essay on global warming and its effect

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Essay on Global Warming

Updated on
Apr 27, 2024

Being able to write an essay is an integral part of mastering any language. Essays form an integral part of many academic and scholastic exams like the SAT , and UPSC amongst many others. It is a crucial evaluative part of English proficiency tests as well like IELTS , TOEFL , etc. Major essays are meant to emphasize public issues of concern that can have significant consequences on the world. To understand the concept of Global Warming and its causes and effects, we must first examine the many factors that influence the planet’s temperature and what this implies for the world’s future. Here’s an unbiased look at the essay on Global Warming and other essential related topics.

Short Essay on Global Warming and Climate Change?

Since the industrial and scientific revolutions, Earth’s resources have been gradually depleted. Furthermore, the start of the world’s population’s exponential expansion is particularly hard on the environment. Simply put, as the population’s need for consumption grows, so does the use of natural resources , as well as the waste generated by that consumption.

Climate change has been one of the most significant long-term consequences of this. Climate change is more than just the rise or fall of global temperatures; it also affects rain cycles, wind patterns, cyclone frequencies, sea levels, and other factors. It has an impact on all major life groupings on the planet.

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century, primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels . The greenhouse gases consist of methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and chlorofluorocarbons. The weather prediction has been becoming more complex with every passing year, with seasons more indistinguishable, and the general temperatures hotter.

The number of hurricanes, cyclones, droughts, floods, etc., has risen steadily since the onset of the 21st century. The supervillain behind all these changes is Global Warming. The name is quite self-explanatory; it means the rise in the temperature of the Earth.

What are the Causes of Global Warming?

According to recent studies, many scientists believe the following are the primary four causes of global warming:

Deforestation
Greenhouse emissions
Carbon emissions per capita

Extreme global warming is causing natural disasters , which can be seen all around us. One of the causes of global warming is the extreme release of greenhouse gases that become trapped on the earth’s surface, causing the temperature to rise. Similarly, volcanoes contribute to global warming by spewing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere.

The increase in population is one of the major causes of Global Warming. This increase in population also leads to increased air pollution . Automobiles emit a lot of CO2, which remains in the atmosphere. This increase in population is also causing deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

The earth’s surface emits energy into the atmosphere in the form of heat, keeping the balance with the incoming energy. Global warming depletes the ozone layer, bringing about the end of the world. There is a clear indication that increased global warming will result in the extinction of all life on Earth’s surface.

Also Read: Land, Soil, Water, Natural Vegetation, and Wildlife Resources

Solutions for Global Warming

Of course, industries and multinational conglomerates emit more carbon than the average citizen. Nonetheless, activism and community effort are the only viable ways to slow the worsening effects of global warming. Furthermore, at the state or government level, world leaders must develop concrete plans and step-by-step programmes to ensure that no further harm is done to the environment in general.

Although we are almost too late to slow the rate of global warming, finding the right solution is critical. Everyone, from individuals to governments, must work together to find a solution to Global Warming. Some of the factors to consider are pollution control, population growth, and the use of natural resources.

One very important contribution you can make is to reduce your use of plastic. Plastic is the primary cause of global warming, and recycling it takes years. Another factor to consider is deforestation, which will aid in the control of global warming. More tree planting should be encouraged to green the environment. Certain rules should also govern industrialization. Building industries in green zones that affect plants and species should be prohibited.

Effects of Global Warming

Global warming is a real problem that many people want to disprove to gain political advantage. However, as global citizens, we must ensure that only the truth is presented in the media.

This decade has seen a significant impact from global warming. The two most common phenomena observed are glacier retreat and arctic shrinkage. Glaciers are rapidly melting. These are clear manifestations of climate change.

Another significant effect of global warming is the rise in sea level. Flooding is occurring in low-lying areas as a result of sea-level rise. Many countries have experienced extreme weather conditions. Every year, we have unusually heavy rain, extreme heat and cold, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Similarly, as global warming continues, marine life is being severely impacted. This is causing the extinction of marine species as well as other problems. Furthermore, changes are expected in coral reefs, which will face extinction in the coming years. These effects will intensify in the coming years, effectively halting species expansion. Furthermore, humans will eventually feel the negative effects of Global Warming.

Also Read: Concept of Sustainable Development

Sample Essays on Global Warming

Here are some sample essays on Global Warming:

Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 – 150 words

Global Warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere and is a result of human activities that have been causing harm to our environment for the past few centuries now. Global Warming is something that can’t be ignored and steps have to be taken to tackle the situation globally. The average temperature is constantly rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the last few years.

The best method to prevent future damage to the earth, cutting down more forests should be banned and Afforestation should be encouraged. Start by planting trees near your homes and offices, participate in events, and teach the importance of planting trees. It is impossible to undo the damage but it is possible to stop further harm.

Essay on Global Warming in 250 Words

Over a long period, it is observed that the temperature of the earth is increasing. This affected wildlife, animals, humans, and every living organism on earth. Glaciers have been melting, and many countries have started water shortages, flooding, and erosion and all this is because of global warming.

No one can be blamed for global warming except for humans. Human activities such as gases released from power plants, transportation, and deforestation have increased gases such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere. The main question is how can we control the current situation and build a better world for future generations. It starts with little steps by every individual.

Start using cloth bags made from sustainable materials for all shopping purposes, instead of using high-watt lights use energy-efficient bulbs, switch off the electricity, don’t waste water, abolish deforestation and encourage planting more trees. Shift the use of energy from petroleum or other fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Instead of throwing out the old clothes donate them to someone so that it is recycled.

Donate old books, don’t waste paper. Above all, spread awareness about global warming. Every little thing a person does towards saving the earth will contribute in big or small amounts. We must learn that 1% effort is better than no effort. Pledge to take care of Mother Nature and speak up about global warming.

Essay on Global Warming in 500 Words

Global warming isn’t a prediction, it is happening! A person denying it or unaware of it is in the most simple terms complicit. Do we have another planet to live on? Unfortunately, we have been bestowed with this one planet only that can sustain life yet over the years we have turned a blind eye to the plight it is in. Global warming is not an abstract concept but a global phenomenon occurring ever so slowly even at this moment. Global Warming is a phenomenon that is occurring every minute resulting in a gradual increase in the Earth’s overall climate. Brought about by greenhouse gases that trap the solar radiation in the atmosphere, global warming can change the entire map of the earth, displacing areas, flooding many countries, and destroying multiple lifeforms. Extreme weather is a direct consequence of global warming but it is not an exhaustive consequence. There are virtually limitless effects of global warming which are all harmful to life on earth. The sea level is increasing by 0.12 inches per year worldwide. This is happening because of the melting of polar ice caps because of global warming. This has increased the frequency of floods in many lowland areas and has caused damage to coral reefs. The Arctic is one of the worst-hit areas affected by global warming. Air quality has been adversely affected and the acidity of the seawater has also increased causing severe damage to marine life forms. Severe natural disasters are brought about by global warming which has had dire effects on life and property. As long as mankind produces greenhouse gases, global warming will continue to accelerate. The consequences are felt at a much smaller scale which will increase to become drastic shortly. The power to save the day lies in the hands of humans, the need is to seize the day. Energy consumption should be reduced on an individual basis. Fuel-efficient cars and other electronics should be encouraged to reduce the wastage of energy sources. This will also improve air quality and reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming is an evil that can only be defeated when fought together. It is better late than never. If we all take steps today, we will have a much brighter future tomorrow. Global warming is the bane of our existence and various policies have come up worldwide to fight it but that is not enough. The actual difference is made when we work at an individual level to fight it. Understanding its import now is crucial before it becomes an irrevocable mistake. Exterminating global warming is of utmost importance and each one of us is as responsible for it as the next.

Also Read: Essay on Library: 100, 200 and 250 Words

Essay on Global Warming UPSC

Always hear about global warming everywhere, but do we know what it is? The evil of the worst form, global warming is a phenomenon that can affect life more fatally. Global warming refers to the increase in the earth’s temperature as a result of various human activities. The planet is gradually getting hotter and threatening the existence of lifeforms on it. Despite being relentlessly studied and researched, global warming for the majority of the population remains an abstract concept of science. It is this concept that over the years has culminated in making global warming a stark reality and not a concept covered in books. Global warming is not caused by one sole reason that can be curbed. Multifarious factors cause global warming most of which are a part of an individual’s daily existence. Burning of fuels for cooking, in vehicles, and for other conventional uses, a large amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and methane amongst many others is produced which accelerates global warming. Rampant deforestation also results in global warming as lesser green cover results in an increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas. Finding a solution to global warming is of immediate importance. Global warming is a phenomenon that has to be fought unitedly. Planting more trees can be the first step that can be taken toward warding off the severe consequences of global warming. Increasing the green cover will result in regulating the carbon cycle. There should be a shift from using nonrenewable energy to renewable energy such as wind or solar energy which causes less pollution and thereby hinder the acceleration of global warming. Reducing energy needs at an individual level and not wasting energy in any form is the most important step to be taken against global warming. The warning bells are tolling to awaken us from the deep slumber of complacency we have slipped into. Humans can fight against nature and it is high time we acknowledged that. With all our scientific progress and technological inventions, fighting off the negative effects of global warming is implausible. We have to remember that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our future generations and the responsibility lies on our shoulders to bequeath them a healthy planet for life to exist.

Climate Change and Global Warming Essay

Global Warming and Climate Change are two sides of the same coin. Both are interrelated with each other and are two issues of major concern worldwide. Greenhouse gases released such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere cause Global Warming which leads to climate change. Black holes have started to form in the ozone layer that protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays.

Human activities have created climate change and global warming. Industrial waste and fumes are the major contributors to global warming.

Another factor affecting is the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and also one of the reasons for climate change. Global warming has resulted in shrinking mountain glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic and causing climate change. Switching from the use of fossil fuels to energy sources like wind and solar.

When buying any electronic appliance buy the best quality with energy savings stars. Don’t waste water and encourage rainwater harvesting in your community.

Tips to Write an Essay

Writing an effective essay needs skills that few people possess and even fewer know how to implement. While writing an essay can be an assiduous task that can be unnerving at times, some key pointers can be inculcated to draft a successful essay. These involve focusing on the structure of the essay, planning it out well, and emphasizing crucial details.

Mentioned below are some pointers that can help you write better structure and more thoughtful essays that will get across to your readers:

Prepare an outline for the essay to ensure continuity and relevance and no break in the structure of the essay
Decide on a thesis statement that will form the basis of your essay. It will be the point of your essay and help readers understand your contention
Follow the structure of an introduction, a detailed body followed by a conclusion so that the readers can comprehend the essay in a particular manner without any dissonance.
Make your beginning catchy and include solutions in your conclusion to make the essay insightful and lucrative to read
Reread before putting it out and add your flair to the essay to make it more personal and thereby unique and intriguing for readers

Also Read: I Love My India Essay: 100 and 500+ Words in English for School Students

Ans. Both natural and man-made factors contribute to global warming. The natural one also contains methane gas, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gases. Deforestation, mining, livestock raising, burning fossil fuels, and other man-made causes are next.

Ans. The government and the general public can work together to stop global warming. Trees must be planted more often, and deforestation must be prohibited. Auto usage needs to be curbed, and recycling needs to be promoted.

Ans. Switching to renewable energy sources , adopting sustainable farming, transportation, and energy methods, and conserving water and other natural resources.

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Digvijay Singh

Having 2+ years of experience in educational content writing, withholding a Bachelor's in Physical Education and Sports Science and a strong interest in writing educational content for students enrolled in domestic and foreign study abroad programmes. I believe in offering a distinct viewpoint to the table, to help students deal with the complexities of both domestic and foreign educational systems. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, I aim to inspire my readers to embark on their educational journeys, whether abroad or at home, and to make the most of every learning opportunity that comes their way.

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Essay on Global Warming – Causes and Solutions

500+ words essay on global warming.

Global Warming is a term almost everyone is familiar with. But, its meaning is still not clear to most of us. So, Global warming refers to the gradual rise in the overall temperature of the atmosphere of the Earth. There are various activities taking place which have been increasing the temperature gradually. Global warming is melting our ice glaciers rapidly. This is extremely harmful to the earth as well as humans. It is quite challenging to control global warming; however, it is not unmanageable. The first step in solving any problem is identifying the cause of the problem. Therefore, we need to first understand the causes of global warming that will help us proceed further in solving it. In this essay on Global Warming, we will see the causes and solutions of Global Warming.

Causes of Global Warming

Global warming has become a grave problem which needs undivided attention. It is not happening because of a single cause but several causes. These causes are both natural as well as manmade. The natural causes include the release of greenhouses gases which are not able to escape from earth, causing the temperature to increase.

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Further, volcanic eruptions are also responsible for global warming. That is to say, these eruptions release tons of carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming. Similarly, methane is also one big issue responsible for global warming.

So, when one of the biggest sources of absorption of carbon dioxide will only disappear, there will be nothing left to regulate the gas. Thus, it will result in global warming. Steps must be taken immediately to stop global warming and make the earth better again.

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Global Warming Solutions

As stated earlier, it might be challenging but it is not entirely impossible. Global warming can be stopped when combined efforts are put in. For that, individuals and governments, both have to take steps towards achieving it. We must begin with the reduction of greenhouse gas.

Furthermore, they need to monitor the consumption of gasoline. Switch to a hybrid car and reduce the release of carbon dioxide. Moreover, citizens can choose public transport or carpool together. Subsequently, recycling must also be encouraged.

Read Global Warming Speech here

For instance, when you go shopping, carry your own cloth bag. Another step you can take is to limit the use of electricity which will prevent the release of carbon dioxide. On the government’s part, they must regulate industrial waste and ban them from emitting harmful gases in the air. Deforestation must be stopped immediately and planting of trees must be encouraged.

In short, all of us must realize the fact that our earth is not well. It needs to treatment and we can help it heal. The present generation must take up the responsibility of stopping global warming in order to prevent the suffering of future generations. Therefore, every little step, no matter how small carries a lot of weight and is quite significant in stopping global warming.

हिंदी में ग्लोबल वार्मिंग पर निबंध यहाँ पढ़ें

FAQs on Global Warming

Q.1 List the causes of Global Warming.

A.1 There are various causes of global warming both natural and manmade. The natural one includes a greenhouse gas, volcanic eruption, methane gas and more. Next up, manmade causes are deforestation, mining, cattle rearing, fossil fuel burning and more.

Q.2 How can one stop Global Warming?

A.2 Global warming can be stopped by a joint effort by the individuals and the government. Deforestation must be banned and trees should be planted more. The use of automobiles must be limited and recycling must be encouraged.

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What is global warming?

What causes global warming, how is global warming linked to extreme weather, what are the other effects of global warming, where does the united states stand in terms of global-warming contributors, is the united states doing anything to prevent global warming, is global warming too big a problem for me to help tackle.

