global warming essay ending

Climate Change: Evidence and Causes: Update 2020 (2020)

Chapter: conclusion, c onclusion.

This document explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It discusses the evidence that the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of the recent change is almost certainly due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. Further climate change is inevitable; if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, future changes will substantially exceed those that have occurred so far. There remains a range of estimates of the magnitude and regional expression of future change, but increases in the extremes of climate that can adversely affect natural ecosystems and human activities and infrastructure are expected.

Citizens and governments can choose among several options (or a mixture of those options) in response to this information: they can change their pattern of energy production and usage in order to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and hence the magnitude of climate changes; they can wait for changes to occur and accept the losses, damage, and suffering that arise; they can adapt to actual and expected changes as much as possible; or they can seek as yet unproven “geoengineering” solutions to counteract some of the climate changes that would otherwise occur. Each of these options has risks, attractions and costs, and what is actually done may be a mixture of these different options. Different nations and communities will vary in their vulnerability and their capacity to adapt. There is an important debate to be had about choices among these options, to decide what is best for each group or nation, and most importantly for the global population as a whole. The options have to be discussed at a global scale because in many cases those communities that are most vulnerable control few of the emissions, either past or future. Our description of the science of climate change, with both its facts and its uncertainties, is offered as a basis to inform that policy debate.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following individuals served as the primary writing team for the 2014 and 2020 editions of this document:

• Eric Wolff FRS, (UK lead), University of Cambridge
• Inez Fung (NAS, US lead), University of California, Berkeley
• Brian Hoskins FRS, Grantham Institute for Climate Change
• John F.B. Mitchell FRS, UK Met Office
• Tim Palmer FRS, University of Oxford
• Benjamin Santer (NAS), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• John Shepherd FRS, University of Southampton
• Keith Shine FRS, University of Reading.
• Susan Solomon (NAS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Walsh, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
• Don Wuebbles, University of Illinois

Staff support for the 2020 revision was provided by Richard Walker, Amanda Purcell, Nancy Huddleston, and Michael Hudson. We offer special thanks to Rebecca Lindsey and NOAA Climate.gov for providing data and figure updates.

The following individuals served as reviewers of the 2014 document in accordance with procedures approved by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences:

• Richard Alley (NAS), Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University
• Alec Broers FRS, Former President of the Royal Academy of Engineering
• Harry Elderfield FRS, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
• Joanna Haigh FRS, Professor of Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London
• Isaac Held (NAS), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
• John Kutzbach (NAS), Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin
• Jerry Meehl, Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London
• John Pyle FRS, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
• Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey
• Gabrielle Walker, Journalist
• Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia

The Support for the 2014 Edition was provided by NAS Endowment Funds. We offer sincere thanks to the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Endowment for NAS Missions for supporting the production of this 2020 Edition.

F OR FURTHER READING

For more detailed discussion of the topics addressed in this document (including references to the underlying original research), see:

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019: Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate [ https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc ]
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2019: Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259 ]
• Royal Society, 2018: Greenhouse gas removal [ https://raeng.org.uk/greenhousegasremoval ]
• U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), 2018: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States [ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov ]
• IPCC, 2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C [ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 ]
• USGCRP, 2017: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume I: Climate Science Special Reports [ https://science2017.globalchange.gov ]
• NASEM, 2016: Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21852 ]
• IPCC, 2013: Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group 1. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 ]
• NRC, 2013: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373 ]
• NRC, 2011: Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12877 ]
• Royal Society 2010: Climate Change: A Summary of the Science [ https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2010/climate-change-summary-science ]
• NRC, 2010: America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12782 ]

Much of the original data underlying the scientific findings discussed here are available at:

• https://data.ucar.edu/
• https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu
• https://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu
• https://ess-dive.lbl.gov/
• https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
• https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
• http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu
• http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth's climate. The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, with their similar missions to promote the use of science to benefit society and to inform critical policy debates, produced the original Climate Change: Evidence and Causes in 2014. It was written and reviewed by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists. This new edition, prepared by the same author team, has been updated with the most recent climate data and scientific analyses, all of which reinforce our understanding of human-caused climate change.

Scientific information is a vital component for society to make informed decisions about how to reduce the magnitude of climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. This booklet serves as a key reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and others seeking authoritative answers about the current state of climate-change science.

READ FREE ONLINE

Welcome to OpenBook!

You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

Show this book's table of contents , where you can jump to any chapter by name.

...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter .

Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

View our suggested citation for this chapter.

Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

Get Email Updates

Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free ? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released.

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

A newer edition of this book is available.

• < Previous chapter

10 (page 173) p. 173 Conclusion

• Published: November 2008
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

The ‘Conclusion’ confirms that global warming is the major challenge for our global society. There is very little doubt that global warming will change our climate in the next century. So what are the solutions to global warming? First, there must be an international political solution. Second, funding for developing cheap and clean energy production must be increased, as all economic development is based on increasing energy usage. We must not pin all our hopes on global politics and clean energy technology, so we must prepare for the worst and adapt. If implemented now, a lot of the costs and damage that could be caused by changing climate can be mitigated.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• Google Scholar Indexing
• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

• Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

Essay on Global Warming

• Updated on  
• Nov 23, 2023

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.

