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Greenhouse gas emissions remain the primary threat to the preservation of polar bear populations worldwide. This conclusion holds true under both a reduced greenhouse gas emission scenario that stabilizes climate warming and another scenario where emissions and warming continue at the current pace, according to updated U.S. Geological Survey research models.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Greenhouse gas emissions remain the primary threat to the preservation of polar bear populations worldwide. This conclusion holds true under both a reduced greenhouse gas emission scenario that stabilizes climate warming and another scenario where emissions and warming continue at the current pace, according to updated U.S. Geological Survey research models.

Under both scenarios, the outcome for the worldwide polar bear population will very likely worsen over time through the end of the century.

The modeling effort examined the prognosis for polar bear populations in the four ecoregions (see map) comprising their range using current sea ice projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for two greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Both scenarios examined how greenhouse gas emissions may affect polar bears: one looked at stabilization in climate warming by century's end because of reduced GHG emissions, and the other looked at unabated (unchanged) rates of GHG emissions, leading to increased warming by century's end.

"Addressing sea ice loss will require global policy solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and likely be years in the making," said Mike Runge, a USGS research ecologist. "Because carbon emissions accumulate over time, there will be a lag, likely on the order of several decades, between mitigation of emissions and meaningful stabilization of sea ice loss."

Under the unabated emission scenario, polar bear populations in two of four ecoregions were projected to reach a greatly decreased state about 25 years sooner than under the stabilized scenario. Under the stabilized scenario, GHG emissions peak around 2040, decline through 2080, then decline through the end of the century. In this scenario, USGS projected that all ecoregion populations will greatly decrease except for the Archipelago Ecoregion, located in the high-latitude Canadian Arctic, where sea ice generally persists longer in the summer. These updated modeling outcomes reinforce earlier suggestions of the Archipelago's potential as an important refuge for ice-dependent species, including the polar bear.

The models, updated from 2010, evaluated specific threats to polar bears such as sea ice loss, prey availability, hunting, and increased human activities, and incorporated new findings on regional variation in polar bear response to sea ice loss.

"Substantial sea ice loss and expected declines in the availability of marine prey that polar bears eat are the most important specific reasons for the increasingly worse outlook for polar bear populations," said Todd Atwood, research biologist with the USGS, and lead author of the study. "We found that other environmental stressors such as trans-Arctic shipping, oil and gas exploration, disease and contaminants, sustainable harvest and defense of life takes, had only negligible effects on polar bear populations-compared to the much larger effects of sea ice loss and associated declines in their ability to access prey."

Additionally, USGS researchers noted that if the summer ice-free period lengthens beyond 4 months - as forecasted to occur during the last half of this century in the unabated scenario - the negative effects on polar bears will be more pronounced. Polar bears rely on ice as the platform for hunting their primary prey - ice seals - and when sea ice completely melts in summer, the bears must retreat to land where their access to seals is limited. Other research this year has shown that terrestrial foods available to polar bears during these land-bound months are unlikely to help polar bear populations adapt to sea ice loss.

USGS scientists' research found that managing threats other than greenhouse gas emissions could slow the progression of polar bear populations to an increasingly worse status. The most optimistic prognosis for polar bears would require immediate and aggressive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions that would limit global warming to less than 2°C above preindustrial levels.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2008 due to the threat posed by sea ice loss. The polar bear was the first species to be listed because of climate change. A plan to address recovery of the polar bear will be released into the Federal Register by the USFWS for public review on July 2, 2015.

The updated forecast for polar bears was developed by USGS as part of its Changing Arctic Ecosystems Initiative, together with collaborators from the U.S. Forest Service and Polar Bears International. The polar bear forecasting report is available online.

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Greenhouse Gas Emissions Remain the Primary Threat to Polar Bears

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Greenhouse gas emissions remain the primary threat to the preservation of polar bear populations worldwide. This conclusion holds true under both a reduced greenhouse gas emission scenario that stabilizes climate warming and another scenario where emissions and warming continue at the current pace, according to updated U.S.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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A new NASA tool links changes in sea level in 293 global port cities to specific regions of melting land ice, such as southern Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. It is intended to help coastal planners prepare for rising seas in the decades to come.

All coastal cities will see some impacts of global sea level rise. But the new tool shows that, for example, New York City is more strongly affected by melting ice in northeastern Greenland than in southwestern Greenland; while Sydney has a greater risk from the rapidly melting Antarctic Peninsula than from East Antarctica.

A paper describing the new tool, titled "Should coastal planners have concern over where land ice is melting?," was recently published in the journal Science Advances. The research team is Eric Larour, Erik Ivins and Surendra Adhikari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Melting ice and rising ocean temperatures contribute about evenly to global sea level rise today. Individual cities are also affected by local conditions such as land sinking. Other Web-based resources such as the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit address some of these issues, but the new NASA tool is the only resource to match specific melting ice locations with their effects on the world's ports.

Water from melted ice on land doesn't spread evenly across the world's oceans because of a gravitational push-pull between ice and ocean. As a melting glacier or ice sheet dwindles, it loses mass, causing its local gravitational pull on nearby ocean water to diminish. Seawater that had been pulled toward the ice by the force of gravity flows away - in other words, sea level drops in the vicinity of a melting glacier but rises farther away. When this spatial pattern can be attributed to a given glacier or ice sheet, it is known as a sea level fingerprint.

To calculate this and other influences on sea level such as Earth's rotation, Larour and his colleagues used a dynamic mathematical formula called the adjoint method, which is used in seismic and meteorological studies. The method enables fast computation of the sensitivity of a model's output to its inputs - in this case, the sensitivity of sea level to ice melting. They used the method with JPL's well-tested computer model of ice sheet melting, the Ice Sheet System Model, to develop their new tool, called Gradient Fingerprint Mapping.

Users of the tool need no specialized training or extreme computer power; they simply download it, input data or projections of ice loss, and let it evolve the shifting ice and water patterns forward into the future. The result: a detailed profile of the sensitivity of sea level at any of these cities to changes in ice anywhere in the world.

