ending on Aug. 17-the date when the Washington Post published its series of "record-crushing heat" infographics-154 heat records were broken.

That may sound like a lot-154 record-high temperatures in the span of just one week. But the NOAA website also indicates how many potential records could have been achieved during that time: 18,953. In actuality, less than one percent of these were broken. You can also pull data on daily maximum temperatures for an entire month: I tried that with August 2017, and then again for months of August at 10-year intervals going back to the 1950s. Each time the query returned at least about 130,000 potential records, of which one or two thousand seemed to be getting broken every year. (There was no apparent trend toward more records being broken over time.)

Now let's say there are 130,000 high-temperature records to be broken every month in the U.S. That's only half the pool of heat-related records, since the database also lets you search for all-time highest low temperatures. You can also check whether any given highest high or highest low happens to be a record for the entire month in that location, or whether it's a record when compared across all the weather stations everywhere on that particular day.

Add all of these together and the pool of potential heat records tracked by NOAA appears to number in the millions annually, of which tens of thousands may be broken. Even this vastly underestimates the number of potential records available for media concern. As they're reported in the news, all-time weather records aren't limited to just the highest highs or highest lows for a given day in one location. Take, for example, the first heat record mentioned in this column, reported in the Post: The U.S. has just endured the hottest May, June, and July of all time. The existence of that record presupposes many others: What about the hottest April, May and June, or the hottest March, April, and May? What about all the other ways that one might subdivide the calendar?

Geography provides another endless well of flexibility. Remember that the all-time record for the hottest May, June, and July applied only to the lower 48 states. Might a different set of records have been broken if we'd considered Hawaii and Alaska? And what about the records spanning smaller portions of the country, like the Midwest, or the Upper Midwest, or just the state of Minnesota, or just the Twin Cities? And what about the all-time records overseas, describing unprecedented heat in other countries or on other continents?

Even if we did limit ourselves to weather records from a single place measured over a common timescale, it would still be possible to parse out record-breaking heat in a thousand different ways. News reports give separate records, as we've seen, for the highest daily high and the highest daily low, but they also tell us when we've hit the highest average temperature over several days or several weeks or several months. The Post describes a recent record-breaking streak of days in San Diego with highs of at least 83 degrees. (You'll find stories touting streaks of daily highs above almost any arbitrary threshold: 90 degrees, 77 degrees, 60 degrees, et cetera.) Records also needn't focus on the temperature at all: There's been lots of news in recent weeks about the fact that the U.K.
has just endured its driest-ever early summer.

"Record-breaking" summer weather, then, can apply to pretty much any geographical location, over pretty much any span of time. It doesn't even have to be a record-there's an endless stream of stories on " near-record heat" in one place or another, or the " fifth-hottest" whatever to happen in wherever, or the fact that it's been " one of the hottest" yadda-yaddas that yadda-yadda has ever seen. In the most perverse, insane extension of this genre, news outlets sometimes even highlight when a given record isn't being set.

Loose reports of "record-breaking heat" only serve to puff up muggy weather and make it seem important. (The sham inflations of the wind chill factor do the same for winter months.) So don't be fooled or flattered by this record-setting hype. Your summer misery is nothing special.

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Climate Change Is Real. Record-High Temperatures Everywhere Are Fake.

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It's been really, really hot this summer. How hot? Last Friday, the Washington Postput out a series of maps and charts to illustrate the " record-crushing heat." All-time temperature highs have been measured in "scores of locations on every continent north of the equator," the article said, while the lower 48 states endured the hottest-ever stretch of temperatures from May until July.

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Weather - Science Lesson Plans - Weather for Kids - Flocabulary

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Learn key facts about the Earth's weather and atmosphere with Flocabulary's educational rap song and lesson plan.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/climate/what-is-extreme-weather.html

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Image

Credit Credit Tyler Varsell

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While unusual weather patterns have always come and gone, in a changing climate extreme weather events will become more frequent. And this year has already had its fair share of extremes.