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

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

Now climate scientists have concluded that we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040 if we are to avoid a future in which everyday life around the world is marked by its worst, most devastating effects: the extreme droughts, wildfires, floods, tropical storms, and other disasters that we refer to collectively as climate change . These effects are felt by all people in one way or another but are experienced most acutely by the underprivileged, the economically marginalized, and people of color, for whom climate change is often a key driver of poverty, displacement, hunger, and social unrest.

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

Though natural cycles and fluctuations have caused the earth’s climate to change several times over the last 800,000 years, our current era of global warming is directly attributable to human activity—specifically to our burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas, which results in the greenhouse effect. In the United States, the largest source of greenhouse gases is transportation (29 percent), followed closely by electricity production (28 percent) and industrial activity (22 percent). Learn about the natural and human causes of climate change .

Curbing dangerous climate change requires very deep cuts in emissions, as well as the use of alternatives to fossil fuels worldwide. The good news is that countries around the globe have formally committed—as part of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement —to lower their emissions by setting new standards and crafting new policies to meet or even exceed those standards. The not-so-good news is that we’re not working fast enough. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists tell us that we need to reduce global carbon emissions by as much as 40 percent by 2030. For that to happen, the global community must take immediate, concrete steps: to decarbonize electricity generation by equitably transitioning from fossil fuel–based production to renewable energy sources like wind and solar; to electrify our cars and trucks; and to maximize energy efficiency in our buildings, appliances, and industries.

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

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

The earth’s ocean temperatures are getting warmer, too—which means that tropical storms can pick up more energy. In other words, global warming has the ability to turn a category 3 storm into a more dangerous category 4 storm. In fact, scientists have found that the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes has increased since the early 1980s, as has the number of storms that reach categories 4 and 5. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season included a record-breaking 30 tropical storms, 6 major hurricanes, and 13 hurricanes altogether. With increased intensity come increased damage and death. The United States saw an unprecedented 22 weather and climate disasters that caused at least a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 2020, but, according to NOAA, 2017 was the costliest on record and among the deadliest as well: Taken together, that year's tropical storms (including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria) caused nearly $300 billion in damage and led to more than 3,300 fatalities.

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

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

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

Disappearing glaciers, early snowmelt, and severe droughts will cause more dramatic water shortages and continue to increase the risk of wildfires in the American West.
Rising sea levels will lead to even more coastal flooding on the Eastern Seaboard, especially in Florida, and in other areas such as the Gulf of Mexico.
Forests, farms, and cities will face troublesome new pests , heat waves, heavy downpours, and increased flooding . All of these can damage or destroy agriculture and fisheries.
Disruption of habitats such as coral reefs and alpine meadows could drive many plant and animal species to extinction.
Allergies, asthma, and infectious disease outbreaks will become more common due to increased growth of pollen-producing ragweed , higher levels of air pollution , and the spread of conditions favorable to pathogens and mosquitoes.

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

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

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

Under the administration of President Donald Trump (a man who falsely referred to global warming as a “hoax”), the United States withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, rolled back or eliminated dozens of clean air protections, and opened up federally managed lands, including culturally sacred national monuments, to fossil fuel development. Although President Biden has pledged to get the country back on track, years of inaction during and before the Trump administration—and our increased understanding of global warming’s serious impacts—mean we must accelerate our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite the lack of cooperation from the Trump administration, local and state governments made great strides during this period through efforts like the American Cities Climate Challenge and ongoing collaborations like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative . Meanwhile, industry and business leaders have been working with the public sector, creating and adopting new clean-energy technologies and increasing energy efficiency in buildings, appliances, and industrial processes.

Today the American automotive industry is finding new ways to produce cars and trucks that are more fuel efficient and is committing itself to putting more and more zero-emission electric vehicles on the road. Developers, cities, and community advocates are coming together to make sure that new affordable housing is built with efficiency in mind , reducing energy consumption and lowering electric and heating bills for residents. And renewable energy continues to surge as the costs associated with its production and distribution keep falling. In 2020 renewable energy sources such as wind and solar provided more electricity than coal for the very first time in U.S. history.

President Biden has made action on global warming a high priority. On his first day in office, he recommitted the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement, sending the world community a strong signal that we were determined to join other nations in cutting our carbon pollution to support the shared goal of preventing the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. (Scientists say we must stay below a 2-degree increase to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.) And significantly, the president has assembled a climate team of experts and advocates who have been tasked with pursuing action both abroad and at home while furthering the cause of environmental justice and investing in nature-based solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Effects of Global Warming Essay

The term "global warming" describes the rise in global temperatures primarily brought on by an increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.

Environmental changes brought on by global warming may have a negative influence on human health. Here are a few essays on the topic ‘global warming’.

100 Words Essay On Global Warming

Global warming is an environmental issue that has been discussed for decades and is now becoming more serious than ever before. Global warming is caused by the increase of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases are released when fossil fuels such as oil and coal are burned. These gases accumulate in the atmosphere, trapping heat and increasing the Earth's temperature. This process is known as the greenhouse effect, and it is causing higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and weather extremes. The effects of global warming on the environment have been devastating and they’re posing a huge threat to life on Earth.

200 Words Essay On Global Warming

Global warming is one of the greatest threats facing our planet today. The average temperature of the planet is rising as a result of global warming, which is caused by an increase in greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone are examples of greenhouse gases that trap solar energy. Higher temperatures have caused glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise. This has caused increased flooding, drought, and extreme weather events. In addition, global warming has also caused a loss of biodiversity, as some species are unable to adapt to the changing climate.

Global warming has become an increasingly important environmental issue in recent years. The effects of global warming are far-reaching and can be seen in many different ways. We must take action now to reduce the causes, mitigate the impacts, and protect the environment for future generations. By taking smart steps to reduce emissions and invest in clean energy, we can create a better future for our planet. Governments must enact policies to reduce emissions from industries and transportation. They can also invest in clean energy sources such as solar and wind. Individuals can help by reducing their carbon footprint by driving less, eating local foods, and conserving energy.

500 Words Essay On Global Warming

Global warming happens when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants accumulate in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar energy that has bounced off the earth's surface. Normally, this radiation would escape into space, but because of the pollutants, which can linger in the atmosphere, the earth becomes hotter. The greenhouse effect is the result of these heat-trapping pollutants, which are known as greenhouse gases. These pollutants include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapour, and synthetic fluorinated gases.

Causes Of Global Warming

Although the earth's temperature has changed multiple times over the past years due to natural cycles and changes, our current era of global warming is directly related to human activity, specifically to our combustion of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas. The primary cause of global warming is the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the earth’s temperature to rise. As temperatures increase, extreme weather events become more frequent, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves.

Effects Of Global Warming

The effects of global warming are already being experienced in many parts of the world. For example, rising sea levels due to melting ice caps have caused coastal flooding in many parts of the world, and extreme weather events have caused destruction and displacement of millions of people. Additionally, global warming has caused an increase in the number of pests and diseases, as well as an increase in ocean acidification.

Wildfire danger will continue to rise as a result of melting glaciers, early snowmelt, and severe droughts.

More coastal flooding will result from rising sea levels. Cities, farms, and forests will see more bothersome bugs, heat waves, torrential downpours, and flooding. Agriculture and fisheries may be harmed or destroyed by all of these.

Many plant and animal species may go extinct if environments like coral reefs and alpine meadows are damaged.

Rising pollen-producing ragweed growth, increased levels of air pollution, and the expansion of conditions that are conducive to pathogens and mosquitoes will all lead to an increase in the frequency of allergic reactions, asthma attacks, and infectious disease epidemics.

What Can We Do

It is clear that global warming is having a serious effect on our planet. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to reduce the impact of global warming. One way is to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere. This can be done by increasing energy efficiency and using renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power. Additionally, individuals can reduce their carbon footprint by using public transportation, reducing meat consumption, and using energy-efficient appliances. Look for a car with the best gas mileage and the fewest pollutants when you go car shopping. Whenever possible, use public transportation or carpool to lessen your emissions.

Global warming is a serious environmental issue that has far-reaching effects on our planet. Although the causes and effects of global warming can seem overwhelming, there are steps that can be taken to reduce its impact. By increasing energy efficiency, using renewable energy sources, and reducing one's carbon footprint, individuals can make a difference in combating global warming. With collective efforts, we can limit the effects of global warming and ensure a healthy environment for future generations.

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Essay on Global Warming

Essay On Global Warming

Essay on global warming is an important topic for students to understand. The essay brings to light the plight of the environment and the repercussion of anthropogenic activities. Continue reading to discover tips and tricks for writing an engaging and interesting essay on global warming.

Essay On Global Warming in 300 Words

Global warming is a phenomenon where the earth’s average temperature rises due to increased amounts of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone trap the incoming radiation from the sun. This effect creates a natural “blanket”, which prevents the heat from escaping back into the atmosphere. This effect is called the greenhouse effect.

Contrary to popular belief, greenhouse gases are not inherently bad. In fact, the greenhouse effect is quite important for life on earth. Without this effect, the sun’s radiation would be reflected back into the atmosphere, freezing the surface and making life impossible. However, when greenhouse gases in excess amounts get trapped, serious repercussions begin to appear. The polar ice caps begin to melt, leading to a rise in sea levels. Furthermore, the greenhouse effect is accelerated when polar ice caps and sea ice melts. This is due to the fact the ice reflects 50% to 70% of the sun’s rays back into space, but without ice, the solar radiation gets absorbed. Seawater reflects only 6% of the sun’s radiation back into space. What’s more frightening is the fact that the poles contain large amounts of carbon dioxide trapped within the ice. If this ice melts, it will significantly contribute to global warming.

A related scenario when this phenomenon goes out of control is the runaway-greenhouse effect. This scenario is essentially similar to an apocalypse, but it is all too real. Though this has never happened in the earth’s entire history, it is speculated to have occurred on Venus. Millions of years ago, Venus was thought to have an atmosphere similar to that of the earth. But due to the runaway greenhouse effect, surface temperatures around the planet began rising.

If this occurs on the earth, the runaway greenhouse effect will lead to many unpleasant scenarios – temperatures will rise hot enough for oceans to evaporate. Once the oceans evaporate, the rocks will start to sublimate under heat. In order to prevent such a scenario, proper measures have to be taken to stop climate change.

More to Read: Learn How Greenhouse Effect works

Tips To Writing the Perfect Essay

Consider adopting the following strategies when writing an essay. These are proven methods of securing more marks in an exam or assignment.

Begin the essay with an introductory paragraph detailing the history or origin of the given topic.
Try to reduce the use of jargons. Use sparingly if the topic requires it.
Ensure that the content is presented in bulleted points wherever appropriate.
Insert and highlight factual data, such as dates, names and places.
Remember to break up the content into smaller paragraphs. 100-120 words per paragraph should suffice.
Always conclude the essay with a closing paragraph.

Explore more essays on biology or other related fields at BYJU’S.

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Causes of global warming, explained

Human activity is driving climate change, including global temperature rise.

The average temperature of the Earth is rising at nearly twice the rate it was 50 years ago. This rapid warming trend cannot be explained by natural cycles alone, scientists have concluded. The only way to explain the pattern is to include the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted by humans.

Current levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in our atmosphere are higher than at any point over the past 800,000 years , and their ability to trap heat is changing our climate in multiple ways .

IPCC conclusions

To come to a scientific conclusion on climate change and what to do about it, the United Nations in 1988 formed a group called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , or IPCC. The IPCC meets every few years to review the latest scientific findings and write a report summarizing all that is known about global warming. Each report represents a consensus, or agreement, among hundreds of leading scientists.

One of the first things the IPCC concluded is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, buildings, factories, and power plants. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, or CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills, natural gas and petroleum industries, and agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals); nitrous oxide from fertilizers; gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes; and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2.

Gaseous abilities

Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can trap more heat than an equivalent amount of CO2. A molecule of methane doesn't hang around the atmosphere as long as a molecule of carbon dioxide will, but it is at least 84 times more potent over two decades. Nitrous oxide is 264 times more powerful than CO2.

Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs—which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer—have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their emissions are much lower than CO2 , none of these gases trap as much heat in the atmosphere as CO2 does.

When those gases that humans are adding to Earth's atmosphere trap heat, it’s called the "greenhouse effect." The gases let light through but then keep much of the heat that radiates from the surface from escaping back into space, like the glass walls of a greenhouse. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more dramatic the effect, and the more warming that happens.

Climate change continues

Despite global efforts to address climate change, including the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement , carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels continue to rise, hitting record levels in 2018 .

Many people think of global warming and climate change as synonyms, but scientists prefer to use “climate change” when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems. Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and and habitats, rising seas , and a range of other impacts.

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The U.S. ‘warming hole’—a climate anomaly explained

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What Is Climate Change?

Climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional and global climates. These changes have a broad range of observed effects that are synonymous with the term.

Changes observed in Earth’s climate since the mid-20th century are driven by human activities, particularly fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, raising Earth’s average surface temperature. Natural processes, which have been overwhelmed by human activities, can also contribute to climate change, including internal variability (e.g., cyclical ocean patterns like El Niño, La Niña and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and external forcings (e.g., volcanic activity, changes in the Sun’s energy output , variations in Earth’s orbit ).

Scientists use observations from the ground, air, and space, along with computer models , to monitor and study past, present, and future climate change. Climate data records provide evidence of climate change key indicators, such as global land and ocean temperature increases; rising sea levels; ice loss at Earth’s poles and in mountain glaciers; frequency and severity changes in extreme weather such as hurricanes, heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and precipitation; and cloud and vegetation cover changes.

“Climate change” and “global warming” are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. Similarly, the terms "weather" and "climate" are sometimes confused, though they refer to events with broadly different spatial- and timescales.

What Is Global Warming?

Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth’s surface observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere. This term is not interchangeable with the term "climate change."

Since the pre-industrial period, human activities are estimated to have increased Earth’s global average temperature by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), a number that is currently increasing by more than 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. The current warming trend is unequivocally the result of human activity since the 1950s and is proceeding at an unprecedented rate over millennia.

Weather vs. Climate

“If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” - Mark Twain

Weather refers to atmospheric conditions that occur locally over short periods of time—from minutes to hours or days. Familiar examples include rain, snow, clouds, winds, floods, or thunderstorms.

Climate, on the other hand, refers to the long-term (usually at least 30 years) regional or even global average of temperature, humidity, and rainfall patterns over seasons, years, or decades.

Find Out More: A Guide to NASA’s Global Climate Change Website

This website provides a high-level overview of some of the known causes, effects and indications of global climate change:

Evidence. Brief descriptions of some of the key scientific observations that our planet is undergoing abrupt climate change.

Causes. A concise discussion of the primary climate change causes on our planet.

Effects. A look at some of the likely future effects of climate change, including U.S. regional effects.

Vital Signs. Graphs and animated time series showing real-time climate change data, including atmospheric carbon dioxide, global temperature, sea ice extent, and ice sheet volume.

Earth Minute. This fun video series explains various Earth science topics, including some climate change topics.