Calculations of sea level fingerprints have been made in previous studies but tended to be cumbersome and spatially coarse, Larour said. The new tool provides an overall mechanism for rapidly computing high-resolution results using a variety of potential data sets.

Gradient Fingerprint Mapping is not dependent on a particular climate change scenario, Larour said. "You can apply the method to any type of melting scenario that you want." That means it will retain its utility as improved projections of ice loss become available in the future.

The computations show that the specific location of mass loss in Greenland is crucial, as it greatly affects the local sea level predictions for many major coastal cities in North America and Europe. The spatial details of Antarctic melting are important for areas south of the equator in South America, Africa and South Asia.

Among some intriguing results, Larour said, are those for New York, London and Oslo. Greenland's northeastern ice stream was shown to have an outsized effect on New York's local sea level, but the island's southern glaciers had little influence. London was more strongly affected by Greenland's northwestern and western glaciers. And Norway is so close to Greenland, the island's gravitational fingerprint is contributing to sea level decrease in Oslo.

The authors note that ocean dynamics can accelerate or offset the changes in sea level from gravitational fingerprints - particularly in New York, where the contribution of melting ice to accelerated sea level rise is minor compared to other sources.

"This is really a new capability," Larour said. "Now a coastal planner can understand and see how the melting or growing of a given ice sheet could be detrimental or beneficial to a specific location."

Access the tool at:
https://vesl.jpl.nasa.gov/research/sea-level/slr-gfm
News media contact

Alan Buis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
818-354-0474
Alan.Buis@jpl.nasa.gov

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NASA links port-city sea levels to regional ice melt - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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A new NASA tool links changes in sea level in 293 global port cities to specific regions of melting land ice, such as southern Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. It is intended to help coastal planners prepare for rising seas in the decades to come.

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Cause and Effects of Climate Change

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Causes and Effects of Climate Change | National Geographic

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Causes and Effects of Climate Change

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Causes and Effects of Climate Change | National Geographic

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WHO: Pollution Kills 1.7M Children a Year Cierra Turner

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WHO: Pollution Kills 1.7M Children a Year Cierra Turner

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weather.com Oct 17, 2017

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WHO: Pollution Kills 1.7M Children a Year | The Weather Channel

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Pollution kills an astounding 1.7 million children a year, according to the World Heath Organization.

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Air Pollution Kills More Than 5 Million People Around the World Every Year 

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Air Pollution Kills More Than 5 Million People Around the World Every Year 

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By Justin Worland

February 12, 2016

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Air Pollution Kills More Than 5 Million People Every Year

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Research suggests the number of deaths will continue to rise

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How the ocean affects climate change

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CLIMATE AND WEATHER October 17, 2017WHO: Pollution Kills 1.7M Children a Year

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CLIMATE AND WEATHER October 17, 2017WHO: Pollution Kills 1.7M Children a Year

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http://www.takepart.com/flashcards/what-is-climate-change/index.html

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What are the differences of Global Warming and Climate Change, and simply what they are.

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The Difference Between Global Warming & Climate Change

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NASA Links Port-city Sea Levels to Regional Ice Melt 

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NASA Links Port-city Sea Levels to Regional Ice Melt 

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Toula Hubbard

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NASA Links Port-City Sea Levels to Regional Ice Melt

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A new NASA tool that links changes in sea level in 293 global port cities to specific regions of melting land ice may help coastal planners prepare for future rising seas.

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The Certainty of Climate Change.
Scientists say it is "extremely likely" that human activity is boosting the planet's temperature.
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/certainty-climate-change

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RnqtIzK4kMR0g-MDUrp62E8jwv0c0GXnNFej2dA5gQs/edit

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https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2655/october-2017-was-the-second-warmest-october-on-record/

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Climate Change Might Affect People's Personalities

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Climate Change Might Affect People's Personalities

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Jasmine Lu
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/climate-change-affect-people-personalities-article-1.3665838

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7 Species Hit Hard by Climate Change—Including One That's Already Extinct

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7 Species Hit Hard by Climate Change—Including One That's Already Extinct

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Stella Winn

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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Climate Change In The Arctic: An Inuit Reality

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Climate Change In The Arctic: An Inuit Reality

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By: Ryan Cerasuolo
https://unchronicle.un.org/article/climate-change-arctic-inuit-reality

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Climate Change In The Arctic: An Inuit Reality | UN Chronicle

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The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) characterizes the circumpolar Arctic as the world's climate change "barometer". The 160,000 Inuit who live in northern Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Chukotka in Russia have witnessed the changing of the natural environment as a result of global warming for almost 20 years.

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When will climate change make the earth too hot for humans? 

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When will climate change make the earth too hot for humans? 

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Raina Moon
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

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Climate Change - A blanket around the Earth

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Climate Change - A blanket around the Earth

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By - Brayden Basinger

https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

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What is climate change and why should we care? Marley Hardesty

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What is climate change and why should we care? Marley Hardesty

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtW2rrLHs08

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Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye | National Geographic

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If oceans stopped absorbing heat from climate change, life on land would average 122°F 

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If oceans stopped absorbing heat from climate change, life on land would average 122°F 

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Ida Mobini

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Since the 1970s, more than 93% of excess heat caused by greenhouse gases has been absorbed by the oceans. To understand how much heat that is, think of it this way: If the oceans weren't absorbing it, average global temperatures on land would be far higher-around 122°F, according to researchers on the documentary Chasing Coral. The global average surface temperature right now is 59°F.

A 122°F world, needless to say, would be unlivable. More than 93% of climate change is out of sight and out of mind for most of us land-dwelling humans, but as the oceans continue to onboard all that heat, they're becoming unlivable themselves.

Ocean temperatures are the highest since record-keeping began, and hundreds of marine species are suffering because of it. Recent back-to-back coral bleaching events-triggered by too-hot sea temperatures-have killed off significant portions (paywall) of the Great Barrier Reef, and a recent UN report warned that the world's most significant coral reefs could die out completely by the end of the century, if not sooner.

"Warming is projected to exceed the ability of reefs to survive within one to three decades for the majority of the World Heritage sites containing corals reefs," the report said.