But if extreme temperatures arrived in your area, would you even notice?

Often, the answer is no, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, researchers analyzed more than two billion Twitter messages to see how people reacted to weather events.

In fact, the study suggests, people learn to accept extreme weather as normal in as little as two years.

That might lead people to underestimate the extent of global warming, given that it has already caused extreme temperature changes. If you were born after 1976, for example, the Earth has been warmer than the 20th century average every year of your life (though local temperatures vary).

Frances C. Moore, the lead author of the new study, wanted to find out how people contextualized extreme temperatures based on past weather experiences.

"You go anywhere in the world and people are going to be commenting on the weather," said Dr. Moore, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. "But the type of weather that people talk about, it's going to differ from place to place. And the way in which it differs, it's telling us something about what type of weather people are finding unusual."

The research team analyzed messages posted to Twitter between 2014 and 2016 that included location data within the United States; they found 60 million tweets that mentioned the weather. They then compared the local temperatures at the time those tweets were sent to a baseline of the 1981-1990 average temperatures for those areas at the same time of year.

"Then what we're looking at is: How does the volume of tweets about weather change, and in particular, how did they change as temperatures change?" Dr. Moore said.

She and her colleagues found that if people experienced extreme temperatures they were unaccustomed to - hot or cold - they tweeted a lot about it. But if the location in question had already experienced those sorts of temperatures in recent years, even if the weather was extreme compared to the baseline, people tended not to tweet about it. The extreme weather wasn't remarkable anymore.

Generally,it took just two to eight years for Americans in a given location to adjust their mental baselines of what was normal - in other words, to stop recognizing that those extreme temperatures were in fact extreme.

"The definition of 'normal weather' shifts rapidly over time in a changing climate," the authors wrote.

Saif M. Mohammad, a senior research scientist at the National Research Council Canada, who was not part of the study, said it had some limitations. "We don't know how representative tweets are to general public opinion," he said. "Because a certain kind of people are tweeting, it is not necessarily representative of people at large."

Still, Dr. Mohammad said the study was a good early attempt at trying to understand how people perceive climate change through extreme weather. "It is sort of sounding a warning bell saying that we keep seeing these anomalous weather events over many years and we can quickly get adjusted to that," he said.

If this recalls the apocryphal tale of the frog that allows itself to be cooked to death if placed in a pot of water that is slowly boiled, it should be noted that frogs won't actually allow themselves to die this way; they will jump out of the pot.

But if people stop registering extreme temperatures as extreme, it may limit the public's willingness to take or support action on global warming, the researchers said. Social scientists refer to "windows of opportunity" when extreme events can act as triggers for social change.

"When people survive something that's so threatening or at times even deadly, it really shapes how they think about what was before, and that often can spur action," said Katja Brundiers, an assistant research professor in sustainability at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the study.

Other severe, repeated weather events that are exacerbated by climate change, like wildfires and hurricanes, could be more effective at spurring people to action, said Elisabeth Hamin Infield, a professor of regional planning at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was also not part of the research.

Even if we've learned to normalize temperatures that are out of the ordinary, we might still feel the effects. Dr. Moore and her colleagues used a technique called sentiment analysis to analyze the moods of tweets from people in regions that were experiencing extreme temperatures, even if the people weren't tweeting about the weather itself. (Sentiment analysis looks for words with positive and negative connotations.)

They found that people experiencing extreme temperatures still had more negative sentiment scores than average.

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter on the climate team. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered science and the environment for Popular Science. @kendrawrites

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Extreme Weather Can Feel 'Normal' After a Few Years. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Extreme Weather Can Feel 'Normal' After Just a Few Years, Study Finds

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. While unusual weather patterns have always come and gone, in a changing climate extreme weather events will become more frequent. And this year has already had its fair share of extremes.