Other NASA Resources

Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio. An extensive collection of animated climate change and Earth science visualizations.

Sea Level Change Portal. NASA's portal for an in-depth look at the science behind sea level change.

NASA’s Earth Observatory. Satellite imagery, feature articles and scientific information about our home planet, with a focus on Earth’s climate and environmental change.

Header image is of Apusiaajik Glacier, and was taken near Kulusuk, Greenland, on Aug. 26, 2018, during NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) field operations. Learn more here . Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Global Warming Definition, Causes, Effects, Impacts, Solutions

Global Warming is a long-term increase in average global temperature. Read about Global Warming Definition, Causes, Effects, Impact on Climate Change & Solutions for the UPSC exam.

Table of Contents

What is Global Warming?

Global Warming is a long-term increase in average global temperature. It is considered a natural phenomenon, but anthropogenic activities on earth, particularly post Industrial Revolution , have led to an increase in the rate of this temperature increase. Various Reports published by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have time and again highlighted that since 1850 human activities have led to an increase of about 1 degree Celsius in average global temperature. Most of this warming has taken place in the second half of the 20th century. The fact that 5 of the hottest recorded year have occurred since 2015 can help us better understand the calamitous impact of anthropogenic activities.

Global Warming Causes

Green House Gases also known as GHGs in the atmosphere trap the solar radiations that are reflected by the earth’s surface. Under normal circumstances, most of these radiations escape into outer space. However, the release of GHGs by anthropogenic activities has increased their concentration in the atmosphere. Thus, the earth is getting hotter and hotter.

Some of the common GHGs include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and water vapour, among others. The global warming potential of each GHG is different. For example, methane has a 25-time warming potential than carbon dioxide. Similarly, nitrous oxide has more than 250 times the warming potential than carbon dioxide. The top anthropogenic activities that are responsible for the release of GHGs are shown below.

Global Warming Definition, Causes, Effects, Impacts, Solutions_4.1

Global Warming and Green House Effect

Both phenomena are related to each other. Green House Gases also known as GHGs in the atmosphere trap the solar radiations that are reflected by the earth’s surface. Under normal circumstances, most of these radiations escape into outer space. However, the release of GHGs by anthropogenic activities has increased their concentration in the atmosphere. This is the primary cause of Global Warming .

Global Warming Effects

Increase in the average temperature of the earth.

According to IPCC reports, human-induced global warming is responsible for nearly 1 degree Celsius temperature rise vis a vis pre-industrial level. Data from NASA suggest that 2016 has been the hottest year on record.

Frequency of Extreme Weather Events is Increasing

Across the globe, extreme weather events have increased in occurrence. For example, forest fires in California have become an annual event. Also, it is increasing in frequency each year. Most recently, we have recorded the phenomena of heat waves in Antarctica. The intensity of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal region has increased. Similarly, the frequency of occurrence of El Niño and La Niña has reduced from once in 8–10 years to once in 3–4 years now. More frequent episodes of floods and drought are being recorded every year across the world.

Melting of Ice

According to IPCC, there is 10% less permafrost in North Hemisphere at present compared to the 1900s. Remote sensing data suggest Arctic ice is melting fast. Experts suggest that not only will the sea level rise with the melting of glaciers, but there is also a danger of new bacteria and viruses being released into the environment which has so far been trapped in ice sheets. This may lead to outbreaks of disease and pandemics which are beyond the control of human medical sciences.

Sea Level Rise and Acidification of Ocean

A report published by WMO, suggests that the rate of sea level rise has doubled for the period between 2013 and 2021 compared to the rate for the period between 1993 and 2002. Earth scientists are suggesting that if this phenomenon continues, many human-inhabited coastal areas will be submerged into the sea in the coming decades. Also, with the concentration of carbon dioxide rising in the atmosphere, oceans are absorbing more of it. This is leading to ocean acidification. The impact of this phenomenon can be disastrous for ocean biodiversity, particularly the coral reefs.

Adverse Impact on Terrestrial Ecosystems of the Earth

It has been recorded that many flora and fauna species are heading northwards in Northern Hemisphere. Significant changes have been observed in the migratory movements of birds across the world. Early arrival to their summer feeding and breeding grounds is quite evident. Expert biologists suggest that rising temperatures in the tropical and subtropical regions may lead to an outbreak of new diseases, which in turn may render many floral and faunal species extinct.

Social and Economic Impact

A rising number of extreme weather events will have an adverse impact on agriculture and fisheries. Rising global temperatures will have a negative impact on the productivity of human beings, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions of the earth. The impact on life and livelihoods of indigenous people across the world will be even more pronounced.

Global Warming Solutions

Global cooperation for reduction of emissions.

It is time that the target of containing the global average temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels is taken seriously. Also, global efforts should be based on a spirit of Common But Differentiated Responsibility. This will ensure that historical injustices done to the global south are duly acknowledged, and they have an equal chance to transform themselves into developed countries. Countries must act proactively to achieve Net Zero Emission status at the earliest.

Transition to Cleaner and Greener Forms of Energy

Thermal power plants based on coal should be made more efficient and inefficient ones should be phased off. Also, mass adoption of renewable forms of energy like solar should be promoted. Similarly, avenues for using hydrogen as energy fuel should be looked into. We must also explore the possibility of Nuclear fusion for energy generation, in addition to making nuclear fission-based energy generation safer.

Changes in Agricultural Practices and Land Use

Agriculture based on the use of nitrogenous fertilizers must be replaced with organic farming techniques. Also, methane gas released from agricultural and cattle waste must be trapped as biogas for domestic usage. Massive afforestation drives must be organized. Urban governments must make it a point to include green spaces in urban planning.

Improving Transportation System

The advent of E-vehicles is a welcome change, but we need to make the batteries used in these vehicles more efficient. Urban planners must make public transportation systems inherent as a benchmark of good urban planning. Also, urban planning should be such that it promotes more walking and cycling habits among the residents.

Behavioural Changes

All the above discussions will have no meaning if we as individuals are not sensitive enough. We need to make reducing, reusing and recycling a mantra of our living. It should be our civic duty to save water, and wildlife and raise awareness among others.

Solar Geoengineering

Solar geoengineering, a proposed climate intervention method, aims to counteract global warming by reflecting a portion of the sun’s rays back into space. One prominent approach involves injecting substances like sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to create reflective aerosols. These particles can scatter sunlight, reducing the Earth’s temperature. However, solar geoengineering is a topic of debate, with concerns about its side effects, such as disrupted weather patterns and potential geopolitical risks. Research in this field is ongoing, but it remains a theoretical concept with limited practical implementation.

Can Solar Geoengineering Halt Global Warming?

Solar geoengineering, specifically solar radiation management (SRM), is under scrutiny as a potential method to mitigate global warming. SRM involves reflecting sunlight away from Earth, often by injecting substances like sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to create reflective aerosols. However, its effectiveness remains a subject of debate, with concerns about potential side effects and ethical implications. While research in this field is ongoing, solar geoengineering is currently in a theoretical stage, with limited practical implementation.

Global Warming Conclusion

It is rightly said that “Charity begins at home.” Climate action will be more efficient if we go by this spirit. To begin with, each individual can make sure that what is happening in their house and immediate surroundings is in harmony with the environment. If this can happen, all the policies we are making at the local, national, regional and global levels will give far better results.

Global Warming UPSC

Each year, we read about rising global temperatures. Also, catching the headlines is the news related to disasters caused by events like cyclones, forest fires, floods and drought. All these phenomena can be attributed to one single cause which is global warming.

Global Warming is a long-term increase in average global temperature. It is considered a natural phenomenon, but anthropogenic activities on earth, particularly post-Industrial Revolution, have led to an increase in the rate of this temperature increase.

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Why is global warming a problem?

Global Warming at present rate can lead to disastrous impacts like rising sea level, out break of new diseases, extreme weather events among others.

What are 3 causes of global warming?

Human induced green house gas emission due to activities like agriculture, industrial emissions, transportation are the top 3 causes of global warming.

What are 5 effects of global warming?

Rising sea level, out break of new diseases, extreme weather events, changes in biodiversity and melting of glaciers are top 5 effects of global warming.

Why global warming is important?

Global warming at its natural rate is important to keep up the temperature of earth within the range that makes it habitable. This makes global warming important.

Can we control global warming?

Number of mitigation measures like shifting to cleaning forms of energy and transportation can be taken to control global warming.

Who help with global warming?

Global Warming is a collective challenge for entire humanity. Citizens, civil societies, governments and businesses must act in unison to address it.

I, Sakshi Gupta, am a content writer to empower students aiming for UPSC, PSC, and other competitive exams. My objective is to provide clear, concise, and informative content that caters to your exam preparation needs. I strive to make my content not only informative but also engaging, keeping you motivated throughout your journey!

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The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof

Definitive answers to the big questions.

Credit... Photo Illustration by Andrea D'Aquino

Supported by

By Julia Rosen

Ms. Rosen is a journalist with a Ph.D. in geology. Her research involved studying ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to understand past climate changes.

Published April 19, 2021 Updated Nov. 6, 2021

The science of climate change is more solid and widely agreed upon than you might think. But the scope of the topic, as well as rampant disinformation, can make it hard to separate fact from fiction. Here, we’ve done our best to present you with not only the most accurate scientific information, but also an explanation of how we know it.

How do we know climate change is really happening?

How much agreement is there among scientists about climate change, do we really only have 150 years of climate data how is that enough to tell us about centuries of change, how do we know climate change is caused by humans, since greenhouse gases occur naturally, how do we know they’re causing earth’s temperature to rise, why should we be worried that the planet has warmed 2°f since the 1800s, is climate change a part of the planet’s natural warming and cooling cycles, how do we know global warming is not because of the sun or volcanoes, how can winters and certain places be getting colder if the planet is warming, wildfires and bad weather have always happened. how do we know there’s a connection to climate change, how bad are the effects of climate change going to be, what will it cost to do something about climate change, versus doing nothing.

Climate change is often cast as a prediction made by complicated computer models. But the scientific basis for climate change is much broader, and models are actually only one part of it (and, for what it’s worth, they’re surprisingly accurate ).

For more than a century , scientists have understood the basic physics behind why greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause warming. These gases make up just a small fraction of the atmosphere but exert outsized control on Earth’s climate by trapping some of the planet’s heat before it escapes into space. This greenhouse effect is important: It’s why a planet so far from the sun has liquid water and life!

However, during the Industrial Revolution, people started burning coal and other fossil fuels to power factories, smelters and steam engines, which added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Ever since, human activities have been heating the planet.

We know this is true thanks to an overwhelming body of evidence that begins with temperature measurements taken at weather stations and on ships starting in the mid-1800s. Later, scientists began tracking surface temperatures with satellites and looking for clues about climate change in geologic records. Together, these data all tell the same story: Earth is getting hotter.

Average global temperatures have increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.2 degrees Celsius, since 1880, with the greatest changes happening in the late 20th century. Land areas have warmed more than the sea surface and the Arctic has warmed the most — by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit just since the 1960s. Temperature extremes have also shifted. In the United States, daily record highs now outnumber record lows two-to-one.

Where it was cooler or warmer in 2020 compared with the middle of the 20th century

This warming is unprecedented in recent geologic history. A famous illustration, first published in 1998 and often called the hockey-stick graph, shows how temperatures remained fairly flat for centuries (the shaft of the stick) before turning sharply upward (the blade). It’s based on data from tree rings, ice cores and other natural indicators. And the basic picture , which has withstood decades of scrutiny from climate scientists and contrarians alike, shows that Earth is hotter today than it’s been in at least 1,000 years, and probably much longer.

In fact, surface temperatures actually mask the true scale of climate change, because the ocean has absorbed 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases . Measurements collected over the last six decades by oceanographic expeditions and networks of floating instruments show that every layer of the ocean is warming up. According to one study , the ocean has absorbed as much heat between 1997 and 2015 as it did in the previous 130 years.

We also know that climate change is happening because we see the effects everywhere. Ice sheets and glaciers are shrinking while sea levels are rising. Arctic sea ice is disappearing. In the spring, snow melts sooner and plants flower earlier. Animals are moving to higher elevations and latitudes to find cooler conditions. And droughts, floods and wildfires have all gotten more extreme. Models predicted many of these changes, but observations show they are now coming to pass.

There’s no denying that scientists love a good, old-fashioned argument. But when it comes to climate change, there is virtually no debate: Numerous studies have found that more than 90 percent of scientists who study Earth’s climate agree that the planet is warming and that humans are the primary cause. Most major scientific bodies, from NASA to the World Meteorological Organization , endorse this view. That’s an astounding level of consensus given the contrarian, competitive nature of the scientific enterprise, where questions like what killed the dinosaurs remain bitterly contested .

Scientific agreement about climate change started to emerge in the late 1980s, when the influence of human-caused warming began to rise above natural climate variability. By 1991, two-thirds of earth and atmospheric scientists surveyed for an early consensus study said that they accepted the idea of anthropogenic global warming. And by 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a famously conservative body that periodically takes stock of the state of scientific knowledge, concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” Currently, more than 97 percent of publishing climate scientists agree on the existence and cause of climate change (as does nearly 60 percent of the general population of the United States).

So where did we get the idea that there’s still debate about climate change? A lot of it came from coordinated messaging campaigns by companies and politicians that opposed climate action. Many pushed the narrative that scientists still hadn’t made up their minds about climate change, even though that was misleading. Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, explained the rationale in an infamous 2002 memo to conservative lawmakers: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly,” he wrote. Questioning consensus remains a common talking point today, and the 97 percent figure has become something of a lightning rod .

To bolster the falsehood of lingering scientific doubt, some people have pointed to things like the Global Warming Petition Project, which urged the United States government to reject the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, an early international climate agreement. The petition proclaimed that climate change wasn’t happening, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be bad for humanity. Since 1998, more than 30,000 people with science degrees have signed it. However, nearly 90 percent of them studied something other than Earth, atmospheric or environmental science, and the signatories included just 39 climatologists. Most were engineers, doctors, and others whose training had little to do with the physics of the climate system.

A few well-known researchers remain opposed to the scientific consensus. Some, like Willie Soon, a researcher affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have ties to the fossil fuel industry . Others do not, but their assertions have not held up under the weight of evidence. At least one prominent skeptic, the physicist Richard Muller, changed his mind after reassessing historical temperature data as part of the Berkeley Earth project. His team’s findings essentially confirmed the results he had set out to investigate, and he came away firmly convinced that human activities were warming the planet. “Call me a converted skeptic,” he wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times in 2012.

Mr. Luntz, the Republican pollster, has also reversed his position on climate change and now advises politicians on how to motivate climate action.

A final note on uncertainty: Denialists often use it as evidence that climate science isn’t settled. However, in science, uncertainty doesn’t imply a lack of knowledge. Rather, it’s a measure of how well something is known. In the case of climate change, scientists have found a range of possible future changes in temperature, precipitation and other important variables — which will depend largely on how quickly we reduce emissions. But uncertainty does not undermine their confidence that climate change is real and that people are causing it.