Scientists worry that the warming ocean also risks releasing billions of tons of frozen methane from the thawing seabed. Unlocking that methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, could trigger significant warming here on land.

Most Popular

Read full story

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If oceans stopped absorbing heat from climate change, life on land would average 122°F

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Since the 1970s, more than 93% of excess heat caused by greenhouse gases has been absorbed by the oceans. To understand how much heat that is, think of it this way: If the oceans weren't absorbing it, average global temperatures on land would be far higher-around 122°F, according to researchers on the documentary Chasing Coral....

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https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

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Researchers explain how climate change can one day effect us unless we take things into action - Dylan Goldstein

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Researchers explain how climate change can one day effect us unless we take things into action - Dylan Goldstein

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2152648-planting-trees-could-mop-up-ten-years-worth-of-greenhouse-gases/

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Delhi pollution crisis prompts city-wide emergency measures

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Delhi pollution crisis prompts city-wide emergency measures

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Rachel Wei

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Air quality readings in India's capital have soared since Tuesday, with one monitor showing levels in the city were 969 -- the World Health Organization considers anything above 25 to be unsafe.

Those levels are based on the concentration of fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, per cubic meter. The microscopic particles, which are smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, are considered particularly harmful because they are small enough to lodge deep into the lungs and pass into other organs, causing serious health risks.

Officials scrambled to provide a response as TV stations looped video of reporters taking live pollution readings amid a background of thick smog. On the street, residents tied scarfs across their faces as makeshift masks.

On Wednesday, the Delhi government took the unusual step of closing all schools until Sunday, but has so far resisted calls from the Indian Medical Association to declare a public health emergency, and enact more sweeping measures, such as temporarily banning cars from the roads.

The smog has blanketed much of the city in recent days, severely reducing visibility, restricting traffic and delaying flights. Mahesh Sharma, a government minister in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has blamed the unusually high pollution levels on a lack of wind and change in humidity levels.

Among the world's most polluted cities

Every winter, pollution levels in Delhi and its neighboring cities rise.

Delhi was named the most polluted city in the world in 2014 according to the WHO. Since then, other Indian cities have climbed up the list, knocking Delhi's ranking down to 14.

"Delhi has become a gas chamber. Every year this happens during this part of year," Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi's chief minister, tweeted. "We have to find a solution to crop burning in adjoining states."

Politicians and officials blame farmers in neighboring northern Indian states who clear their fields by burning their crops. The landlocked capital sits in a natural bowl and is surrounded by industrial and agricultural hubs. Without the coastal breeze of cities such as Mumbai and Chennai, much of the pollution settles.

Every year, farmers across fertile neighboring states set fire to their fields to clear them for the next season. Known as stubble burning, millions of tons of crop residue are set alight releasing untold amounts of particulate matter into the environment.

In addition to the crop burning, Delhi's pollution comes from industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust from cars, road dust and burning of biomass, said Santosh Harish, assistant director of research at EPIC India, a research institute based in the US and India.

A report by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur carried out in 2014 found that vehicle omissions accounted for 20% of Delhi's annual PM2.5 levels.

Nevertheless, the number of cars on the city's roads has continued to rise. According to government statistics, the total number of vehicles in Delhi exceeded 10 million for the first time in 2016.

In the wider Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) -- a sprawling area that encompasses Delhi, as well as satellite districts in the neighboring states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, and is home to some 46 million people -- a lack of effective public transportation has meant that workers are forced to drive to and from jobs in the city, further exacerbating the problem.

Government inaction

In a bid to improve air quality, local governments have implemented various measures, including the shut down of power plants and brick kilns in the wider Delhi region, as well as the banning of private electricity generators during the winter months, said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at the Center for Science and Environment.

The country's Supreme Court also banned the sale of firecrackers during Diwali -- the Indian festival of lights.

Still, there is much more work to be done to enact systematic change and not only emergency measures, said Roychowdhury. One of the missing pieces is sustained public pressure.

"What we're unable to do as a community-at-large, and that also holds true for the government, is we've been unable to sustain interest beyond the three months of winter," said Harish.

Unlike in other notoriously smoggy cities such as Beijing, air pollution has yet to become a politically sensitive issue in Delhi. Instead residents are increasingly looking to privatized solutions, claims Govindraj Ethiraj, the founder of data journalism site IndiaSpend.

"For instance, most people don't trust the quality of water that's supplied to their homes, so the solution that they found is the water purifiers," he said. "So now what people have done is buy air purifiers."

While air purifier and pollution mask sales have grown steadily, Ethiraj points out it excludes the millions unable to afford the various high-tech solutions.

On the street Wednesday, Delhi resident Mukesh Kumar Srivastav, whose job as a security guard requires that he stands outside for much of the day, said that air filtration was a distant dream. "Our position is low, so if the government is not doing anything, what can we do in response? There's nothing we can do."

CNN's Manveena Suri contributed to this report

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delhi wakes up to third day of heavy pollution  - cnn

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Delhi wakes up to third day of heavy pollution

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Air quality readings in India's capital have soared since Tuesday, with one monitor showing levels in the city were 969 -- the World Health Organization considers anything above 25 to be unsafe. Those levels are based on the concentration of fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, per cubic meter.

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Climate Change to Effect Natural Wonders  

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Climate Change to Effect Natural Wonders  

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RJ

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Thanks to climate change, a predicted rise in sea level along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the southeastern U.S. over the next century or two is currently modeled at a seemingly modest one to two meters. This change in the coastline, however, threatens tens of thousands of known archaeological sites, standing historic and prehistoric structures, and other cultural properties, according to archaeologists.

Writing today in PLOS One, a team composed of nine archaeologists from around the U.S. detail their model of cultural resources most at risk should the sea level rise predicted to result from anthropogenic global climate change bear out. The researchers used data accessible through the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), a database whose current coverage is best in the swath of land from Maryland to the Texas-Louisiana border.