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TED TALK: How to talk to someone who doesn't believe in Climate Change

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The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it

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How do you talk to someone who doesn’t believe in climate change? Not by rehashing the same data and facts we’ve been discussing for years, says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. In this inspiring, pragmatic talk, Hayhoe shows how the key to having a real discussion is to connect over shared values like family, community and religion -- and to prompt people to realize that they already care about a changing climate. “We can’t give in to despair,” she says. “We have to go out and look for the hope we need to inspire us to act -- and that hope begins with a conversation, today.”

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Bill Nye the Science Guy S02E19 Atmosphere

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Is global warming FAKE?

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President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America.

He could have made the decision simply because the science is false. However, most of the American and global public have been brainwashed into believing the science is correct (and supported by the faux 97% consensus), so they would not have believed that explanation.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and indeed the leaders of many western democracies, support the Agreement and are completely unaware of the gross deficiencies in the science. If they understood those deficiencies, they wouldn't be forcing a carbon dioxide (CO ₂) tax on their citizens.

Trudeau and other leaders show how little they know, and how little they assume the public knows, by calling it a "carbon tax" on "carbon emissions." But CO ₂ is a gas, the trace atmospheric gas that makes life on Earth possible. Carbon is a solid, and carbon-based fuels are solid (coal), liquid (oil) or gaseous (natural gas).

By constantly railing about "carbon emissions," Trudeau, Obama and others encourage people to think of carbon dioxide as something "dirty," like soot, which really is carbon. Calling CO ₂ by its proper name would help the public remember that it is actually an invisible, odorless gas essential to plant photosynthesis.

Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is arguably the most misinformed of the lot, saying in a recent interview that "polluters should pay." She too either does not know that CO ₂ is not a pollutant, or she is deliberately misleading people.

Like many of her political peers, McKenna dismisses credentialed PhD scientists who disagree with her approach, labelling them "deniers." She does not seem to understand that questioning scientific hypotheses, even scientific theories, is what all scientists should do, if true science is to advance.

That is why the Royal Society's official motto is " Nullius in verba," Latin for "Take nobody's word for it." Ironically, the Society rarely practices this approach when it comes to climate change.

Mistakes such as those made by McKenna are not surprising, considering that from the outset the entire claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was built on falsehoods and spread with fake news.

The plot to deceive the world about human-caused global warming gathered momentum right after the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) created the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.

After spending five days at the U.N. with Maurice Strong, the first executive director of UNEP, Hamilton Spectator investigative reporter Elaine Dewar concluded that the overarching objective of the IPCC was political, not scientific. "Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the global governance agenda," she wrote.

The political agenda required "credibility" to accomplish the deception. It also required some fake news for momentum. Ideally, this would involve testimony from a scientist before a legislative committee.

U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) was fully committed to the political agenda and the deception. As he explained in a 1993 comment, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing...."

In 1988 Wirth was in a position to jump-start the climate alarm. He worked with colleagues on the SenateEnergy and Natural Resources Committee to organize and orchestrate a June 23, 1988 hearing where the lead witness would be Dr. James Hansen, then the head of theGoddard Institute for Space Studies. Wirth explained in a 2007 interview with PBS Frontline:

"We knew there was this scientist at NASA, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So, we called him up and asked him if he would testify."

Hansen did not disappoint. The New York Times reported on June 23, 1988: "Today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation, but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere."

Specifically, Hansen told the committee, "Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.... It is already happening now."

Hansen also testified: "The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.... We have already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important."

Wirth, who presided at the hearing, was pre-disposed to believe Hansen and told the committee. "As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth's atmosphere gets warmer," Wirth said. "Now the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend, and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable."

More than any other event, that single hearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee publicly initiated the climate scare, the biggest deception in history. It created an unholy alliance between a bureaucrat and a politician, which was bolstered by the U.N. and the popular press - leading to the hoax being accepted in governments, industry boardrooms, schools and churches all across the world.

Dr. John S. Theon, Hansen's former supervisor at NASA, wrote to the Senate Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. "Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress."