Earth’s climate is inherently variable. Some years are hot and others are cold, some decades bring more hurricanes than others, some ancient droughts spanned the better part of centuries. Glacial cycles operate over many millenniums. So how can scientists look at data collected over a relatively short period of time and conclude that humans are warming the planet? The answer is that the instrumental temperature data that we have tells us a lot, but it’s not all we have to go on.

Historical records stretch back to the 1880s (and often before), when people began to regularly measure temperatures at weather stations and on ships as they traversed the world’s oceans. These data show a clear warming trend during the 20th century.

Global average temperature compared with the middle of the 20th century

+0.75°C

–0.25°

Some have questioned whether these records could be skewed, for instance, by the fact that a disproportionate number of weather stations are near cities, which tend to be hotter than surrounding areas as a result of the so-called urban heat island effect. However, researchers regularly correct for these potential biases when reconstructing global temperatures. In addition, warming is corroborated by independent data like satellite observations, which cover the whole planet, and other ways of measuring temperature changes.

Much has also been made of the small dips and pauses that punctuate the rising temperature trend of the last 150 years. But these are just the result of natural climate variability or other human activities that temporarily counteract greenhouse warming. For instance, in the mid-1900s, internal climate dynamics and light-blocking pollution from coal-fired power plants halted global warming for a few decades. (Eventually, rising greenhouse gases and pollution-control laws caused the planet to start heating up again.) Likewise, the so-called warming hiatus of the 2000s was partly a result of natural climate variability that allowed more heat to enter the ocean rather than warm the atmosphere. The years since have been the hottest on record .

Still, could the entire 20th century just be one big natural climate wiggle? To address that question, we can look at other kinds of data that give a longer perspective. Researchers have used geologic records like tree rings, ice cores, corals and sediments that preserve information about prehistoric climates to extend the climate record. The resulting picture of global temperature change is basically flat for centuries, then turns sharply upward over the last 150 years. It has been a target of climate denialists for decades. However, study after study has confirmed the results , which show that the planet hasn’t been this hot in at least 1,000 years, and probably longer.

Scientists have studied past climate changes to understand the factors that can cause the planet to warm or cool. The big ones are changes in solar energy, ocean circulation, volcanic activity and the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And they have each played a role at times.

For example, 300 years ago, a combination of reduced solar output and increased volcanic activity cooled parts of the planet enough that Londoners regularly ice skated on the Thames . About 12,000 years ago, major changes in Atlantic circulation plunged the Northern Hemisphere into a frigid state. And 56 million years ago, a giant burst of greenhouse gases, from volcanic activity or vast deposits of methane (or both), abruptly warmed the planet by at least 9 degrees Fahrenheit, scrambling the climate, choking the oceans and triggering mass extinctions.

In trying to determine the cause of current climate changes, scientists have looked at all of these factors . The first three have varied a bit over the last few centuries and they have quite likely had modest effects on climate , particularly before 1950. But they cannot account for the planet’s rapidly rising temperature, especially in the second half of the 20th century, when solar output actually declined and volcanic eruptions exerted a cooling effect.

That warming is best explained by rising greenhouse gas concentrations . Greenhouse gases have a powerful effect on climate (see the next question for why). And since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been adding more of them to the atmosphere, primarily by extracting and burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, which releases carbon dioxide.

Bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice show that, before about 1750, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was roughly 280 parts per million. It began to rise slowly and crossed the 300 p.p.m. threshold around 1900. CO2 levels then accelerated as cars and electricity became big parts of modern life, recently topping 420 p.p.m . The concentration of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. We’re now emitting carbon much faster than it was released 56 million years ago .

30 billion metric tons

Carbon dioxide emitted worldwide 1850-2017

Rest of world

Other developed

European Union

Developed economies

Other countries

United States

E.U. and U.K.

These rapid increases in greenhouse gases have caused the climate to warm abruptly. In fact, climate models suggest that greenhouse warming can explain virtually all of the temperature change since 1950. According to the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses published scientific literature, natural drivers and internal climate variability can only explain a small fraction of late-20th century warming.

Another study put it this way: The odds of current warming occurring without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are less than 1 in 100,000 .

But greenhouse gases aren’t the only climate-altering compounds people put into the air. Burning fossil fuels also produces particulate pollution that reflects sunlight and cools the planet. Scientists estimate that this pollution has masked up to half of the greenhouse warming we would have otherwise experienced.

Greenhouse gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide serve an important role in the climate. Without them, Earth would be far too cold to maintain liquid water and humans would not exist!

Here’s how it works: the planet’s temperature is basically a function of the energy the Earth absorbs from the sun (which heats it up) and the energy Earth emits to space as infrared radiation (which cools it down). Because of their molecular structure, greenhouse gases temporarily absorb some of that outgoing infrared radiation and then re-emit it in all directions, sending some of that energy back toward the surface and heating the planet . Scientists have understood this process since the 1850s .

Greenhouse gas concentrations have varied naturally in the past. Over millions of years, atmospheric CO2 levels have changed depending on how much of the gas volcanoes belched into the air and how much got removed through geologic processes. On time scales of hundreds to thousands of years, concentrations have changed as carbon has cycled between the ocean, soil and air.

Today, however, we are the ones causing CO2 levels to increase at an unprecedented pace by taking ancient carbon from geologic deposits of fossil fuels and putting it into the atmosphere when we burn them. Since 1750, carbon dioxide concentrations have increased by almost 50 percent. Methane and nitrous oxide, other important anthropogenic greenhouse gases that are released mainly by agricultural activities, have also spiked over the last 250 years.

We know based on the physics described above that this should cause the climate to warm. We also see certain telltale “fingerprints” of greenhouse warming. For example, nights are warming even faster than days because greenhouse gases don’t go away when the sun sets. And upper layers of the atmosphere have actually cooled, because more energy is being trapped by greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere.

We also know that we are the cause of rising greenhouse gas concentrations — and not just because we can measure the CO2 coming out of tailpipes and smokestacks. We can see it in the chemical signature of the carbon in CO2.

Carbon comes in three different masses: 12, 13 and 14. Things made of organic matter (including fossil fuels) tend to have relatively less carbon-13. Volcanoes tend to produce CO2 with relatively more carbon-13. And over the last century, the carbon in atmospheric CO2 has gotten lighter, pointing to an organic source.

We can tell it’s old organic matter by looking for carbon-14, which is radioactive and decays over time. Fossil fuels are too ancient to have any carbon-14 left in them, so if they were behind rising CO2 levels, you would expect the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere to drop, which is exactly what the data show .

It’s important to note that water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. However, it does not cause warming; instead it responds to it . That’s because warmer air holds more moisture, which creates a snowball effect in which human-caused warming allows the atmosphere to hold more water vapor and further amplifies climate change. This so-called feedback cycle has doubled the warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

A common source of confusion when it comes to climate change is the difference between weather and climate. Weather is the constantly changing set of meteorological conditions that we experience when we step outside, whereas climate is the long-term average of those conditions, usually calculated over a 30-year period. Or, as some say: Weather is your mood and climate is your personality.

So while 2 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t represent a big change in the weather, it’s a huge change in climate. As we’ve already seen, it’s enough to melt ice and raise sea levels, to shift rainfall patterns around the world and to reorganize ecosystems, sending animals scurrying toward cooler habitats and killing trees by the millions.

It’s also important to remember that two degrees represents the global average, and many parts of the world have already warmed by more than that. For example, land areas have warmed about twice as much as the sea surface. And the Arctic has warmed by about 5 degrees. That’s because the loss of snow and ice at high latitudes allows the ground to absorb more energy, causing additional heating on top of greenhouse warming.

Relatively small long-term changes in climate averages also shift extremes in significant ways. For instance, heat waves have always happened, but they have shattered records in recent years. In June of 2020, a town in Siberia registered temperatures of 100 degrees . And in Australia, meteorologists have added a new color to their weather maps to show areas where temperatures exceed 125 degrees. Rising sea levels have also increased the risk of flooding because of storm surges and high tides. These are the foreshocks of climate change.

And we are in for more changes in the future — up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit of average global warming by the end of the century, in the worst-case scenario . For reference, the difference in global average temperatures between now and the peak of the last ice age, when ice sheets covered large parts of North America and Europe, is about 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

Under the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Biden recently rejoined, countries have agreed to try to limit total warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, since preindustrial times. And even this narrow range has huge implications . According to scientific studies, the difference between 2.7 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit will very likely mean the difference between coral reefs hanging on or going extinct, and between summer sea ice persisting in the Arctic or disappearing completely. It will also determine how many millions of people suffer from water scarcity and crop failures, and how many are driven from their homes by rising seas. In other words, one degree Fahrenheit makes a world of difference.

Earth’s climate has always changed. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the entire planet froze . Fifty million years ago, alligators lived in what we now call the Arctic . And for the last 2.6 million years, the planet has cycled between ice ages when the planet was up to 11 degrees cooler and ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe, and milder interglacial periods like the one we’re in now.

Climate denialists often point to these natural climate changes as a way to cast doubt on the idea that humans are causing climate to change today. However, that argument rests on a logical fallacy. It’s like “seeing a murdered body and concluding that people have died of natural causes in the past, so the murder victim must also have died of natural causes,” a team of social scientists wrote in The Debunking Handbook , which explains the misinformation strategies behind many climate myths.

Indeed, we know that different mechanisms caused the climate to change in the past. Glacial cycles, for example, were triggered by periodic variations in Earth’s orbit , which take place over tens of thousands of years and change how solar energy gets distributed around the globe and across the seasons.

These orbital variations don’t affect the planet’s temperature much on their own. But they set off a cascade of other changes in the climate system; for instance, growing or melting vast Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and altering ocean circulation. These changes, in turn, affect climate by altering the amount of snow and ice, which reflect sunlight, and by changing greenhouse gas concentrations. This is actually part of how we know that greenhouse gases have the ability to significantly affect Earth’s temperature.

For at least the last 800,000 years , atmospheric CO2 concentrations oscillated between about 180 parts per million during ice ages and about 280 p.p.m. during warmer periods, as carbon moved between oceans, forests, soils and the atmosphere. These changes occurred in lock step with global temperatures, and are a major reason the entire planet warmed and cooled during glacial cycles, not just the frozen poles.

Today, however, CO2 levels have soared to 420 p.p.m. — the highest they’ve been in at least three million years . The concentration of CO2 is also increasing about 100 times faster than it did at the end of the last ice age. This suggests something else is going on, and we know what it is: Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases that are heating the planet now (see Question 5 for more details on how we know this, and Questions 4 and 8 for how we know that other natural forces aren’t to blame).

Over the next century or two, societies and ecosystems will experience the consequences of this climate change. But our emissions will have even more lasting geologic impacts: According to some studies, greenhouse gas levels may have already warmed the planet enough to delay the onset of the next glacial cycle for at least an additional 50,000 years.

The sun is the ultimate source of energy in Earth’s climate system, so it’s a natural candidate for causing climate change. And solar activity has certainly changed over time. We know from satellite measurements and other astronomical observations that the sun’s output changes on 11-year cycles. Geologic records and sunspot numbers, which astronomers have tracked for centuries, also show long-term variations in the sun’s activity, including some exceptionally quiet periods in the late 1600s and early 1800s.

We know that, from 1900 until the 1950s, solar irradiance increased. And studies suggest that this had a modest effect on early 20th century climate, explaining up to 10 percent of the warming that’s occurred since the late 1800s. However, in the second half of the century, when the most warming occurred, solar activity actually declined . This disparity is one of the main reasons we know that the sun is not the driving force behind climate change.

Another reason we know that solar activity hasn’t caused recent warming is that, if it had, all the layers of the atmosphere should be heating up. Instead, data show that the upper atmosphere has actually cooled in recent decades — a hallmark of greenhouse warming .

So how about volcanoes? Eruptions cool the planet by injecting ash and aerosol particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. We’ve observed this effect in the years following large eruptions. There are also some notable historical examples, like when Iceland’s Laki volcano erupted in 1783, causing widespread crop failures in Europe and beyond, and the “ year without a summer ,” which followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.

Since volcanoes mainly act as climate coolers, they can’t really explain recent warming. However, scientists say that they may also have contributed slightly to rising temperatures in the early 20th century. That’s because there were several large eruptions in the late 1800s that cooled the planet, followed by a few decades with no major volcanic events when warming caught up. During the second half of the 20th century, though, several big eruptions occurred as the planet was heating up fast. If anything, they temporarily masked some amount of human-caused warming.

The second way volcanoes can impact climate is by emitting carbon dioxide. This is important on time scales of millions of years — it’s what keeps the planet habitable (see Question 5 for more on the greenhouse effect). But by comparison to modern anthropogenic emissions, even big eruptions like Krakatoa and Mount St. Helens are just a drop in the bucket. After all, they last only a few hours or days, while we burn fossil fuels 24-7. Studies suggest that, today, volcanoes account for 1 to 2 percent of total CO2 emissions.

When a big snowstorm hits the United States, climate denialists can try to cite it as proof that climate change isn’t happening. In 2015, Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, famously lobbed a snowball in the Senate as he denounced climate science. But these events don’t actually disprove climate change.

While there have been some memorable storms in recent years, winters are actually warming across the world. In the United States, average temperatures in December, January and February have increased by about 2.5 degrees this century.

On the flip side, record cold days are becoming less common than record warm days. In the United States, record highs now outnumber record lows two-to-one . And ever-smaller areas of the country experience extremely cold winter temperatures . (The same trends are happening globally.)

So what’s with the blizzards? Weather always varies, so it’s no surprise that we still have severe winter storms even as average temperatures rise. However, some studies suggest that climate change may be to blame. One possibility is that rapid Arctic warming has affected atmospheric circulation, including the fast-flowing, high-altitude air that usually swirls over the North Pole (a.k.a. the Polar Vortex ). Some studies suggest that these changes are bringing more frigid temperatures to lower latitudes and causing weather systems to stall , allowing storms to produce more snowfall. This may explain what we’ve experienced in the U.S. over the past few decades, as well as a wintertime cooling trend in Siberia , although exactly how the Arctic affects global weather remains a topic of ongoing scientific debate .

Climate change may also explain the apparent paradox behind some of the other places on Earth that haven’t warmed much. For instance, a splotch of water in the North Atlantic has cooled in recent years, and scientists say they suspect that may be because ocean circulation is slowing as a result of freshwater streaming off a melting Greenland . If this circulation grinds almost to a halt, as it’s done in the geologic past, it would alter weather patterns around the world.

Not all cold weather stems from some counterintuitive consequence of climate change. But it’s a good reminder that Earth’s climate system is complex and chaotic, so the effects of human-caused changes will play out differently in different places. That’s why “global warming” is a bit of an oversimplification. Instead, some scientists have suggested that the phenomenon of human-caused climate change would more aptly be called “ global weirding .”