Along this coastline, the archaeologists discovered that 5,762 archaeological sites are already at or below sea level, while a total of 32,898 are at or below 5 m above sea level. "Assuming current projections hold," David G. Anderson of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and colleagues write, "and the sea level rises approximately one meter by the end of the century, a total of 19,676 currently recorded archaeological sites will be submerged." Especially problematic is the "loss of a substantial portion of the record of both pre-Columbian and historic period human habitation of the coastal margin of the southeastern United States."

Archaeological sites are not the only casualties of sea level rise. The researchers note that "the dead as well as the living will also be impacted." Historical cemeteries are not recorded in the same way that archaeological sites are, so the archaeologists can only estimate the impact of climate change on graveyards: close to 7,000 are mentioned in the DINAA data over 15 southeastern states, representing the lower bound of the number of cemeteries at risk.

One of the states projected to be hardest hit by climate change is Florida, simply because of the amount of coastline. Fortunately, the state is also home to the Florida Public Archaeology Network, whose mission is to promote and facilitate conservation, study, and public understanding of the archaeological heritage of Florida. FPAN's Northeast Regional Director, archaeologist Sarah Miller, is also the program manager for Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS) of Florida.

Miller praised the data produced by Anderson and colleagues, noting that "baseline numbers are essential to defining the problem." But the public, she says, is often inundated with numbers without being given opportunities to help. HMS Florida is a "citizen-science initiative by FPAN to monitor close to 4,000 archaeological sites at risk from sea level rise," Miller explains. "In just over a year, 296 citizen-science volunteers signed up across Florida. At this rate, we have the potential to document and assess these archaeological sites within ten years' time."

But Florida is only one state. Anderson says that "the cooperation of large numbers of people and organizations - a truly team effort - is needed if we are to protect our history." He and his co-authors argue that "one way to do that, an important first step, is to have a good handle on what may be threatened or lost. Projects like DINAA provide tools useful for public education, resource management, and research projects."

Although DINAA is only focused on the southeast, Anderson and colleagues have already begun to reach out to preservation authorities in every state. "Aggregating and integrating these data," co-author Eric Kansa, Program Director for Open Context, says, "requires expert labor. It doesn't just happen, and it takes time to reach a 'critical mass' of relevant data that can enable new research." What's unique about DINAA, though, is that it is all open source. "We would love to see people build alternative user interfaces that meet different needs for different applications and different communities," Kansa insists. "Collaboration between data experts and public engagement experts will also be critical."

When asked what the models will look like if and when additional states' data are compiled into DINAA, Anderson commented that "the picture is unlikely to look very good anywhere, since people have been living in coastal areas for millennia." Peninsular Florida will be particularly hard hit by sea level rise, but large coastal states like Texas and California will likely also see climate change that will be catastrophic to historic and prehistoric archaeological sites. However, depending on the rate of sea level rise, the archaeologists note, climate change may only submerge these resources, and the extent of damage, destruction, or loss is still uncertain.

Mitigating damage to the cultural history of the United States will therefore take effort at numerous levels. Miller notes that programs such as Florida's HMS exist in other countries and are emerging in other states now. "In the near future," she says, "I hope there will be more regional and national coordination of outreach efforts by archaeologists to pool the limited resources for public engagement into increased community action."

Ultimately, Anderson and colleagues write in their PLOS article, "what will be needed is a commitment, like that last seen in the Great Depression, to document that which will be lost if the effects of sea level rise are not mitigated. Tools like DINAA are the future of archaeological research, and it is not a question of if they will be developed, but when."

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Climate Change Threatens To Destroy Over 20,000 Historical Sites, Archaeologists Say

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Thanks to climate change, a predicted rise in sea level along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the southeastern U.S. over the next century or two is currently modeled at a seemingly modest one to two meters. This change in the coastline, however, threatens tens of thousands of known archaeological sites, standing historic and prehistoric structures, and other cultural properties, according to archaeologists.

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Zahir Ahmed

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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The rate of change since the mid-20th century is unprecedented over millennia.

Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000 years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era - and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth's orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Luthi, D., et al.. 2008; Etheridge, D.M., et al. 2010; Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.) Find out more about ice cores (external site).

The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun's energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Do scientists agree on climate change?

Yes, the vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists - 97 percent - agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change.

detailed answer

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate all over the world. These data, collected over many years, reveal the signs and patterns of a changing climate.

Scientists demonstrated the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases in the mid-19th century. Many of the science instruments NASA uses to study our climate focus on how these gases affect the movement of infrared radiation through the atmosphere. From the measured impacts of increases in these gases, there is no question that increased greenhouse gas levels warm Earth in response.

"Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth's climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of warming after an ice age. Carbon dioxide from human activities is increasing about 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age.

References

References
Header image shows clouds imitating mountains as the sun sets after midnight as seen from Denali's backcountry Unit 13 on June 14, 2019. Credit: NPS/Emily Mesner

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Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. How do we know it's happening? Here's the evidence.

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Ryan Gross

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Human activities have increased carbon-dioxide emissions, driving up temperatures. Extreme weather and melting polar ice are among the possible effects.

What is climate change?

The Earth's average temperature is about 15C but has been much higher and lower in the past.

There are natural fluctuations in the climate but scientists say temperatures are now rising faster than at many other times.

This is linked to the greenhouse effect, which describes how the Earth's atmosphere traps some of the Sun's energy.

Solar energy radiating back to space from the Earth's surface is absorbed by greenhouse gases and re-emitted in all directions.

This heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface of the planet. Without this effect, the Earth would be about 30C colder and hostile to life.

Scientists believe we are adding to the natural greenhouse effect, with gases released from industry and agriculture trapping more energy and increasing the temperature.

This is known as climate change or global warming.

What are greenhouse gases?

The greenhouse gas with the greatest impact on warming is water vapour. But it remains in the atmosphere for only a few days.

Carbon dioxide (CO2), however, persists for much longer. It would take hundreds of years for a return to pre-industrial levels and only so much can be soaked up by natural reservoirs such as the oceans.

Most man-made emissions of CO2 come from burning fossil fuels. When carbon-absorbing forests are cut down and left to rot, or burned, that stored carbon is released, contributing to global warming.

Climate change: Where we are in seven charts

Five things the 1.5C report taught us

Since the industrial revolution began in about 1750, CO2 levels have risen more than 30%. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.