Hansen never abandoned his single-minded, unsubstantiated claim that CO ₂ from human activities caused dangerous global warming. He defied Hatch Act limits on bureaucratic political actions, and in 2011 even got arrested at a White House protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. It was at least his third such arrest to that point.

Like Trudeau and other leaders duped by the climate scare, Senator Wirth either had not read or did not understand the science. In fact, an increasing number of climate scientists (including Dr. Ball) now conclude that there is no empirical evidence of human-caused global warming. There are only computer model speculations that humans are causing it, and every forecast made using these models since 1990 has been wrong - with actual temperatures getting further from predictions with every passing year.

President Trump must now end America's participation in the fake science and fake news of manmade global warming. To do this, he must withdraw the U.S. from further involvement with all U.N. global warming programs, especially the IPCC, as well as the agency that now directs it - the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He should also launch a "Red Team" exercise that lets non-alarmist scientists examine climate cataclysm claims and the purported evidence for them.

Only then will the U.S. have a chance to fully develop its hydrocarbon resources to achieve the president's goal of global energy dominance and long-term prosperity for America and the world

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Global warming: Fake News From the Start

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Senator Tim Wirth, scientist James Hansen and others manufactured the climate "crisis"

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Myth 1. The Earth's climate has always changed

Over the course of the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history, the climate has changed a lot. This is true. But the rapid warming we're seeing now can't be explained by natural cycles of warming and cooling. The kind of changes that would normally happen over hundreds of thousands of years are happening in decades.

Global temperatures are now at their highest since records began. In fact, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have all taken place since 2001.

This much faster warming corresponds with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which have been increasing since the industrial revolution. So, when people talk about climate change today, they mean anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. This is the warming of Earth's average temperature as a result of human activity, such as burning coal, oil and gas to produce energy to fuel our homes and transport and cutting down trees to produce the food we eat.

Myth 2. Plants need carbon dioxide

Plants do need carbon dioxide (CO2) to live. Plants and forests remove and store away huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. But the problem is, there's only so much carbon dioxide they can absorb and this amount is getting less, as more and more forests are cut down across the world, largely to produce our food.

Let's be clear, CO2 itself does not cause problems. It's part of the natural global ecosystem. The problem is the quantity of CO2 that's being produced by us as humans; there hasn't been this level of CO2 in the atmosphere for 800,000 years.

Global warming is causing the Earth's average surface temperature to increase. This is not only making heatwaves and droughts more likely but it's also causing changes to our natural climate systems. These changes are making extreme weather events more likely and more severe. For example, hurricanes and storms are becoming more intense, moving slower and taking longer to die down.

Because of where we are, the UK & Ireland are likely to get more rain and wind as a result of climate change while New York will see more snow.

This is no longer an excuse not to act on climate change and push the burden onto future generations. Last year, the world's leading climate scientists warned we only have 12 years to limit global warming to a maximum of 1.5C and avoid climate breakdown.

We're already seeing the devastating effects of climate change on global food supplies, increasing migration, conflict, disease and global instability, and this will only get worse if we don't act now. Man-made climate change is the biggest environmental crisis of our time. It threatens the future of the planet that we depend on for our survival and we're the last generation that can do something about it.

It's a commonly-held belief that renewable energy is expensive, but this simply isn't true! Solar power and onshore wind are the cheapest ways of generating electricity; meaning the energy they produce is cheaper than using nuclear, gas and fossil fuels.

The cost of renewables has fallen faster than anyone could have predicted. And yet the government are still backing dirty fossil fuels. Did you know the UK has the biggest fossil fuel subsidies in the EU? That's right, they spend an eye-watering €12bn (£10.5bn) a year supporting dirty fossil fuels.

Myth 6. Polar bear numbers are increasing

This isn't the case. Climate change is the biggest threat faced by polar bears. The Arctic is warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the world, causing sea ice to melt earlier and form later each year. This makes it more difficult for female polar bears to get onto land in late autumn to build their dens, and more difficult for them to get out onto the sea ice in spring to feed their cubs. Their main source of prey, seals, are also affected by climate change, as they depend on sea ice to raise their young.