Extreme weather and natural disasters are part of life on Earth — just ask the dinosaurs. But there is good evidence that climate change has increased the frequency and severity of certain phenomena like heat waves, droughts and floods. Recent research has also allowed scientists to identify the influence of climate change on specific events.

Let’s start with heat waves . Studies show that stretches of abnormally high temperatures now happen about five times more often than they would without climate change, and they last longer, too. Climate models project that, by the 2040s, heat waves will be about 12 times more frequent. And that’s concerning since extreme heat often causes increased hospitalizations and deaths, particularly among older people and those with underlying health conditions. In the summer of 2003, for example, a heat wave caused an estimated 70,000 excess deaths across Europe. (Human-caused warming amplified the death toll .)

Climate change has also exacerbated droughts , primarily by increasing evaporation. Droughts occur naturally because of random climate variability and factors like whether El Niño or La Niña conditions prevail in the tropical Pacific. But some researchers have found evidence that greenhouse warming has been affecting droughts since even before the Dust Bowl . And it continues to do so today. According to one analysis , the drought that afflicted the American Southwest from 2000 to 2018 was almost 50 percent more severe because of climate change. It was the worst drought the region had experienced in more than 1,000 years.

Rising temperatures have also increased the intensity of heavy precipitation events and the flooding that often follows. For example, studies have found that, because warmer air holds more moisture, Hurricane Harvey, which struck Houston in 2017, dropped between 15 and 40 percent more rainfall than it would have without climate change.

It’s still unclear whether climate change is changing the overall frequency of hurricanes, but it is making them stronger . And warming appears to favor certain kinds of weather patterns, like the “ Midwest Water Hose ” events that caused devastating flooding across the Midwest in 2019 .

It’s important to remember that in most natural disasters, there are multiple factors at play. For instance, the 2019 Midwest floods occurred after a recent cold snap had frozen the ground solid, preventing the soil from absorbing rainwater and increasing runoff into the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. These waterways have also been reshaped by levees and other forms of river engineering, some of which failed in the floods.

Wildfires are another phenomenon with multiple causes. In many places, fire risk has increased because humans have aggressively fought natural fires and prevented Indigenous peoples from carrying out traditional burning practices. This has allowed fuel to accumulate that makes current fires worse .

However, climate change still plays a major role by heating and drying forests, turning them into tinderboxes. Studies show that warming is the driving factor behind the recent increases in wildfires; one analysis found that climate change is responsible for doubling the area burned across the American West between 1984 and 2015. And researchers say that warming will only make fires bigger and more dangerous in the future.

It depends on how aggressively we act to address climate change. If we continue with business as usual, by the end of the century, it will be too hot to go outside during heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia . Droughts will grip Central America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa. And many island nations and low-lying areas, from Texas to Bangladesh, will be overtaken by rising seas. Conversely, climate change could bring welcome warming and extended growing seasons to the upper Midwest , Canada, the Nordic countries and Russia . Farther north, however, the loss of snow, ice and permafrost will upend the traditions of Indigenous peoples and threaten infrastructure.

It’s complicated, but the underlying message is simple: unchecked climate change will likely exacerbate existing inequalities . At a national level, poorer countries will be hit hardest, even though they have historically emitted only a fraction of the greenhouse gases that cause warming. That’s because many less developed countries tend to be in tropical regions where additional warming will make the climate increasingly intolerable for humans and crops. These nations also often have greater vulnerabilities, like large coastal populations and people living in improvised housing that is easily damaged in storms. And they have fewer resources to adapt, which will require expensive measures like redesigning cities, engineering coastlines and changing how people grow food.

Already, between 1961 and 2000, climate change appears to have harmed the economies of the poorest countries while boosting the fortunes of the wealthiest nations that have done the most to cause the problem, making the global wealth gap 25 percent bigger than it would otherwise have been. Similarly, the Global Climate Risk Index found that lower income countries — like Myanmar, Haiti and Nepal — rank high on the list of nations most affected by extreme weather between 1999 and 2018. Climate change has also contributed to increased human migration, which is expected to increase significantly .

Even within wealthy countries, the poor and marginalized will suffer the most. People with more resources have greater buffers, like air-conditioners to keep their houses cool during dangerous heat waves, and the means to pay the resulting energy bills. They also have an easier time evacuating their homes before disasters, and recovering afterward. Lower income people have fewer of these advantages, and they are also more likely to live in hotter neighborhoods and work outdoors, where they face the brunt of climate change.

These inequalities will play out on an individual, community, and regional level. A 2017 analysis of the U.S. found that, under business as usual, the poorest one-third of counties, which are concentrated in the South, will experience damages totaling as much as 20 percent of gross domestic product, while others, mostly in the northern part of the country, will see modest economic gains. Solomon Hsiang, an economist at University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of the study, has said that climate change “may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”

Even the climate “winners” will not be immune from all climate impacts, though. Desirable locations will face an influx of migrants. And as the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, disasters in one place quickly ripple across our globalized economy. For instance, scientists expect climate change to increase the odds of multiple crop failures occurring at the same time in different places, throwing the world into a food crisis .

On top of that, warmer weather is aiding the spread of infectious diseases and the vectors that transmit them, like ticks and mosquitoes . Research has also identified troubling correlations between rising temperatures and increased interpersonal violence , and climate change is widely recognized as a “threat multiplier” that increases the odds of larger conflicts within and between countries. In other words, climate change will bring many changes that no amount of money can stop. What could help is taking action to limit warming.

One of the most common arguments against taking aggressive action to combat climate change is that doing so will kill jobs and cripple the economy. But this implies that there’s an alternative in which we pay nothing for climate change. And unfortunately, there isn’t. In reality, not tackling climate change will cost a lot , and cause enormous human suffering and ecological damage, while transitioning to a greener economy would benefit many people and ecosystems around the world.

Let’s start with how much it will cost to address climate change. To keep warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, society will have to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of this century. That will require significant investments in things like renewable energy, electric cars and charging infrastructure, not to mention efforts to adapt to hotter temperatures, rising sea-levels and other unavoidable effects of current climate changes. And we’ll have to make changes fast.

Estimates of the cost vary widely. One recent study found that keeping warming to 2 degrees Celsius would require a total investment of between $4 trillion and $60 trillion, with a median estimate of $16 trillion, while keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could cost between $10 trillion and $100 trillion, with a median estimate of $30 trillion. (For reference, the entire world economy was about $88 trillion in 2019.) Other studies have found that reaching net zero will require annual investments ranging from less than 1.5 percent of global gross domestic product to as much as 4 percent . That’s a lot, but within the range of historical energy investments in countries like the U.S.

Now, let’s consider the costs of unchecked climate change, which will fall hardest on the most vulnerable. These include damage to property and infrastructure from sea-level rise and extreme weather, death and sickness linked to natural disasters, pollution and infectious disease, reduced agricultural yields and lost labor productivity because of rising temperatures, decreased water availability and increased energy costs, and species extinction and habitat destruction. Dr. Hsiang, the U.C. Berkeley economist, describes it as “death by a thousand cuts.”

As a result, climate damages are hard to quantify. Moody’s Analytics estimates that even 2 degrees Celsius of warming will cost the world $69 trillion by 2100, and economists expect the toll to keep rising with the temperature. In a recent survey , economists estimated the cost would equal 5 percent of global G.D.P. at 3 degrees Celsius of warming (our trajectory under current policies) and 10 percent for 5 degrees Celsius. Other research indicates that, if current warming trends continue, global G.D.P. per capita will decrease between 7 percent and 23 percent by the end of the century — an economic blow equivalent to multiple coronavirus pandemics every year. And some fear these are vast underestimates .

Already, studies suggest that climate change has slashed incomes in the poorest countries by as much as 30 percent and reduced global agricultural productivity by 21 percent since 1961. Extreme weather events have also racked up a large bill. In 2020, in the United States alone, climate-related disasters like hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires caused nearly $100 billion in damages to businesses, property and infrastructure, compared to an average of $18 billion per year in the 1980s.

Given the steep price of inaction, many economists say that addressing climate change is a better deal . It’s like that old saying: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In this case, limiting warming will greatly reduce future damage and inequality caused by climate change. It will also produce so-called co-benefits, like saving one million lives every year by reducing air pollution, and millions more from eating healthier, climate-friendly diets. Some studies even find that meeting the Paris Agreement goals could create jobs and increase global G.D.P . And, of course, reining in climate change will spare many species and ecosystems upon which humans depend — and which many people believe to have their own innate value.

The challenge is that we need to reduce emissions now to avoid damages later, which requires big investments over the next few decades. And the longer we delay, the more we will pay to meet the Paris goals. One recent analysis found that reaching net-zero by 2050 would cost the U.S. almost twice as much if we waited until 2030 instead of acting now. But even if we miss the Paris target, the economics still make a strong case for climate action, because every additional degree of warming will cost us more — in dollars, and in lives.

Veronica Penney contributed reporting.

Illustration photographs by Esther Horvath, Max Whittaker, David Maurice Smith and Talia Herman for The New York Times; Esther Horvath/Alfred-Wegener-Institut

An earlier version of this article misidentified the authors of The Debunking Handbook. It was written by social scientists who study climate communication, not a team of climate scientists.

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Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other 2024 event that’s out of this world with our space and astronomy calendar .

Euclid, a European Space Agency telescope launched into space last summer, finally showed off what it’s capable of with a batch of breathtaking images and early science results.

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Is Pluto a planet? And what is a planet, anyway? Test your knowledge here .

The Effects of Climate Change

The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible for people alive today, and will worsen as long as humans add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

We already see effects scientists predicted, such as the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense heat waves.
Scientists predict global temperature increases from human-made greenhouse gases will continue. Severe weather damage will also increase and intensify.

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth’s climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change — modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. 1 The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.

Here are some of the expected effects of global climate change on the United States, according to the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports:

Future effects of global climate change in the United States:

U.S. Sea Level Likely to Rise 1 to 6.6 Feet by 2100

Global sea level has risen about 8 inches (0.2 meters) since reliable record-keeping began in 1880. By 2100, scientists project that it will rise at least another foot (0.3 meters), but possibly as high as 6.6 feet (2 meters) in a high-emissions scenario. Sea level is rising because of added water from melting land ice and the expansion of seawater as it warms. Image credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Sun shining brightly over misty mountains.

Climate Changes Will Continue Through This Century and Beyond

Global climate is projected to continue warming over this century and beyond. Image credit: Khagani Hasanov, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Hurricanes Will Become Stronger and More Intense

Scientists project that hurricane-associated storm intensity and rainfall rates will increase as the climate continues to warm. Image credit: NASA

More Droughts and Heat Waves

Droughts in the Southwest and heat waves (periods of abnormally hot weather lasting days to weeks) are projected to become more intense, and cold waves less intense and less frequent. Image credit: NOAA

Longer Wildfire Season

Warming temperatures have extended and intensified wildfire season in the West, where long-term drought in the region has heightened the risk of fires. Scientists estimate that human-caused climate change has already doubled the area of forest burned in recent decades. By around 2050, the amount of land consumed by wildfires in Western states is projected to further increase by two to six times. Even in traditionally rainy regions like the Southeast, wildfires are projected to increase by about 30%.

Changes in Precipitation Patterns

Climate change is having an uneven effect on precipitation (rain and snow) in the United States, with some locations experiencing increased precipitation and flooding, while others suffer from drought. On average, more winter and spring precipitation is projected for the northern United States, and less for the Southwest, over this century. Image credit: Marvin Nauman/FEMA

Frost-Free Season (and Growing Season) will Lengthen

The length of the frost-free season, and the corresponding growing season, has been increasing since the 1980s, with the largest increases occurring in the western United States. Across the United States, the growing season is projected to continue to lengthen, which will affect ecosystems and agriculture.

Heatmap showing scorching temperatures in U.S. West

Global Temperatures Will Continue to Rise

Summer of 2023 was Earth's hottest summer on record, 0.41 degrees Fahrenheit (F) (0.23 degrees Celsius (C)) warmer than any other summer in NASA’s record and 2.1 degrees F (1.2 C) warmer than the average summer between 1951 and 1980. Image credit: NASA

Arctic Is Very Likely to Become Ice-Free

Sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is expected to continue decreasing, and the Arctic Ocean will very likely become essentially ice-free in late summer if current projections hold. This change is expected to occur before mid-century.

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third 3 and Fourth 4 National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program .

Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity , which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.
Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.
Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region’s economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.
Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.
Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

1. IPCC 2021, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis , the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

2. IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

3. USGCRP 2014, Third Climate Assessment .

4. USGCRP 2017, Fourth Climate Assessment .

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A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

What’s the difference between climate change and global warming?

“Global warming” refers to the long-term warming of the planet. “Climate change” encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

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The sum of Earth's plants, on land and in the ocean, changes slightly from year to year as weather patterns shift.

Facts About Earth

Greenhouse Effect

Global warming describes the current rise in the average temperature of Earth’s air and oceans. Global warming is often described as the most recent example of climate change.