Other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also released through human activities but they are less abundant than carbon dioxide.

What is the evidence for warming?

The world is about one degree Celsius warmer than before widespread industrialisation, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says.

The 20 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 22 years, with 2015-18 making up the top four.

Across the globe, the average sea level increased by 3.6mm per year between 2005 and 2015.

Most of this change was because water increases in volume as it heats up.

However, melting ice is now thought to be the main reason for rising sea levels. Most glaciers in temperate regions of the world are retreating.

And satellite records show a dramatic decline in Arctic sea-ice since 1979. The Greenland Ice Sheet has experienced record melting in recent years.

Satellite data also shows the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass. A recent study indicated East Antarctica may also have started to lose mass.

The effects of a changing climate can also be seen in vegetation and land animals. These include earlier flowering and fruiting times for plants and changes in the territories of animals.

How much will temperatures rise in future?

The change in the global surface temperature between 1850 and the end of the 21st Century is likely to exceed 1.5C, most simulations suggest.

The WMO says that if the current warming trend continues, temperatures could rise 3-5C by the end of this century.

Temperature rises of 2C had long been regarded as the gateway to dangerous warming. More recently, scientists and policymakers have argued that limiting temperature rises to 1.5C is safer.

An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2018 suggested that keeping to the 1.5C target would require " rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society".

The UN is leading a political effort to stabilise greenhouse-gas emissions. China emits more CO2 than any other country. It is followed by the US and the European Union member states, although emissions per person are much greater there.

But even if we now cut greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically, scientists say the effects will continue. Large bodies of water and ice can take hundreds of years to respond to changes in temperature. And it takes CO2 decades to be removed from the atmosphere.

How will climate change affect us?

There is uncertainty about how great the impact of a changing climate will be.

It could cause freshwater shortages, dramatically alter our ability to produce food, and increase the number of deaths from floods, storms and heatwaves. This is because climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events - though linking any single event to global warming is complicated.

As the world warms, more water evaporates, leading to more moisture in the air. This means many areas will experience more intense rainfall - and in some places snowfall. But the risk of drought in inland areas during hot summers will increase. More flooding is expected from storms and rising sea levels. But there are likely to be very strong regional variations in these patterns.

Vietnam's children and the fear of climate change

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Poorer countries, which are least equipped to deal with rapid change, could suffer the most.

Plant and animal extinctions are predicted as habitats change faster than species can adapt. And the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the health of millions could be threatened by increases in malaria, water-borne disease and malnutrition.

As more CO2 is released into the atmosphere, uptake of the gas by the oceans increases, causing the water to become more acidic. This could pose major problems for coral reefs.

Global warming will cause further changes that are likely to create further heating. This includes the release of large quantities of methane as permafrost - frozen soil found mainly at high latitudes - melts.

Responding to climate change will be one of the biggest challenges we face this century.

Climate-related words and phrases explained

How much warmer is your city?

What is your diet's carbon footprint?

Where we are in seven charts

What questions do you have about changes in our climate?
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Human activities have increased carbon-dioxide emissions, driving up temperatures. Extreme weather and melting polar ice are among the possible effects. The Earth's average temperature is about 15C but has been much higher and lower in the past. There are natural fluctuations in the climate but scientists say temperatures are now rising faster than at many other times.

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How NASA is using space age technology to stop Air Pollution

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How NASA is using space age technology to stop Air Pollution

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How NASA Is Using Space-Age Technology To Stop Air Pollution

The agency plans to track environmental contaminants as they move across the globe.

Casey Williams

NASA is celebrated for space probes and Mars missions. But one of the agency’s next big projects could also make a major contribution to public health.

The U.S. space agency, along with agencies in Europe and South Korea, is making plans to launch a fleet of air pollution sensors into space. The sensors, which are being built by NASA, the European Space Agency and the South Korean government, are meant to monitor and track pollutants from orbit. Scientists hope NASA’s contribution to the project, called TEMPO, will provide a more accurate picture of how dangerous particles crisscross the Earth.

“Air pollution is really a global pollution,” Barry Lefer, a NASA scientist and project manager for TEMPO, told The Huffington Post. “Pollution from the U.S. travels to Europe, pollution from Asia travels to the U.S. And satellites are the best way to see the long-range transportation of pollution.”

The final product, which scientists say will be a “constellation” of pollution-tracking satellites, is still years away. But NASA plans to kick off the first phase of the project in May, when it will begin collecting air pollution data from the Korean peninsula in order to fine-tune its satellite-based pollution monitors.

NASA has been collecting pollution data for decades, but its old instruments are becoming outdated. They’re also not always accurate, in part because they don’t directly measure pollutants. Instead, they look at light bouncing off particles in the atmosphere. Each type of particle reflects light differently, producing a series of “spectral fingerprints” that scientists can use to tell one substance from another.

While distinguishing between different pollutants is difficult, experts say the real challenge is producing high-resolution data that  would let scientists determine exactly where air pollution is coming from. NASA’s new satellites can collect pollution data at the county level, promising a more detailed picture of pollution sources than previous satellite data could provide.

“What’s gotten better is the finer resolution,” Lefer said. With earlier satellites, “we could see the city and the rural area, and we would be averaging the two. Now, with the new satellite imagers, we get better spatial resolution.”

While NASA has been using satellites to measure and track air pollution since the 1970s, most environmental organizations in the U.S. and Asia rely on ground-based sensors to monitor pollution. But these sensors can’t be everywhere at once, and groups like the Environmental Protection Agency are often left with large gaps in data.

“One of problems with EPA monitoring is you only have data where there’s a monitor,” Lefer said. “A satellite can see where they’re not monitoring properly.”

Ground-based sensors are also unable to track pollution over long distances, like across oceans and from one continent to another. The new mission, Lefer said, is meant to provide “a powerful new understanding of air pollution and how it’s being transported across the globe.”

Every year, air pollution is responsible for more than 150,000 deaths in the U.S. and more than 2 million deaths in the Western Pacific region, which includes China and South Korea, according to NASA. Scientists at NASA hope that putting sophisticated air pollution monitors in space will help environmental agencies around the world improve their efforts to curb pollution.