This means that in some parts of the Arctic, polar bears are having to survive with less food than they did previously. Polar bear populations are predicted to decline by 30% by the middle of this century.

Myth 7. Renewable energy can only work when it's not cloudy or windy

Industry is developing new techniques for storing electricity and managing demand at peak times meaning that even if the sun isn't shining or it's not blowing a gale, it's still possible to rely on renewable energy sources.

The majority of UK homes get their electricity from the National Grid. When you switch to a clean supplier, they guarantee that for every unit of electricity you take out of the Grid, they'll put the same amount of clean energy back in, helping to clean up our energy supply.

This one isn't a myth, Darwin got the adaptation part right. But let's be clear, some plants and animals will adapt but not all.

To survive, plants, animals and birds confronted with climate change have two options: move or adapt. There are several examples of species that have begun to adapt to climate change already.

But increasingly, it's a different story for many. Given the speed of climate change, it's becoming impossible for many species to adapt quickly enough to keep up with their changing environment. And, as habitats are destroyed by roads, cities and dams, moving becomes increasingly difficult.  For those that can't move or adapt, the future doesn't look so positive.

Myth 9. Getting rid of humans will fix this

This, we firmly believe, is wrong. It's easy to start feeling that we've gone too far already and that the planet won't be able to support the world's growing population.

It's WWF's mission to build a world where people and nature thrive together. The technology and systems we need to move to 100% renewable energy by 2045 and use our planet's resources sustainably are already available. What's now needed is for political and business leaders to take bold and urgent action towards using these solutions to address the climate crisis and restore nature.

Myth 10. China is the only country responsible for climate change

Despite being one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, China is currently one of the largest investors in renewables. The increase in investment has been in response to the rapid growth of green business and the need to clean up air pollution in its major cities.

Climate change is a global issue and we all have a responsibility to step up to the climate crisis. Action on it will need serious investment but has the potential to deliver huge benefits for nature and people. We all need to raise our voices and fight for our world!

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Over the course of the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history, the climate has changed a lot. This is true. But the rapid warming we're seeing now can't be explained by natural cycles of warming and cooling. The kind of changes that would normally happen over hundreds of thousands of years are happening in decades.

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Newsela | Scientists watch weather near the top of the world

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In Alaska, scientist Bryan Thomas keeps watch on the atmosphere. His work shows that the Earth is getting warmer quickly. His goal is to gather important data on global warming and share the information with "decision-makers."

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An atmosphere (from Ancient Greek ἀτμός (atmós) 'vapour, steam', and σφαῖρα (sphaîra) 'sphere') is a layer of gas or layers of gases that envelope a planet, and is held in place by the gravity of the planetary body. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A stellar atmosphere is the outer region of a star, which includes the layers above the opaque photosphere; stars of low temperature might have outer atmospheres containing compound molecules.

The atmosphere of Earth is composed of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), argon (0.9%), carbon dioxide (0.04%) and trace gases. Most organisms use oxygen for respiration; lightning and bacteria perform nitrogen fixation to produce ammonia that is used to make nucleotides and amino acids; plants, algae, and cyanobacteria use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. The layered composition of the atmosphere minimises the harmful effects of sunlight, ultraviolet radiation, the solar wind, and cosmic rays to protect organisms from genetic damage. The current composition of the atmosphere of the Earth is the product of billions of years of biochemical modification of the paleoatmosphere by living organisms.[1]

It was generally believed around 5 billion years ago, the Earth collided with a planet the size of Mars. Then by around 4.6 billion years ago, almost no atmosphere was found on the planet, as it was covered by a rock of molten lava. However, when the planet cooled, the atmosphere began to develop from gases spewed from volcanoes, which included much of the carbon dioxide. Half a billion years ago, the Earth's surface began to cool when the atmosphere was solidified and layered with rich oxygen in order for water to collect on the surface for the evolution of life.