Earth Science, Meteorology, Geography

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Global warming describes the current rise in the average temperature of Earth’s air and oceans. Global warming is often described as the most recent example of climate change . Earth’s climate has changed many times. Our planet has gone through multiple ice ages , in which ice sheets and glaciers covered large portions of Earth. It has also gone through warm periods when temperatures were higher than they are today. Past changes in Earth’s temperature happened very slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years. However, the recent warming trend is happening much faster than it ever has. Natural cycles of warming and cooling are not enough to explain the amount of warming we have experienced in such a short time—only human activities can account for it. Scientists worry that the climate is changing faster than some living things can adapt to it. In 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme established a committee of climatologists , meteorologists , geographers , and other scientists from around the world. This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) includes thousands of scientists who review the most up-to-date research available related to global warming and climate change. The IPCC evaluates the risk of climate change caused by human activities. According to the IPCC’s most recent report (in 2007), Earth’s average surface temperatures have risen about 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.33 degrees Fahrenheit) during the past 100 years. The increase is greater in northern latitudes . The IPCC also found that land regions are warming faster than oceans. The IPCC states that most of the temperature increase since the mid-20th century is likely due to human activities. The Greenhouse Effect Human activities contribute to global warming by increasing the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect happens when certain gases—known as greenhouse gases —collect in Earth’s atmosphere . These gases, which occur naturally in the atmosphere, include carbon dioxide , methane , nitrogen oxide, and fluorinated gases sometimes known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Greenhouse gases let the sun’s light shine onto Earth’s surface, but they trap the heat that reflects back up into the atmosphere. In this way, they act like the insulating glass walls of a greenhouse. The greenhouse effect keeps Earth’s climate comfortable. Without it, surface temperatures would be cooler by about 33 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit), and many life forms would freeze . Since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s and early 1800s, people have been releasing large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That amount has skyrocketed in the past century. Greenhouse gas emissions increased 70 percent between 1970 and 2004. Emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, rose by about 80 percent during that time. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today far exceeds the natural range seen over the last 650,000 years. Most of the carbon dioxide that people put into the atmosphere comes from burning fossil fuels such as oil , coal , and natural gas . Cars, trucks, trains, and planes all burn fossil fuels. Many electric power plants also burn fossil fuels. Another way people release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is by cutting down forests . This happens for two reasons. Decaying plant material, including trees, releases tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Living trees absorb carbon dioxide. By diminishing the number of trees to absorb carbon dioxide, the gas remains in the atmosphere. Most methane in the atmosphere comes from livestock farming , landfills , and fossil fuel production such as coal mining and natural gas processing. Nitrous oxide comes from agricultural technology and fossil fuel burning. Fluorinated gases include chlorofluorocarbons, hydrochlorofluorocarbons , and hydrofluorocarbons. These greenhouse gases are used in aerosol cans and refrigeration. All of these human activities add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, trapping more heat than usual and contributing to global warming. Effects of Global Warming Even slight rises in average global temperatures can have huge effects. Perhaps the biggest, most obvious effect is that glaciers and ice caps melt faster than usual. The meltwater drains into the oceans, causing sea levels to rise and oceans to become less salty. Ice sheets and glaciers advance and retreat naturally. As Earth’s temperature has changed, the ice sheets have grown and shrunk, and sea levels have fallen and risen. Ancient corals found on land in Florida, Bermuda, and the Bahamas show that the sea level must have been five to six meters (16-20 feet) higher 130,000 years ago than it is today. Earth doesn’t need to become oven-hot to melt the glaciers. Northern summers were just three to five degrees Celsius (five to nine degrees Fahrenheit) warmer during the time of those ancient fossils than they are today. However, the speed at which global warming is taking place is unprecedented . The effects are unknown. Glaciers and ice caps cover about 10 percent of the world’s landmass today. They hold about 75 percent of the world’s fresh water. If all of this ice melted, sea levels would rise by about 70 meters (230 feet). The IPCC reported that the global sea level rose about 1.8 millimeters (0.07 inches) per year from 1961 to 1993, and 3.1 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year since 1993. Rising sea levels could flood coastal communities, displacing millions of people in areas such as Bangladesh, the Netherlands, and the U.S. state of Florida. Forced migration would impact not only those areas, but the regions to which the “ climate refugees ” flee . Millions more people in countries like Bolivia, Peru, and India depend on glacial meltwater for drinking, irrigation , and hydroelectric power . Rapid loss of these glaciers would devastate those countries. Glacial melt has already raised the global sea level slightly. However, scientists are discovering ways the sea level could increase even faster. For example, the melting of the Chacaltaya Glacier in Bolivia has exposed dark rocks beneath it. The rocks absorb heat from the sun, speeding up the melting process. Many scientists use the term “climate change” instead of “global warming.” This is because greenhouse gas emissions affect more than just temperature. Another effect involves changes in precipitation like rain and snow . Patterns in precipitation may change or become more extreme. Over the course of the 20th century, precipitation increased in eastern parts of North and South America, northern Europe, and northern and central Asia. However, it has decreased in parts of Africa, the Mediterranean, and parts of southern Asia. Future Changes Nobody can look into a crystal ball and predict the future with certainty. However, scientists can make estimates about future population growth, greenhouse gas emissions, and other factors that affect climate. They can enter those estimates into computer models to find out the most likely effects of global warming. The IPCC predicts that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase over the next few decades . As a result, they predict the average global temperature will increase by about 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. Even if we reduce greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions to their 2000 levels, we can still expect a warming of about 0.1 degree Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. The panel also predicts global warming will contribute to some serious changes in water supplies around the world. By the middle of the 21st century, the IPCC predicts, river runoff and water availability will most likely increase at high latitudes and in some tropical areas. However, many dry regions in the mid-latitudes and tropics will experience a decrease in water resources. As a result, millions of people may be exposed to water shortages . Water shortages decrease the amount of water available for drinking, electricity , and hygiene . Shortages also reduce water used for irrigation. Agricultural output would slow and food prices would climb. Consistent years of drought in the Great Plains of the United States and Canada would have this effect. IPCC data also suggest that the frequency of heat waves and extreme precipitation will increase. Weather patterns such as storms and tropical cyclones will become more intense. Storms themselves may be stronger, more frequent, and longer-lasting. They would be followed by stronger storm surges , the immediate rise in sea level following storms. Storm surges are particularly damaging to coastal areas because their effects (flooding, erosion , damage to buildings and crops) are lasting. What We Can Do Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is a critical step in slowing the global warming trend. Many governments around the world are working toward this goal. The biggest effort so far has been the Kyoto Protocol , which was adopted in 1997 and went into effect in 2005. By the end of 2009, 187 countries had signed and ratified the agreement. Under the protocol , 37 industrialized countries and the European Union have committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. There are several ways that governments, industries, and individuals can reduce greenhouse gases. We can improve energy efficiency in homes and businesses. We can improve the fuel efficiency of cars and other vehicles. We can also support development of alternative energy sources, such as solar power and biofuels , that don’t involve burning fossil fuels. Some scientists are working to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground, rather than let it go into the atmosphere. This process is called carbon sequestration . Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. Protecting existing forests and planting new ones can help balance greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Changes in farming practices could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, farms use large amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizers , which increase nitrogen oxide emissions from the soil. Reducing the use of these fertilizers would reduce the amount of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The way farmers handle animal manure can also have an effect on global warming. When manure is stored as liquid or slurry in ponds or tanks, it releases methane. When it dries as a solid, however, it does not. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is vitally important. However, the global temperature has already changed and will most likely continue to change for years to come. The IPCC suggests that people explore ways to adapt to global warming as well as try to slow or stop it. Some of the suggestions for adapting include:

Expanding water supplies through rain catchment , conservation , reuse, and desalination .
Adjusting crop locations, variety, and planting dates.
Building seawalls and storm surge barriers and creating marshes and wetlands as buffers against rising sea levels .
Creating heat-health action plans , boosting emergency medical services, and improving disease surveillance and control.
Diversifying tourism attractions, because existing attractions like ski resorts and coral reefs may disappear.
Planning for roads and rail lines to cope with warming and/or flooding.
Strengthening energy infrastructure , improving energy efficiency, and reducing dependence on single sources of energy.

Barking up the Wrong Tree Spruce bark beetles in the U.S. state of Alaska have had a population boom thanks to 20 years of warmer-than-average summers. The insects have managed to chew their way through 1.6 million hectares (four million acres) of spruce trees.

Disappearing Penguins Emperor penguins ( Aptenodytes forsteri ) made a showbiz splash in the 2005 film March of the Penguins . Sadly, their encore might include a disappearing act. In the 1970s, an abnormally long warm spell caused these Antarctic birds' population to drop by 50 percent. Some scientists worry that continued global warming will push the creatures to extinction by changing their habitat and food supply.

Shell Shock A sudden increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does more than change Earth's temperature. A lot of the carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into seawater. There, it forms carbonic acid in a process called ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is making it hard for some sea creatures to build shells and skeletal structures. This could alter the ecological balance in the oceans and cause problems for fishing and tourism industries.

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Human-caused global warming at all-time high, new report concludes

"Global temperatures are still heading in the wrong direction and faster than ever before."

Smoke is pushed up from the towers of a power plant at sunset.

Last year alone, human activities — such as burning coal for cheap power — led to our planet warming by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.34 Fahrenheit), according to a new report. If we continue pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at our current rate, scientists say we have about five years before we drive global warming beyond the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) set by the Paris Agreement.

Once again, the findings show that human-driven global warming continues to heat the planet — and that's even though climate action has somewhat slowed the overall rise in greenhouse gas emissions. "Global temperatures are still heading in the wrong direction and faster than ever before," Piers Forster , who is a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in the U.K., said in a statement provided by the university, whose scientists spearheaded the new report.

Related: Scientists are mapping Earth's rivers from space before climate change devastates our planet

Last year, from June through December, each month set a global heat record for its respective history. For example, July 2023 was the hottest July on a record that dates back to the late 1800s. Those extreme temperatures devastated many regions across the world, thawing Antarctic ice to unmatched lows and sparking the worst-ever wildfire season in Canada. The extreme heat was clearly driven by heat-trapping gases emitted when companies burn fossil fuels to generate power.

These record-shattering temperatures were further exacerbated by a recurring weather pattern known as El Niño , which is linked to warmer temperatures on average, although scientists say it has been strengthening over the past 60 years due to global warming. And, again, human activities are the primary driver of global warming — what we're seeing in terms of climate change, scientists have reiterated, is not a healthy and natural phenomenon for our planet.

A map showing the severity of temperatures in 2023.

"Last year, when observed temperature records were broken, these natural factors were temporarily adding around 10 percent to the long-term warming," Forster said in the news release. "The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding and heat waves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal."

Over the past decade, from 2014 to 2023, temperatures rose by 1.19 degrees Celsius (2.1 Fahrenheit) — an increase from the 1.14 degrees Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) seen from 2013 to 2022, according to the new report, which was published Tuesday (June 4) and overseen by over 50 scientists including Forster. A full version of the report can be viewed in the journal Earth System Science Data.

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The scientists say the past decade's global warming is also partly a side effect of reduced sulfur emissions from the commercial shipping industry, which, since 2020, has changed its fuel composition to limit sulfur in accordance with regulations from the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Those regulations aimed at — and were successful in — reducing air pollution from ships. That might sound like a positive, but not in all aspects. Sulfur is known to have a cooling effect on the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. So, the accelerated phaseout of sulfur in marine fuel starting 2020 meant fewer sulfur particles were in the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays.

Global warming due to this IMO regulation is equal to tacking on roughly two additional years of greenhouse gas emissions at current rates, which may not fundamentally change where the world is headed in terms of warming by 2050, but "it does make it more difficult to limit warming to 1.5C over the next few decades," Forster and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley Earth wrote in Carbon Brief last year.

The latest findings are also echoed in multiple reports issued this year. In February, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that, last year, average temperatures worldwide rose by 1.48 degrees Celsius, or 2.66 Fahrenheit, compared to the late 19th century — marking 2023 as the hottest total year on record. An analysis by scientists at NASA similarly concluded last year's global temperatures to be around 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16 Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial levels.

While every organization employs slightly different methods to arrive at these numbers, they all agree 2023 was our planet's hottest in a century and a half, and possibly in the past 2,000 years .

— NASA's twin spacecraft will go to the ends of the Earth to combat climate change

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— The summer of 2023 was Earth's hottest in 2,000 years, scientists find

"It's just so obvious we should do as much as possible, as soon as possible," Jan Esper, a climate scientist at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, had told reporters during a press briefing last month. "I am worried about global warming — it's one of the biggest threats out there."

This November, world leaders will gather for the United Nations climate conference COP29 in Azerbaijan for the latest round of negotiations aimed at capping the rise of global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur.

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Atlan0001 I have the answer. Just make mankind extinct and you'll make the Earth pristine. Or, just establish government population controls and total quality management and control of all human activities. As Will Durant, along with the Roman Cicero much earlier, and many others in between, have said, a million rules governing every human's every activity makes a savage adult child, 'The Lord of the Flies'. Total indoctrination of mankind . . . Oops, that is one those many, very many, bad descriptive words ("mankind") on its way to becoming forbidden speech! Total quality management. don't you know! Moving hard and fast to colonize and open the Space Frontier would be better than a Chinese "War of a thousand (million, billion, trillion..., zillion) cuts bleeding infrastructure and civilization to death!" Nothing but slaves and slave overseers don't build or keep civilizations! And a civilized intelligent and benign population is a more open systemic Frontiering population, NOT a more closed system prison world population. It was American revolutionary Patrick Henry who said, "Give me liberty or give me death!" It was Moses who said, "Let my people go!" It was the fanatical Utopians who paid the horrific price for not opening the system up to a more benign frontier of Exodus. SOONEST! Tyranny and the Apocalypse is an inward sucking avalanche that begins with the roll of one little pebble, then just one more little pebble, and one more, and ten more, and a hundred more little pebbles, and a thousand more, and a thousand-thousand-million more! Reply
Classical Motion I don't know about global warming, but the amount of fossil emissions is going to shoot up every year for at least 5 yrs. Big time. What the final CO2 levels are in ten years is anybody's guess. Just like what effect it will have on temp and sea level is anybody's guess. The atmosphere is a sea also that can hold lot's of water. Whether that sea will block more heat than it can blanket is another guess. And a watering will cause a greening, and that will have an effect. The land will hold more water. We will all see how much of these predictions and relationships come true. It does no good to worry about it. It can not be stopped. Reply
Unclear Engineer There is already backlash (or "greenlash") in European politics. For instance, see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nneg6252eo . There is too much political posturing and not enough engineering assessment. And sociological factors are being used divisively instead of positively. Too much that is impossible is being demanded, while what is possible is being ignored or hampered as not good enough. We are not going to stop sea level rise in our lifetimes, even if we could somehow stop emitting all CO2 today at close of business. We need to recognize that it is going to happen and prepare for it. We can use the costs and damages as arguments that things can get even worse, a lot worse, and can happen faster, a lot faster, if we don't change our ways. But, we can't expect people to do things that they cannot physically do or financially afford to do. And, using scare tactics by both "sides" of the politics is going to drive people to make very counter-productive disruptions in our efforts to change things. Reply
Atlan0001 It's ultimately a matter of physics and infinity cancelation, as I've said before. There will never be 'One World' until there are 'two worlds', the second the 'Frontier' (the 'New World' (new worlds, plural) offset from the 'Old World'. As we see of the "observable universe", seeing what looks to be "accelerating expansion", division will have its half -- in full! -- of the universe ('0' (null unity) and/or '1' (unity)) either to the outside (more benign) or ripping it out of the guts of unity to the inside (more malignant)! Knowledge of what people are doing or will do or not do is not involved concerning the many. It will be a matter, or an antimatter, of closed systemic negative energies' negative entropy! Everything that can possibly go wrong, will go wrong, no matter what! When it is the due time of beginning birthing, the baby cannot be suspended into perpetuity in the womb, doing anything at all first before exodus, before expansion, from the womb world. Just two examples of so many. Another example is that mankind, and life in general, is a combustion engine that cannot have the exhaust system (the frontier system) stoppered without reversing the exhaust (waste to some, NOT waste at all to others) into the engine (thus, the 'apocalypse' Stephen Hawking, among many others, have foreseen)! Then there is the tree of life, its rings, its softest portion to the inside, its hardest portions -- clear to the hardest and most brittle, bark -- to the frontier outside, being turned inside-out and outside-in, being reversed by nature from the normal natural order of things to the most abnormal, in the closed world system! Reply

Unclear Engineer said: There is already backlash (or "greenlash") in European politics. For instance, see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nneg6252eo . There is too much political posturing and not enough engineering assessment. And sociological factors are being used divisively instead of positively. Too much that is impossible is being demanded, while what is possible is being ignored or hampered as not good enough. We are not going to stop sea level rise in our lifetimes, even if we could somehow stop emitting all CO2 today at close of business. We need to recognize that it is going to happen and prepare for it. We can use the costs and damages as arguments that things can get even worse, a lot worse, and can happen faster, a lot faster, if we don't change our ways. But, we can't expect people to do things that they cannot physically do or financially afford to do. And, using scare tactics by both "sides" of the politics is going to drive people to make very counter-productive disruptions in our efforts to change things.