“There are different ways we’ve tried to... make this useful to the general public, use this for the good and improve the public’s health,” Lefer said.

Critics of NASA in Congress argue that the agency’s Earth-focused missions need to be kept in check. In 2015, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, introduced legislation to defund NASA’s Earth Science program. Missions focused on the Earth, Smith argued, come “at the expense of the other science divisions and human and robotic space exploration.”

But efforts to explore the Earth and protect the health of its occupants remain a central part of NASA’s mission, Lefer said.

“NASA is still the nation’s space agency. We’re interested in going to Mars, we’re interested in the cosmos,” he said. “But a huge amount of money is also spent on studying our home planet.”

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How melting the glaciers is affecting the world

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How melting the glaciers is affecting the world

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Viren Kumar

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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A new NASA tool links changes in sea level in 293 global port cities to specific regions of melting land ice, such as southern Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. It is intended to help coastal planners prepare for rising seas in the decades to come.

All coastal cities will see some impacts of global sea level rise. But the new tool shows that, for example, New York City is more strongly affected by melting ice in northeastern Greenland than in southwestern Greenland; while Sydney has a greater risk from the rapidly melting Antarctic Peninsula than from East Antarctica.

A paper describing the new tool, titled "Should coastal planners have concern over where land ice is melting?," was recently published in the journal Science Advances. The research team is Eric Larour, Erik Ivins and Surendra Adhikari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Melting ice and rising ocean temperatures contribute about evenly to global sea level rise today. Individual cities are also affected by local conditions such as land sinking. Other Web-based resources such as the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit address some of these issues, but the new NASA tool is the only resource to match specific melting ice locations with their effects on the world's ports.

Water from melted ice on land doesn't spread evenly across the world's oceans because of a gravitational push-pull between ice and ocean. As a melting glacier or ice sheet dwindles, it loses mass, causing its local gravitational pull on nearby ocean water to diminish. Seawater that had been pulled toward the ice by the force of gravity flows away - in other words, sea level drops in the vicinity of a melting glacier but rises farther away. When this spatial pattern can be attributed to a given glacier or ice sheet, it is known as a sea level fingerprint.

To calculate this and other influences on sea level such as Earth's rotation, Larour and his colleagues used a dynamic mathematical formula called the adjoint method, which is used in seismic and meteorological studies. The method enables fast computation of the sensitivity of a model's output to its inputs - in this case, the sensitivity of sea level to ice melting. They used the method with JPL's well-tested computer model of ice sheet melting, the Ice Sheet System Model, to develop their new tool, called Gradient Fingerprint Mapping.

Users of the tool need no specialized training or extreme computer power; they simply download it, input data or projections of ice loss, and let it evolve the shifting ice and water patterns forward into the future. The result: a detailed profile of the sensitivity of sea level at any of these cities to changes in ice anywhere in the world.

Calculations of sea level fingerprints have been made in previous studies but tended to be cumbersome and spatially coarse, Larour said. The new tool provides an overall mechanism for rapidly computing high-resolution results using a variety of potential data sets.

Gradient Fingerprint Mapping is not dependent on a particular climate change scenario, Larour said. "You can apply the method to any type of melting scenario that you want." That means it will retain its utility as improved projections of ice loss become available in the future.

The computations show that the specific location of mass loss in Greenland is crucial, as it greatly affects the local sea level predictions for many major coastal cities in North America and Europe. The spatial details of Antarctic melting are important for areas south of the equator in South America, Africa and South Asia.

Among some intriguing results, Larour said, are those for New York, London and Oslo. Greenland's northeastern ice stream was shown to have an outsized effect on New York's local sea level, but the island's southern glaciers had little influence. London was more strongly affected by Greenland's northwestern and western glaciers. And Norway is so close to Greenland, the island's gravitational fingerprint is contributing to sea level decrease in Oslo.

The authors note that ocean dynamics can accelerate or offset the changes in sea level from gravitational fingerprints - particularly in New York, where the contribution of melting ice to accelerated sea level rise is minor compared to other sources.

"This is really a new capability," Larour said. "Now a coastal planner can understand and see how the melting or growing of a given ice sheet could be detrimental or beneficial to a specific location."

Access the tool at:
https://vesl.jpl.nasa.gov/research/sea-level/slr-gfm
News media contact

Alan Buis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
818-354-0474
Alan.Buis@jpl.nasa.gov

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NASA links port-city sea levels to regional ice melt - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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A new NASA tool links changes in sea level in 293 global port cities to specific regions of melting land ice, such as southern Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. It is intended to help coastal planners prepare for rising seas in the decades to come.

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Climate change has begun to reshape the lives of Alaska's indigenous people

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Climate change has begun to reshape the lives of Alaska's indigenous people

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Hannah Lee

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Newsela | Climate change has begun to reshape the lives of Alaska's indigenous people

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Warming seas have begun to take a toll on indigenous Alaska communities.

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Valerie Militeeva

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It was the flood that ensured that Ntonya Sande's first year as a teenager would also be the first year of her married life. Up to the moment the water swept away her parents' field in Kachaso in the Nsanje district of Malawi, they had been scraping a living. Afterwards they were reduced to scavenging for bits of firewood to sell.

So when a young man came to their door and asked for the 13-year old's hand in marriage, the couple didn't think about it for too long, lest he look elsewhere. Ntonya begged them to change their minds. She was too young, she pleaded. She didn't want to leave. But it was to no avail. Her parents sat her down and spelled it out for her: the weather had changed and taken everything from them. There was not enough food to go around. They couldn't afford another mouth at the table.

That night she lay down in bed for the first time with the man she had never seen before and followed the instructions of her aunt, who had coached her on the important matter of sex. Ten months later, she gave birth to their first daughter.