To this day, many planets beyond Earth contain a rich pressure with an outermost layer of extraterrestrial atmospheres. Earth's atmosphere refracts sunlight with a day longer than 12 hours in equinox, in absence of its effects of climate change.

As early as 2020, with the discovery of the exoplanet TOI 700 d, there is a feasibility for an Earth analog with its own atmosphere to be retained. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in late 2021, currently observes the findings of atmospheres within potentially habitable exoplanets.

The initial gaseous composition of an atmosphere is determined by the chemistry and temperature of the local solar nebula from which a planet is formed, and the subsequent escape of some gases from the interior of the atmosphere proper. The original atmosphere of the planets originated from a rotating disc of gases, which collapsed onto itself and then divided into a series of spaced rings of gas and matter that, which later condensed to form the planets of the Solar system. The atmospheres of the planets Venus and Mars are principally composed of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, argon and oxygen.

The composition of Earth's atmosphere is determined by the by-products of the life that it sustains. Dry air (mixture of gases) from Earth's atmosphere contains 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and traces of hydrogen, helium, and other "noble" gases (by volume), but generally a variable amount of water vapor is also present, on average about 1% at sea level.

The low temperatures and higher gravity of the Solar System's giant planets- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune-allow them more readily to retain gases with low molecular masses. These planets have hydrogen-helium atmospheres, with trace amounts of more complex compounds.

Two satellites of the outer planets possess significant atmospheres. Titan, a moon of Saturn, and Triton, a moon of Neptune, have atmospheres mainly of nitrogen. When in the part of its orbit closest to the Sun, Pluto has an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane similar to Triton's, but these gases are frozen when it is farther from the Sun.

Other bodies within the Solar System have extremely thin atmospheres not in equilibrium. These include the Moon ( sodium gas), Mercury (sodium gas), Europa (oxygen), Io ( sulfur), and Enceladus ( water vapor).

The first exoplanet whose atmospheric composition was determined is HD 209458b, a gas giant with a close orbit around a star in the constellation Pegasus. Its atmosphere is heated to temperatures over 1,000 K, and is steadily escaping into space. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and sulfur have been detected in the planet's inflated atmosphere.

The atmosphere of Earth is composed of layers with different properties, such as specific gaseous composition, temperature, and pressure. The lowest layer of the atmosphere is the troposphere, which extends from the planetary surface to the bottom of the stratosphere. The troposphere contains 75 per cent of the mass of the atmosphere, and is the atmospheric layer wherein the weather occurs; the height of the troposphere varies between 17 km at the equator and 7.0 km at the poles. The stratosphere extends from the top of the troposphere to the bottom of the mesosphere, and contains the ozone layer, at an altitude between 15 km and 35 km. It is the atmospheric layer that absorbs most of the ultraviolet radiation that Earth receives from the Sun. The mesosphere ranges from 50 km to 85 km, and is the layer wherein most meteors are incinerated before reaching the surface. The thermosphere extends from an altitude of 85 km to the base of the exosphere at 690 km and contains the ionosphere, where solar radiation ionizes the atmosphere. The density of the ionosphere is greater at short distances from the planetary surface in the daytime and decreases as the ionosphere rises at night-time, thereby allowing a greater range of radio frequencies to travel greater distances. Moreover, located in the thermosphere is the Kármán line at 100 km, which is the boundary between outer space and Earth's atmosphere. The exosphere begins at 690 to 1,000 km from the surface, and extends to roughly 10,000 km, where it interacts with the magnetosphere of Earth.

Atmospheric pressure is the force (per unit-area) perpendicular to a unit-area of planetary surface, as determined by the weight of the vertical column of atmospheric gases. In said atmospheric model, the atmospheric pressure, the weight of the mass of the gas, decreases at high altitude because of the diminishing mass of the gas above the point of barometric measurement. The units of air pressure are based upon the standard atmosphere (atm), which is 101.325 kPa (760 Torr, or 14.696 pounds per square inch (psi). The height at which the atmospheric pressure declines by a factor of (an irrational number equal to 2.71828) is called the scale height ( H). For an atmosphere of uniform temperature, the scale height is proportional to the atmospheric temperature, and is inversely proportional to the product of the mean molecular mass of dry air, and the local acceleration of gravity at the point of barometric measurement.