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What are the effects of global warming?

The effects of global warming will be far-reaching and often devastating, scientists have warned.

A woman looks at wildfires tearing through a forest in the region of Chefchaouen in northern Morocco on Aug. 15, 2021. One of the effects of global warming will be more heat waves in some areas, a risk factor for wildfires.

Temperature extremes
Extreme weather

Sea levels and ocean acidification

Plants and animals, social effects.

Further reading

Additional resources

Bibliography.

The effects of global warming can be seen and felt across the planet. Global warming , the gradual heating of Earth's surface, oceans and atmosphere, is caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels that pump carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Already, the consequences of global warming are measurable and visible.

"We can observe this happening in real time in many places," Josef Werne, a professor of geology and environmental science at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science. "Ice is melting in both polar ice caps and mountain glaciers. Lakes around the world, including Lake Superior, are warming rapidly — in some cases faster than the surrounding environment. Animals are changing migration patterns and plants are changing the dates of activity," such as trees budding their leaves earlier in the spring and dropping them later in the fall.

Here is an in-depth look at the ongoing effects of global warming.

Global warming increases average temperatures and temperature extremes

A graph of 2022 year-to-date anomalies compared to the ten warmest years on record

One of the most immediate and obvious consequences of global warming is the increase in temperatures around the world. The average global temperature has increased by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) over the past 100 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Since record keeping began in 1895, the hottest year on record worldwide was 2016, according to NOAA and NASA data . That year Earth's surface temperature was 1.78 degrees F (0.99 degrees C) warmer than the average across the entire 20th century. Before 2016, 2015 was the warmest year on record, globally. And before 2015? Yep, 2014. In fact, all 10 of the warmest years on record have occurred since 2005, which tied with 2013 as the 10th-warmest year on record, according to NOAA’s Global Climate Report 2021 . Rounding out the top 6 hottest years on record across the globe are (in order of hottest to not as hot): 2020, 2019, 2015, 2017 and 2021.

For the contiguous United States and Alaska, 2016 was the second-warmest year on record and the 20th consecutive year that the annual average surface temperature exceeded the 122-year average since record keeping began, according to NOAA . Shattered heat records in the U.S. are increasingly becoming the norm: June 2021, for example, saw the warmest temperatures on record for that month for 15.2%of the contiguous U.S. That's the largest extent of record warm temperatures ever recorded in the country, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information .

Global warming increases extreme weather events

Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm, reaches Florida, Sept. 26, 2022, as seen from the International Space Station.

As global average temperatures warm, weather patterns are changing. An immediate consequence of global warming is extreme weather.

These extremes come in a lot of different flavors. Paradoxically, one effect of climate change can be colder-than-normal winters in some areas.

Changes in climate can cause the polar jet stream — the boundary between the cold North Pole air and the warm equatorial air — to migrate south, bringing with it cold, Arctic air. This is why some states can have a sudden cold snap or colder-than-normal winter, even during the long-term trend of global warming, Werne explained.

Werne received his doctorate in Geological Sciences at Northwestern University in 2000 with an emphasis in Biogeochemistry. He was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research from 2000 to 2002 and on the faculty of the Large Lakes Observatory and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (assistant/associate professor) at the University of Minnesota Duluth, before joining the department in 2012. Werne spent a year in Perth, Australia, as a visiting senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Western Australia, as well as a visiting scientist in the Western Australia Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre at Curtin University.

"Climate is, by definition, the long-term average of weather, over many years. One cold (or warm) year or season has little to do with overall climate. It is when those cold (or warm) years become more and more regular that we start to recognize it as a change in climate rather than simply an anomalous year of weather," he said. Global warming is also changing other extreme weather. According to the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of NOAA , hurricanes are likely to become more intense, on average, in a warming world. Most computer models suggest that hurricane frequency will stay about the same (or even decrease), but those storms that do form will have the capacity to drop more rain due to the fact that warmer air holds more moisture.

"And even if they become less frequent globally, hurricanes could still become more frequent in some particular areas," said atmospheric scientist Adam Sobel, author of " Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future " (HarperWave, 2014). "Additionally, scientists are confident that hurricanes will become more intense due to climate change." This is because hurricanes get their energy from the temperature difference between the warm tropical ocean and the cold upper atmosphere. Global warming increases that temperature difference. "Since the most damage by far comes from the most intense hurricanes — such as typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 — this means that hurricanes could become overall more destructive," said Sobel, a Columbia University professor in the departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics. (Hurricanes are called typhoons in the western North Pacific, and they're called cyclones in the South Pacific and Indian oceans.) What's more, hurricanes of the future will be hitting shorelines that are already prone to flooding due to the sea-level rise caused by climate change. This means that any given storm will likely cause more damage than it would have in a world without global warming.

Lightning strikes light up the sky in Montevideo, Uruguay on Feb. 20, 2022.

Lightning is another weather feature that is being affected by global warming. According to a 2014 study , a 50% increase in the number of lightning strikes within the United States is expected by 2100 if global temperatures continue to rise. The researchers of the study found a 12% increase in lightning activity for every 1.8 degree F (1 degree C) of warming in the atmosphere. NOAA established the U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI) in 1996 to track extreme weather events. The number of extreme weather events that are among the most unusual in the historical record, according to the CEI, has been rising over the last four decades. Scientists project that extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts , blizzards and rainstorms will continue to occur more often and with greater intensity due to global warming, according to Climate Central . Climate models forecast that global warming will cause climate patterns worldwide to experience significant changes. These changes will likely include major shifts in wind patterns, annual precipitation and seasonal temperatures variations. These impacts vary by location and geography. For example, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) , the eastern United States has been trending wetter over time, while the West – and particularly the Southwest – have become increasingly dry. Because high levels of greenhouse gases are likely to remain in the atmosphere for many years, these changes are expected to last for several decades or longer, according to the EPA.

Global warming melts ice

In this aerial view, icebergs and meltwater are seen in front of the retreating Russell Glacier on Sept. 8, 2021 near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.

One of the primary manifestations of climate change so far is melt. North America, Europe and Asia have all seen a trend toward less snow cover between 1960 and 2015, according to 2016 research published in the journal Current Climate Change Reports. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, there is now 10% less permafrost , or permanently frozen ground, in the Northern Hemisphere than there was in the early 1900s. The thawing of permafrost can cause landslides and other sudden land collapses . It can also release long-buried microbes, as in a 2016 case when a cache of buried reindeer carcasses thawed and caused an outbreak of anthrax . One of the most dramatic effects of global warming is the reduction in Arctic sea ice. Sea ice hit record-low extents in both the fall and winter of 2015 and 2016, meaning that at the time when the ice is supposed to be at its peak, it was lagging. The melt means there is less thick sea ice that persists for multiple years. That means less heat is reflected back into the atmosphere by the shiny surface of the ice and more is absorbed by the comparatively darker ocean, creating a feedback loop that causes even more melt, according to NASA's Operation IceBridge . Glacial retreat, too, is an obvious effect of global warming. Only 25 glaciers bigger than 25 acres are now found in Montana's Glacier National Park, where about 150 glaciers were once found, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A similar trend is seen in glacial areas worldwide. According to a 2016 study in the journal Nature Geoscience, there is a 99% likelihood that this rapid retreat is due to human-caused climate change. Some glaciers retreated up to 15 times as much as they would have without global warming, those researchers found.

view of major bleaching on the coral reefs of the Society Islands on May 9, 2019 in Moorea, French Polynesia

In general, as ice melts, sea levels rise. According to a 2021 report by the World Meteorological Organization , the pace of sea level rise doubled from 0.08 inches (2.1 millimeters) per year between 1993 and 2002 to 0.17 inches (4.4 mm) per year between 2013 and 2021.

Melting polar ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, coupled with melting ice sheets and glaciers across Greenland, North America, South America, Europe and Asia, are expected to raise sea levels significantly. Global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1870, according to the EPA, and the rate of increase is expected to accelerate in the coming years. If current trends continue, many coastal areas, where roughly half of the Earth's human population lives, will be inundated.

Researchers project that by 2100, average sea levels will be 2.3 feet (.7 meters) higher in New York City, 2.9 feet (0.88 m) higher at Hampton Roads, Virginia, and 3.5 feet (1.06 m) higher at Galveston, Texas, the EPA reports. According to an IPCC report , if greenhouse gas emissions remain unchecked, global sea levels could rise by as much as 3 feet (0.9 meters) by 2100. That estimate is an increase from the estimated 0.9 to 2.7 feet (0.3 to 0.8 meters) that was predicted in the 2007 IPCC report for future sea-level rise.

Sea level isn't the only thing changing for the oceans due to global warming. As levels of CO2 increase, the oceans absorb some of that gas, which increases the acidity of seawater. Werne explains it this way: "When you dissolved CO2 in water, you get carbonic acid. This is the same exact thing that happens in cans of soda. When you pop the top on a can of Dr Pepper, the pH is 2 — quite acidic."

Since the Industrial Revolution began in the early 1700s, the acidity of the oceans has increased about 25 percent, according to the EPA. "This is a problem in the oceans, in large part, because many marine organisms make shells out of calcium carbonate (think corals, oysters), and their shells dissolve in acid solution," said Werne. "So as we add more and more CO2 to the ocean, it gets more and more acidic, dissolving more and more shells of sea creatures. It goes without saying that this is not good for their health."

If current ocean acidification trends continue, coral reefs are expected to become increasingly rare in areas where they are now common, including most U.S. waters, the EPA reports. In 2016 and 2017, portions of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia were hit with bleaching , a phenomenon in which coral eject their symbiotic algae. Bleaching is a sign of stress from too-warm waters, unbalanced pH or pollution ; coral can recover from bleaching, but back-to-back episodes make recovery less likely.

Caribou running through shallow water, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, USA

The effects of global warming on Earth's ecosystems are expected to be significant and widespread. Many species of plants and animals are already moving their range northward or to higher altitudes as a result of warming temperatures, according to a report from the National Academy of Sciences.

"They are not just moving north, they are moving from the equator toward the poles. They are quite simply following the range of comfortable temperatures, which is migrating to the poles as the global average temperature warms," Werne said. Ultimately, he said, this becomes a problem when the rate of climate change velocity (how fast a region changes put into a spatial term) is faster than the rate that many organisms can migrate. Because of this, many animals may not be able to compete in the new climate regime and may go extinct.

Additionally, migratory birds and insects are now arriving in their summer feeding and nesting grounds several days or weeks earlier than they did in the 20th century, according to the EPA.

Warmer temperatures will also expand the range of many disease-causing pathogens that were once confined to tropical and subtropical areas, killing off plant and animal species that formerly were protected from disease.

In addition, animals that live in the polar regions are facing an existential threat. In the Arctic, the decline in sea ice and changes in ice melt threaten particularly ice-dependent species, such as narwhals ( Monodon monoceros ), polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ) and walruses ( Odobenus rosmarus ), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) noted. Animals in the Antarctic also face serious challenges — in Oct. 2022 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) as endangered due to the threat of climate change.

A 2020 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that 1 in every 3 species of plant and animal are at risk of extinction by 2070 due to climate change.

A farmer inspects a field cracked due to drought on August 26, 2022 in Neijiang, Sichuan Province of China

As dramatic as the effects of climate change are expected to be on the natural world, the projected changes to human society may be even more devastating.

Agricultural systems will likely be dealt a crippling blow. Though growing seasons in some areas will expand, the combined impacts of drought, severe weather, lack of accumulated snowmelt, greater number and diversity of pests, lower groundwater tables and a loss of arable land could cause severe crop failures and livestock shortages worldwide.

North Carolina State University also notes that carbon dioxide is affecting plant growth. Though CO2 can increase the growth of plants, the plants may become less nutritious.

This loss of food security may, in turn, create havoc in international food markets and could spark famines, food riots, political instability and civil unrest worldwide, according to a number of analyses from sources as diverse as the U.S Department of Defense, the Center for American Progress and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In addition to less nutritious food, the effect of global warming on human health is also expected to be serious. The American Medical Association has reported an increase in mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever, as well as a rise in cases of chronic conditions like asthma, most likely as a direct result of global warming. The 2016 outbreak of Zika virus , a mosquito-borne illness, highlighted the dangers of climate change. The disease causes devastating birth defects in fetuses when pregnant women are infected, and climate change could make higher-latitude areas habitable for the mosquitoes that spread the disease, experts said. Longer, hotter summers could also lead to the spread of tick-borne illnesses .

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Yale Climate Connections

What’s the deal with terms like “greenhouse effect,” “global warming,” “climate change,” and “the climate emergency”?

How terms changed over time

Although the first mention of “global warming” was in a 1975 scientific study , throughout the 1980s, “greenhouse effect” was still more commonly used by the four newspapers we analyzed. It wasn’t until 1989 that “global warming” became the term of choice in these mainstream outlets, as illustrated in the graphic below.

By 2009, “climate change” had surpassed “global warming” in the four newspapers. This terminological transition was championed as early as 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences as a more accurate way to describe the phenomenon. It may also have reflected the increasingly politicized nature of climate issues, driven in part by the oil and gas industry’s intensive campaigning . A 2011 study demonstrated that using the term “climate change” rather than “global warming” at the time resulted in a 16% increase in Republicans endorsing the phenomenon as real.

Interestingly, it wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that Google searches for “climate change” outpaced those for “global warming,” as shown in the graphic below. This suggests that the media do not have an immediate, overwhelming effect on the terms used by the public. Indeed, it can take years for a new term to seep into public consciousness and be reflected in everyday language.

The sudden rise of “climate crisis”

The media is much quicker to adopt new terminology. In late 2018, “climate crisis” and related terms, including “climate emergency,” “climate catastrophe,” “climate apocalypse,” “climate breakdown,” and “planetary emergency,” suddenly appeared in the media. These emotive terms are qualitatively different from the phrases used since the 1980s. Why did they break through at that time?

Global activism likely contributed to this sharp rise. In August 2018, Greta Thunberg launched her Fridays for Future campaign. In the U.S., organizations such as the Sunrise Movement grabbed headlines through high-profile protests that drew sustained attention. They helped to frame the issue as an emergency requiring immediate action. As Thunberg said in her December 2018 COP24 speech, “We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.”

She was not alone in this view. In February 2019, climate journalist David Wallace-Wells penned an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled, “Time to Panic,” in which he argued that “climate change is a crisis precisely because it is a looming catastrophe that demands an aggressive global response, now.” Other journalists also embraced this perspective, especially in the U.K., where the Guardian changed its house style guide in May 2019 to favor terms like “climate crisis.”