Around 1.5 million girls in Malawi are at risk of getting married because of climate change. That's a huge number

Everyone has their own idea of what climate change looks like. For some, it's the walrus struggling to find space on melting ice floes on Blue Planet II. For others, it's an apocalyptic vision of cities disappearing beneath the waves. But for more and more girls across Africa, the most palpable manifestation of climate change is the baby in their arms as they sit watching their friends walk to school. The Brides of the Sun reporting project, funded by the European Journalism Centre, set out to try to assess the scale of what many experts are warning is a real and growing crisis: the emergence of a generation of child brides as a direct result of a changing climate.

And time and again, in villages from the south of Malawi to the east coast of Mozambique, the child brides and their parents told an increasingly familiar story. In recent years they had noticed the temperatures rising, the rains becoming less predictable and coming later and sometimes flooding where there had not been flooding before. Families that would once have been able to afford to feed and educate several children reported that they now faced an impossible situation.

None of the villages had any way of recording the changes scientifically, or indeed felt any urge to do so. All they knew was that the weather had changed and that where they used to be able to pay for their girls to go through school now they couldn't. And the only solution was for one or more daughters to get married.

Sometimes it was the parents who made the decision. For the good of the rest of the family, a daughter had to be sacrificed. She would be taken out of school and found a husband, one less mouth to feed. Sometimes it was the girl herself who made the decision and forced it upon her parents. Unhappy, hungry, she hoped that a husband might be the answer.

Carlina Nortino (main image, first left) sits with her husband, Horacio, in the dry sand that is all that is left of the river that once flowed past the village of Nataka in the Larde district of Nampula province, on the east coast of Mozambique. From the ground, there is nothing to see of the river. But a drone camera sent up to hover above reveals the ghost of the river, a darker line of green growth winding its way across the plain.

Carlina is 15, Horacio 16. They married when she was 13, two years after the river disappeared, she says.

"I remember when I saw people here fishing. I used to sell the fish, I took it from the fishermen and went to sell it to the village. There was water everywhere. I remember seeing Horacio with the other fishermen. But without rain, the fish died."

Her family used to harvest as many as 20 50kg bags of cassava. Today it is down to one or two bags. She blames the lack of rain.

Horacio looks across to where the river once ran. "I can't fish any more because the fish don't have water any more. The water disappeared. Now I do agriculture. Before, the rain started in September and came regularly until March. Now the rain only comes in January and February and that's it."

Carlina had dreamed of becoming a midwife: school was the most important part of her life. "It was never my desire to get married at that young age. I wanted to go to school. But I was forced to by my father. The family didn't have enough food to survive. So my father accepted the proposal because he couldn't support me to go to school."

She give birth to their first child, a boy, earlier this year. There were problems from the start. The family could not afford to go to a hospital with an incubator and the child died. "I am sure that if my father and my husband weren't that poor, my son would be alive," she says.

It wasn't his choice to marry her off, says her father, Carlitos Camilo. The 49-year-old used to support his family through fishing and farming. Then the weather changed and there was no more fish. "If I was able to feed my children, I wouldn't have pushed her to get married so young. Look at my other daughters, they grew up, they went to school, they got married at a normal age."

In 2015 the United Nations Population Fund estimated that 13.5 million children would marry under the age of 18 in that year alone - 37,000 child marriages every day - including 4.4 million married before they were 15. Across the whole of Africa, Unicef warned in 2015 that the total number of child brides could more than double to 310 million by 2050 if current trends continue.

There are many reasons for children marrying young. In some societies, it is regarded as simply practical; when children reach puberty, sexual behaviour starts to carry with it the risk of pregnancy. Elsewhere, poverty is the driver: when parents cannot afford to feed several children, it tends to be the girls who have to go.

But set against that is a growing awareness of the issue and a stated desire by governments to tackle it. Malawi made it illegal to marry below the age of 18 in 2015 and wrote it into its constitution this year. The rate of child marriage should be falling. Yet it persists. In Mozambique the number of child brides is actually rising as a result of the growing population. Something else has entered the equation.

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Little girls fetch water in Kachaso village, Nsanje district, Malawi. Extreme poverty in the region may compel them to marry before they're ready.

The new factor is climate change, says Mac Bain Mkandawire, executive director of Youth Net and Counselling, which campaigns for the rights of women and children from its base in Zomba, Malawi.

"We do not have detailed figures, but I would say 30% to 40% of child marriages in Malawi are due to the floods and droughts caused by climate change," he says. There are no detailed figures, he explains, because no one has previously thought to connect the two issues and to ask the right questions.

"Given that there are about 4 or 5 million girls at risk of getting married in Malawi, around 1.5 million girls are at risk of getting married because of climate change related events. That is a huge number."

The published figures may underestimate the scale of the problem because many marriages are informal affairs, not officially recorded. Often they are simply an agreement between two families, or if there are no parents then between the boy and the girl themselves. Sometimes a small dowry is paid by the husband or his family.

That's how it was for Filomena Antonio. She was 15 when 21-year-old Momande Churute approached her father, Antonio, and offered him 2,000 Mozambican meticals (£25) to marry his daughter.

Antonio Momade Jamal is 50. He has lived in Moma in Nampula province, all his life. He started fishing in 1985 when it was still a profitable business. Back then, buyers used to come from the city of Nampula to compete for the catch. Then the weather started to change.

"We see that it's too hot. We talk about that and we all agree that it's difficult to catch enough fish because of these high temperatures," he says. "In the areas where we used to go, the sea level is rising and the waves are much stronger."

He thought Filomena too young to marry but he felt he had little choice and when Momande offered to support her to stay in school, he agreed. He says he is not the only one.

"I've seen other neighbours who, because they are struggling, let their daughters get married. I have five other kids who go to secondary school. I have two other daughters, one of 13, another of 11. If a man came to ask for their hand, I would think about it, I would consider it. This man could help me support not only my daughter, but also help my other kids continue their education."

Filomena sits next to him, listening. She appears to have accepted her fate as long as it means she can go off to study in the city. She wants to be a nurse.

"We met here in the neighbourhood and he asked me to be with him," she says, indicating Momande. "I liked him. I thought he was a beautiful man."

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Its course still visible from the air, the river in Nataka, Larde district, Mozambique was a vital source of fish and water for irrigation until the rains became unreliable and the river dried up.