Surface gravity differs significantly among the planets. For example, the large gravitational force of the giant planet Jupiter retains light gases such as hydrogen and helium that escape from objects with lower gravity. Secondly, the distance from the Sun determines the energy available to heat atmospheric gas to the point where some fraction of its molecules' thermal motion exceed the planet's escape velocity, allowing those to escape a planet's gravitational grasp. Thus, distant and cold Titan, Triton, and Pluto are able to retain their atmospheres despite their relatively low gravities.

Since a collection of gas molecules may be moving at a wide range of velocities, there will always be some fast enough to produce a slow leakage of gas into space. Lighter molecules move faster than heavier ones with the same thermal kinetic energy, and so gases of low molecular weight are lost more rapidly than those of high molecular weight. It is thought that Venus and Mars may have lost much of their water when, after being photodissociated into hydrogen and oxygen by solar ultraviolet radiation, the hydrogen escaped. Earth's magnetic field helps to prevent this, as, normally, the solar wind would greatly enhance the escape of hydrogen. However, over the past 3 billion years Earth may have lost gases through the magnetic polar regions due to auroral activity, including a net 2% of its atmospheric oxygen. The net effect, taking the most important escape processes into account, is that an intrinsic magnetic field does not protect a planet from atmospheric escape and that for some magnetizations the presence of a magnetic field works to increase the escape rate.

Other mechanisms that can cause atmosphere depletion are solar wind-induced sputtering, impact erosion, weathering, and sequestration-sometimes referred to as "freezing out"-into the regolith and polar caps.

Atmospheres have dramatic effects on the surfaces of rocky bodies. Objects that have no atmosphere, or that have only an exosphere, have terrain that is covered in craters. Without an atmosphere, the planet has no protection from meteoroids, and all of them collide with the surface as meteorites and create craters.

Most meteoroids burn up as meteors before hitting a planet's surface. When meteoroids do impact, the effects are often erased by the action of wind.

Wind erosion is a significant factor in shaping the terrain of rocky planets with atmospheres, and over time can erase the effects of both craters and volcanoes. In addition, since liquids can not exist without pressure, an atmosphere allows liquid to be present at the surface, resulting in lakes, rivers and oceans. Earth and Titan are known to have liquids at their surface and terrain on the planet suggests that Mars had liquid on its surface in the past.

Atmospheres in the Solar System

Outside the Solar System

Main article: Extraterrestrial atmosphere

The circulation of the atmosphere occurs due to thermal differences when convection becomes a more efficient transporter of heat than thermal radiation. On planets where the primary heat source is solar radiation, excess heat in the tropics is transported to higher latitudes. When a planet generates a significant amount of heat internally, such as is the case for Jupiter, convection in the atmosphere can transport thermal energy from the higher temperature interior up to the surface.

From the perspective of a planetary geologist, the atmosphere acts to shape a planetary surface. Wind picks up dust and other particles which, when they collide with the terrain, erode the relief and leave deposits ( eolian processes). Frost and precipitations, which depend on the atmospheric composition, also influence the relief. Climate changes can influence a planet's geological history. Conversely, studying the surface of the Earth leads to an understanding of the atmosphere and climate of other planets.

For a meteorologist, the composition of the Earth's atmosphere is a factor affecting the climate and its variations.

For a biologist or paleontologist, the Earth's atmospheric composition is closely dependent on the appearance of the life and its evolution.

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An atmosphere (from Ancient Greek ἀτμός (atmós) 'vapour, steam', and σφαῖρα (sphaîra) 'sphere') is a layer of gas or layers of gases that envelope a planet, and is held in place by the gravity of the planetary body. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low.