This Blog Includes:

Short essay on global warming and climate change, what are the causes of global warming, solutions for global warming, effects of global warming, essay on global warming paragraph in 100 – 150 words, essay on global warming in 250 words, essay on global warming in 500 words, essay on global warming upsc, climate change and global warming essay, tips to write an essay.

Also Read: Essay on Labour Day

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.

Also Read: World Population Day

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.

Also Read: What is a Natural Disaster?

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

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.

Also Read: Essay on Pollution

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:

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.

Also Read: Social Forestry

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.

Also Read: Types of Water Pollution

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.  

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. 

Also Read: Essay on Disaster Management

One good action in a day is to combat the heat.

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. 

Also Read: Essay on Air Pollution

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  

Relevant Blogs

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.

We hope this blog gave you an idea about how to write and present an essay on global warming that puts forth your opinions. The skill of writing an essay comes in handy when appearing for standardized language tests . Thinking of taking one soon? Leverage Edu provides the best online test prep for the same via Leverage Live . Register today to know more!

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.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

This was really a good essay on global warming… There has been used many unic words..and I really liked it!!!Seriously I had been looking for a essay about Global warming just like this…

Thank you for the comment!

I want to learn how to write essay writing so I joined this page.This page is very useful for everyone.

Hi, we are glad that we could help you to write essays. We have a beginner’s guide to write essays ( https://leverageedu.com/blog/essay-writing/ ) and we think this might help you.

It is not good , to have global warming in our earth .So we all have to afforestation program on all the world.

thank you so much

Very educative , helpful and it is really going to strength my English knowledge to structure my essay in future

Thank you for the comment, please follow our newsletter to get more insights on studying abroad and exams!

Global warming is the increase in 𝓽𝓱𝓮 ᴀᴠᴇʀᴀɢᴇ ᴛᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴀᴛᴜʀᴇs ᴏғ ᴇᴀʀᴛʜ🌎 ᴀᴛᴍᴏsᴘʜᴇʀᴇ

Leaving already?

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Grab this one-time opportunity to download this ebook

Connect With Us

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

September 2024

January 2025

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

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.

Get English Important Questions here

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.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

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.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

The importance of storytelling in fighting climate change

In a webinar on April 19, we'll explore how climate organizations are currently using storytelling in their work, the impacts of these stories, and lessons learned from other movements.

Knowledge is power

Stay in the know about climate impacts and solutions. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

Yale Climate Connections

Scientists agree: Climate change is real and caused by people

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)

[Leer en español aquí]

The scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that it is human-caused is strong. Scientific investigation of global warming began in the 19th century , and by the early 2000s, this research began to coalesce into confidence about the reality, causes, and general range of adverse effects of global warming. This conclusion was drawn from studying air and ocean temperatures, the atmosphere’s composition, satellite records, ice cores, modeling, and more.

In 1988 the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, to provide regular updates on the scientific evidence on global warming. In a 2013 report , the IPCC concluded that scientific evidence of warming is “unequivocal” and that the largest cause is an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of humans burning fossil fuels. The IPCC continues to assess this science, periodically issuing new reports.

Climate change is real and caused by humans

The IPCC is not the only scientific group that has reached a clear consensus on the scientific evidence of human-caused global warming. As this NASA page points out, 200 global scientific organizations, 11 international science academies, and 18 American science associations have released statements in alignment with this consensus.

Amanda Staudt is the senior director for climate, atmospheric and polar sciences at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, where she has worked since 2001. The Academies, she said, first began studying climate change in 1979, researching how much warming would likely happen if the amount of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were doubled.

Four decades later, those findings have held up and have been strengthened based on scores of continued studies and analysis. “The remarkable thing about that study,” she said, “is that they basically got the right answer” from the start. This 1979 study by the National Research Council, Staudt said, led to investment in climate science in the U.S. 

Though this consensus has been thoroughly established, scientific research and new findings continue. Staudt said countless attempted rebuttals of climate science findings have been researched and disproved.

“We did a lot of studies in that time period, looking at those questions,” she said, ”and one by one, putting them to bed and convincing ourselves over and over again, that humans were affecting climate, and that we could document that effect.”

At the National Academies, reaching consensus requires open sessions and dialogue with scientists and agreement from committees, which typically consist of 12-15 experts. Their draft reports go through peer review, and reviewers’ concerns are resolved before publication is approved. The goal is for the complex science of climate change to become as thoroughly researched and substantiated as possible.

“One of the things I think about scientists is that we’re all inherently skeptics at some level,” Staudt said. “That’s what drives us to science, that we have questions about the world around us. And we want to prove that for ourselves.”

Scientists consistently reaffirm evidence that climate change is happening

Climate scientists worldwide go through similar processes before their findings are published. And their research papers, too, show a strong consensus about global warming. As NASA states on its website , “Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” (By sound practice, scientists resist saying science is for all times “certain” or that its findings are “final,” and the “extremely likely” language respects that practice.)