This rapid evolution in newspaper language closely tracks expert discourse. In addition to global environmental movements, late 2018 saw the publication of a special U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that, for the first time, quantified the time we have left to act to avoid catastrophic damage. Scopus , a prominent database containing a diverse array of scientific studies, shows a year-on-year doubling between 2018 and 2019 in scholarship that used “climate crisis” and “climate emergency,” and then a quadrupling of such terms between 2019 and 2020.

The convergence of a push from activists and a shift in expert views turned awareness of what seemed to be distant consequences into a time-sensitive crisis. But that doesn’t mean that the public has adopted these terms as their own. Google searches for “climate change” still outpace those for “global warming” by a significant degree. As the graphic below shows, even when comparing the relatively less common “global warming” to “climate crisis,” there are strikingly few people searching for the more urgent term.

If the lag in general usage of “climate change” compared to “global warming” is any indication, we may simply have to wait a few more years for “climate crisis” and its analogues to become common search terms. Use of these more dire words will likely affect public perception of the issue and the resulting sentiment on climate policy. The question is how.

Climate communications scholars are divided on the impact. Some studies point to the use of terms like “crisis” and “emergency” leading to distrust of news sources. Other studies, however, find no impact of the terms on a person’s willingness to engage in climate action. Alternatively, framing climate concerns as an existential threat has also been shown to generate strong emotions that motivate people to act on behalf of the environment.

This is critical because by any tangible metric, the planet is indeed experiencing a climate crisis. Carbon dioxide levels are unprecedented in the modern era, dozens of species are going extinct every day, and damages from increasingly common weather disasters are rising. The 10 hottest years on record all occurred in the last decade.

In ancient Greek, a “crisis” meant a turning point — one that might spur people to action. By embracing the “climate crisis” in this spirit, we just might provide an impetus that leads us to a better future.

Erik Bleich is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College, where he directs the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project lab that uses data science techniques to analyze contemporary issues. Eli Richardson is a 2024 Middlebury College graduate who specializes in climate topics. Noah Rizika is a 2024 Middlebury College graduate with experience in conservation research and carbon footprint analysis. Both recent graduates are members of the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project lab.

Tom Toro is a cartoonist and writer who has published over 200 cartoons in The New Yorker since 2010.

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Rate of global warming caused by humans at an all-time high, say scientists

The second annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report, which is led by the University of Leeds, reveals that human-induced warming has risen to 1.19 °C over the past decade (2014-2023) -- an increase from the 1.14 °C seen in 2013-2022 (set out in last year's report).

Looking at 2023 in isolation, warming caused by human activity reached 1.3 °C. This is lower than the total amount of warming we experienced in 2023 (1.43 °C), indicating that natural climate variability, in particular El Niño, also played a role in 2023's record temperatures.

The analysis also shows that the remaining carbon budget -- how much carbon dioxide can be emitted before committing us to 1.5 °C of global warming -- is only around 200 gigatonnes (billion tonnes), around five years' worth of current emissions.

In 2020, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 °C was in the 300 to 900 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide range, with a central estimate of 500. Since then, CO 2 emissions and global warming have continued. At the start of 2024, the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 °C stood at 100 to 450 gigatonnes, with a central estimate of 200.

The Indicators of Global Climate Change Project is being coordinated by Professor Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. He said: "Our analysis shows that the level of global warming caused by human action has continued to increase over the past year, even though climate action has slowed the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Global temperatures are still heading in the wrong direction and faster than ever before.

"Our analysis is designed to track the long-term trends caused by human activities. Observed temperatures are a product of this long-term trend modulated by shorter-term natural variations. Last year, when observed temperature records were broken, these natural factors were temporarily adding around 10% to the long-term warming."

The warning comes as climate experts meet in Bonn to prepare the ground for the COP29 climate conference which takes place in November in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The authoritative source of scientific information on the state of the climate is the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but as its next major assessment will not happen until around 2027, this creates an "information gap," particularly when climate indicators are changing rapidly.

The new report is accompanied by an open data, open science platform -- the Climate Change Tracker's Indicators of Global Climate Change dashboard which provides easy access to updated information on the key climate indicators.

The latest Indicator report, which is published by more than 50 scientists in the journal Earth System Science Data, also provides new insight into the effects of reductions in sulphur emissions from the global shipping industry. The sulphur has a cooling effect on the climate by directly reflecting sunlight back to space and by helping more reflective clouds to form, but ongoing reductions in those emissions have lessened that effect.

Although this was offset last year by the aerosol emissions from the Canadian wildfires, the report says the longer-term trend nonetheless indicates that the amount of cooling we can expect from aerosol emissions is continuing to decline.

Other key findings:

Human-induced warming has risen to 1.19 °C over the past decade (2014-2023) -- an increase from the 1.14 °C seen in 2013-2022 (set out in last year's report).
Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching roughly 0.26 °C per decade over 2014-2023.
This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being consistently high, equivalent to 53 billion tonnes of CO 2 per year, as well as ongoing improvements in air quality, which are reducing the strength of human-caused cooling from particles in the atmosphere.
High GHG emission levels are also affecting the Earth's energy balance: ocean buoys and satellites are tracking unprecedented flows of heat into the Earth's oceans, ice caps, soils and atmosphere. This flow of heat is 50% higher than its long-term average.

Professor Forster added: "Fossil fuel emissions are around 70% of all GHG emissions and clearly the main driver of climate change, but other sources of pollution from cement production, farming and deforestation and cuts to the level of sulphur emissions are also contributing to warming.

"Rapidly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases towards net zero will limit the level of global warming we ultimately experience. At the same time, we need to build more resilient societies. The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding and heat waves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal."

It is hoped that the report will play a strong role in informing new Nationally Determined Contributions, the improved climate plans that every country in the world has promised to put forward to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by 2025 to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

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Materials provided by University of Leeds . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

Piers M. Forster et al. Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key1 indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence . Earth System Science Data (submitted) , 2024 [ abstract ]

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Plants and global warming: challenges and strategies for a warming world

Published: 02 January 2024
Volume 43 , article number 27 , ( 2024 )

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Pratyay Seth 1 &
Jose Sebastian ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1826-0308 1

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Key Message

In this review, we made an attempt to create a holistic picture of plant response to a rising temperature environment and its impact by covering all aspects from temperature perception to thermotolerance. This comprehensive account describing the molecular mechanisms orchestrating these responses and potential mitigation strategies will be helpful for understanding the impact of global warming on plant life.

Organisms need to constantly recalibrate development and physiology in response to changes in their environment. Climate change-associated global warming is amplifying the intensity and periodicity of these changes. Being sessile, plants are particularly vulnerable to variations happening around them. These changes can cause structural, metabolomic, and physiological perturbations, leading to alterations in the growth program and in extreme cases, plant death. In general, plants have a remarkable ability to respond to these challenges, supported by an elaborate mechanism to sense and respond to external changes. Once perceived, plants integrate these signals into the growth program so that their development and physiology can be modulated befittingly. This multifaceted signaling network, which helps plants to establish acclimation and survival responses enabled their extensive geographical distribution. Temperature is one of the key environmental variables that affect all aspects of plant life. Over the years, our knowledge of how plants perceive temperature and how they respond to heat stress has improved significantly. However, a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of the process still largely elusive. This review explores how an increase in the global surface temperature detrimentally affects plant survival and productivity and discusses current understanding of plant responses to high temperature (HT) and underlying mechanisms. We also highlighted potential resilience attributes that can be utilized to mitigate the impact of global warming.

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Plant Thermomorphogenic Adaptation to Global Warming

Roles of plant hormones in thermomorphogenesis

Climate change regulated abiotic stress mechanisms in plants: a comprehensive review

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the reviewers and the editor for their contribution in improving this manuscript.

This work was supported by the Ramalingaswami fellowship program, Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India to JS. PS is supported by a PhD fellowship from University grants commission (UGC), Government of India.

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Between 2014 and 2023, the rate of decadal global warming reached its highest level on record.

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The 2023 assessment documented the human-induced warming average for that year at 1.31 degrees Celsius compared to the period of 1850-1900.

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Global warming
Modern global warming is the result of an increase in magnitude of the so-called greenhouse effect, a warming of Earth's surface and lower atmosphere caused by the presence of water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, and other greenhouse gases. In 2014 the IPCC first reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and ...
Essay on Effects of Global Warming for Students
The Effect of Global Warming. The impact that global warming is causing on earth is extremely serious. There are many hazardous effects that will happen in the future if global warming continues. It includes melting of polar ice caps, leading to an increase in sea level drowning coastlines and slowly submerging continents.
Essay on Global Warming with Samples (150, 250, 500 Words
These effects will intensify in the coming years, effectively halting species expansion. Furthermore, humans will eventually feel the negative effects of Global Warming. Also Read: Concept of Sustainable Development. Sample Essays on Global Warming. Here are some sample essays on Global Warming: Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 - 150 ...
What are the effects of global warming?
What are the effects of global warming? One of the most concerning impacts of global warming is the effect warmer temperatures will have on Earth's polar regions and mountain glaciers. The Arctic ...
Global Warming
Global warming is the long-term warming of the planet's overall temperature. Though this warming trend has been going on for a long time, its pace has significantly increased in the last hundred years due to the burning of fossil fuels.As the human population has increased, so has the volume of . fossil fuels burned.. Fossil fuels include coal, oil, and natural gas, and burning them causes ...
Essay on Global Warming
Q.1 List the causes of Global Warming. A.1 There are various causes of global warming both natural and manmade. The natural one includes a greenhouse gas, volcanic eruption, methane gas and more. Next up, manmade causes are deforestation, mining, cattle rearing, fossil fuel burning and more.
Causes and Effects of Climate Change
Fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas - are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all ...
Global Warming Essay: Causes, Effects, and Prevention
A. One degree in temperature change may not seem like a lot, but that amount of global warming can cause major crises, displacing millions of people and causing billions of dollars in damage. B. It is a known fact that fossil fuel burning, particularly coal, is the biggest culprit of global warming (MacMillan, 2016).
Global Warming 101
A: Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO 2) and other air pollutants collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth's surface. Normally ...
What is global warming, facts and information
We often call the result global warming, but it is causing a set of changes to the Earth's climate, or long-term weather patterns, that varies from place to place. While many people think of ...
Causes
Takeaways Increasing Greenhouses Gases Are Warming the Planet Scientists attribute the global warming trend observed since the mid-20th century to the human expansion of the "greenhouse effect"1 — warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space. Life on Earth depends on energy coming from the Sun.
Effects of Global Warming Essay in English
This has caused increased flooding, drought, and extreme weather events. In addition, global warming has also caused a loss of biodiversity, as some species are unable to adapt to the changing climate. Global warming has become an increasingly important environmental issue in recent years. The effects of global warming are far-reaching and can ...
Climate Change
Climate change is the long-term alteration of temperature and typical weather patterns in a place. Climate change could refer to a particular location or the planet as a whole. Climate change may cause weather patterns to be less predictable. These unexpected weather patterns can make it difficult to maintain and grow crops in regions that rely ...
Global Warming Essay
A rise in global temperatures can lead to additional changes in the environment, such as rising sea levels. Since an increase in the temperature causes the glaciers and icebergs to melt at a rapid pace, it causes the sea levels to rise. On the Weather: Global Warming causes intense heat waves by significantly increasing the temperature which ...
Essay On Global Warming
Essay On Global Warming in 300 Words. Global warming is a phenomenon where the earth's average temperature rises due to increased amounts of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone trap the incoming radiation from the sun. This effect creates a natural "blanket", which prevents the heat from escaping ...
Causes and effects of global warming
global warming, Increase in the global average surface temperature resulting from enhancement of the greenhouse effect, primarily by air pollution.In 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast that by 2100 global average surface temperatures would increase 3.2-7.2 °F (1.8-4.0 °C), depending on a range of scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, and stated that it was ...
Causes of global warming, facts and information
Causes of global warming, explained. ... Read next: Global Warming Effects. Introducing Nat Geo Kids Book Bundle! Ages 7-12. GET OR GIVE NAT GEO KIDS. Related Topics. CLIMATE CHANGE;
What Is Climate Change?
Image credit: true. Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth's surface observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth's atmosphere. This term is not interchangeable with the term "climate change."
Global Warming Definition, Causes, Effects, Impacts, Solutions
Global Warming is a long-term increase in average global temperature. It is considered a natural phenomenon, but anthropogenic activities on earth, particularly post Industrial Revolution, have led to an increase in the rate of this temperature increase. Various Reports published by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have time and ...
The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof
Average global temperatures have increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.2 degrees Celsius, since 1880, with the greatest changes happening in the late 20th century. Land areas have warmed more ...
Effects
The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible for people alive today, and will worsen as long as humans add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. En español. Takeaways. We already see effects scientists predicted, such as the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense heat ...
Climate Change Assay: A Spark Of Change
Bahçeşehir College is committed to increasing students' awareness of the changing world we live in. This climate change essay competition saw many students submitting well thought out pieces of writing. These essays were marked on their format, creativity, organisation, clarity, unity/development of thought, and grammar/mechanics.
Climate change and ecosystems: threats, opportunities and solutions
Hoegh-Guldberg O et al. 2018 Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
Greenhouse Effect
greenhouse effect. phenomenon where gases allow sunlight to enter Earth's atmosphere but make it difficult for heat to escape. greenhouse gas. gas in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and ozone, that absorbs solar heat reflected by the surface of the Earth, warming the atmosphere.
Human-caused global warming at all-time high, new report concludes
Last year alone, human activities — such as burning coal for cheap power — led to our planet warming by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.34 Fahrenheit), according to a new report. If we continue pumping ...
What are the effects of global warming?
The effects of global warming can be seen and felt across the planet. Global warming, the gradual heating of Earth's surface, oceans and atmosphere, is caused by human activity, primarily the ...
What's the deal with terms like "greenhouse effect," "global warming
Almost two decades ago, Al Gore's 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" raised awareness of the problems associated with what was then commonly called "global warming." Although most people had moved away from referring to the heating of our planet as the "greenhouse effect," we were still a few years from adopting the term "climate change," a more accurate though less ...
Rate of global warming caused by humans at an all-time high, say
Date: June 4, 2024. Source: University of Leeds. Summary: Global warming caused by humans is advancing at 0.26 C per decade -- the highest rate since records began, according to new research by ...
Plants and global warming: challenges and strategies for a warming
The extreme vulnerability of agriculture to global warming and climate change is a major concern. For instance, even a moderate rise in ambient temperature can shorten the plant growth season and lower photosynthetic efficiency resulting in poor biomass accumulation and yield (Asseng et al. 2015; Ray et al. 2019 ).
Earth's Decade-Long Fever: Record-Breaking Global Temperatures ...
Between 2014 and 2023, the rate of decadal global warming reached its highest level on record. New research conducted by more than 50 prominent international scientists reveals that human-induced ...

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