She told him he had to ask her father's permission. "My father accepted because he had poor conditions, so he believed that my husband could support me to go to school. I accepted because my father allowed me to. Since my father is poor, I thought I would get married so that my husband would help me. I believe that if my father had kept doing well with the fishing, he wouldn't have accepted the proposal because then he could afford my education, the school fees, my books."

Mozambique is one of the world's poorest countries, with almost 70% of its 28 million people living below the poverty line. It is particularly vulnerable to climate change: the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment warns that "climate-related hazards such as droughts, floods and cyclones are occurring with increasing frequency".

The legal age of marriage is 18 (16 with parental consent) but still Mozambique has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, with nearly one in two girls married by the age of 18 and one in seven by 15. The highest rates of child marriage are found in the northern provinces, including Nampula, which also has the highest number of adolescent pregnancies.

Fatima Mussa is 16, and nine months pregnant. She hadn't really wanted to get married. On the other hand, her father could no longer afford to keep her. She married 18-year-old Priorino Antonio last year when she was 15 after he approached her father in the village of Nataka, in Nampula province, and offered him 2,000 meticals. There was no ceremony.

"My father said 'I would have never considered allowing my daughter to marry now, because she is young. But she will marry because I don't have enough money to send her to secondary school.' I didn't want to get married at such a young age, but I didn't know what to do, since I couldn't go to school. So I saw an opportunity to marry someone who could maybe improve my life a little bit."

Across the border in Malawi, nearly half the country's girls are married by the age of 18 and nearly one in 10 by age 15, leaving Malawi ranked by Unicef as the 11th worst country in the world for child marriage. The legal age of marriage was raised to 18 in 2015 but there have been no reports of any prosecutions.

Poverty is the key factor, increasingly driven by climate change. The International Monetary Fund says that 70% of the 19 million population live below the poverty line, and 25% live in extreme poverty: "Considering that a significant number of the non-poor in rural areas are highly vulnerable to weather shocks, the poverty rate is - if anything - expected to increase due to the impact of recent floods and drought."

For Lucy Anusa, it was the drought of 2016 that tipped her over the edge. She was 14, the youngest of three sisters living with their farmer parents in Namalaka, near the southern end of Lake Malawi, when the drought laid waste to their crops.

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Lucy Anusa, now a 15-year-old mother, has returned to live with her family near Lake Malawi.

"I met this man who proposed to get married. I had to accept despite the fact that my parents kept telling me good things about education. But I opted for marriage given the way things were at home."

Her parents were unhappy, but she was too stubborn. Only when she became pregnant and the husband turned her out of their home did she start to regret her decision.

Now 15, she gave birth to their daughter earlier this year. "My mother had to welcome me back. But she kept reminding me: 'My daughter, I told you about this. You are too young for marriage. You have a lot of challenges when you go into marriage so young.'"

The changes in the weather are wrong-footing farmers, says Amos Mtonya from Malawi's department of climate change and meteorological services. "When it starts to rain, they immediately start planting. But then, three weeks later, they realise that everything they planted is dry," he says. "So to some, giving away their girl child can be a relief. It can also help the husband's family, since it gets someone to assist with the household chores. Of course tradition plays its role, but climate change will encourage people to get married early."

The government's own report on the 2015 floods listed child marriage as one of the side effects, a view shared by the anti-child marriage campaign group Girls Not Brides. "If we don't act now we risk another generation of childhoods being lost," says its executive director Lakshmi Sundaram.

Maliya Mapira dropped out of school because a teacher got her pregnant. She was 15 at the time. Her parents are tobacco farmers and the worsening harvests meant they were living hand to mouth. When they discovered who the father was, they wanted Maliya to marry him. "But along the way the teacher was unable to support me, not even the baby. If my parents could have supported me, I would have preferred to continue with education rather than get married. But I didn't want to put pressure on them. So I just decided to get married to this man to survive."

But marriage has changed little for her. She and tobacco farmer Maliki Hestone, trying to raise her six-month-old son, Bashiru Akim, face the same problems her parents failed to overcome. "Sometimes, because of the floods, the crops get washed away. At the end of the day, we get very little harvest from it," she says. "I don't want to have more children because we are struggling taking care of the one I have. It would just make things more difficult."

Five hundred miles away, in the courtyard of a house on the edge of Moma, Majuma Julio is stirring a pot of maize, preparing lunch for husband, Juma Momade, who is holding their year-old daughter, Fatima, on his lap.

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Majuma Julio, now 17, married at 15 and has a daughter nearly two: 'I don't blame anyone. The weather just changed.'

The couple married two years ago when Majuma was 15 and Juma was 19. It's not what she wanted, Majuma says. But she was staying with an uncle, a farmer, who was paying to support her through school. The weather changed and there was no more money; marriage was the only solution.

"It was because of the sun. There was too much sun and the rain was not falling enough. His production started to decrease three years before the marriage," says Majuma. "It used to rain for two months, but after a while it started coming less and less. I don't blame anyone. The weather just changed. My uncle called me and informed me that there was a man who wanted to marry me. I accepted. I didn't like the idea but I just accepted because I wanted to study."

Majuma knew that marriage would mean children. But Juma had promised to support her. "Juma and the imam came to my uncle's house, they did the ceremony and we were married. I am all right now. I feel better than when I was in my uncle's house because my husband treats me well, I keep going to school, there's no problem.

"I won't let my daughter get married at 15 years old. She has to study."

Up the coast from Moma, administrator Brigi Rupio looks out across the wide blue expanse of the Larde river. "When I arrived here in 2014, there was a house right next to the river," he says, pointing to where the bank is being undercut by the current. "But in 2015, there were severe floods that destroyed houses and increased the level of the river. Then there was drought. We had areas where we used to produce rice. But because of the dry spells, it's not possible any more. The weather is changing. Even those who cannot read or write can notice that."

The young girls taken out of school to marry early can attest to that.

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Why climate change is creating a new generation of child brides

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It was the flood that ensured that Ntonya Sande's first year as a teenager would also be the first year of her married life. Up to the moment the water swept away her parents' field in Kachaso in the Nsanje district of Malawi, they had been scraping a living.