One of the studies about the consensus was led by John Cook, a fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Cook and colleagues reviewed nearly 12,000 scientific papers to examine how aligned published research is on major findings on climate change. That study found that 97 percent of scholarly papers that take a position on climate change do endorse the consensus. The papers that rejected the consensus position contained errors, according to subsequent research .

In reviewing the papers, Cook has said he and his colleagues found the consensus to have been so widely accepted by 2013 that many researchers by then no longer felt a need to mention or reaffirm it in their research papers.

Also see: Causes of global warming: How scientists know that humans are responsible

Samantha Harrington

Samantha Harrington, director of audience experience for Yale Climate Connections, is a journalist and graphic designer with a background in digital media and entrepreneurship. Sam is especially interested... More by Samantha Harrington

• Share full article

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.

Back to top .

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.

How we handle corrections

What’s Up in Space and Astronomy

Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe..

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 .

Scientists may have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, a mysterious cosmic force . That could be good news for the fate of the universe.

A new set of computer simulations, which take into account the effects of stars moving past our solar system, has effectively made it harder to predict Earth’s future and reconstruct its past.

Dante Lauretta, the planetary scientist who led the OSIRIS-REx mission to retrieve a handful of space dust , discusses his next final frontier.

A nova named T Coronae Borealis lit up the night about 80 years ago. Astronomers say it’s expected to put on another show  in the coming months.

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

Advertisement

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

• While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history , the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.
• According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ), "Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact." 1
• Scientific information taken from natural sources (such as ice cores, rocks, and tree rings) and from modern equipment (like satellites and instruments) all show the signs of a changing climate.
• From global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds.

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

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

The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia. 1 It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

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

Scientists demonstrated the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases in the mid-19th century. 2 Many of the science instruments NASA uses to study our climate focus on how these gases affect the movement of infrared radiation through the atmosphere. From the measured impacts of increases in these gases, there is no question that increased greenhouse gas levels warm Earth in response.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of warming after an ice age. Carbon dioxide from human activities is increasing about 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age. 3

The Evidence for Rapid Climate Change Is Compelling:

Global Temperature Is Rising

The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and other human activities. 4 Most of the warming occurred in the past 40 years, with the seven most recent years being the warmest. The years 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year on record. 5 Image credit: Ashwin Kumar, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

The Ocean Is Getting Warmer

The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 100 meters (about 328 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.67 degrees Fahrenheit (0.33 degrees Celsius) since 1969. 6 Earth stores 90% of the extra energy in the ocean. Image credit: Kelsey Roberts/USGS

The Ice Sheets Are Shrinking

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost an average of 279 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2019, while Antarctica lost about 148 billion tons of ice per year. 7 Image: The Antarctic Peninsula, Credit: NASA

Glaciers Are Retreating

Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska, and Africa. 8 Image: Miles Glacier, Alaska Image credit: NASA

Snow Cover Is Decreasing

Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and the snow is melting earlier. 9 Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sea Level Is Rising

Global sea level rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century and accelerating slightly every year. 10 Image credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Norfolk District

Arctic Sea Ice Is Declining

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. 11 Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Extreme Events Are Increasing in Frequency

The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events. 12 Image credit: Régine Fabri,  CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Ocean Acidification Is Increasing

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30%. 13 , 14 This increase is due to humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the ocean. The ocean has absorbed between 20% and 30% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades (7.2 to 10.8 billion metric tons per year). 1 5 , 16 Image credit: NOAA

1. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, WGI, Technical Summary . B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere.” Nature 382 (04 July 1996): 39-46. https://doi.org/10.1038/382039a0. Gabriele C. Hegerl et al., “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method.” Journal of Climate 9 (October 1996): 2281-2306. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(1996)009<2281:DGGICC>2.0.CO;2. V. Ramaswamy, et al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling.” Science 311 (24 February 2006): 1138-1141. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1122587. B.D. Santer et al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes.” Science 301 (25 July 2003): 479-483. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1084123. T. Westerhold et al., "An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years." Science 369 (11 Sept. 2020): 1383-1387. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1094123

2. In 1824, Joseph Fourier calculated that an Earth-sized planet, at our distance from the Sun, ought to be much colder. He suggested something in the atmosphere must be acting like an insulating blanket. In 1856, Eunice Foote discovered that blanket, showing that carbon dioxide and water vapor in Earth's atmosphere trap escaping infrared (heat) radiation. In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming. In 1941, Milutin Milankovic linked ice ages to Earth’s orbital characteristics. Gilbert Plass formulated the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change in 1956.

3. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, WG1, Chapter 2 Vostok ice core data; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record O. Gaffney, W. Steffen, "The Anthropocene Equation." The Anthropocene Review 4, issue 1 (April 2017): 53-61. https://doi.org/abs/10.1177/2053019616688022.

4. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/monitoring https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

5. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20170118/

6. S. Levitus, J. Antonov, T. Boyer, O Baranova, H. Garcia, R. Locarnini, A. Mishonov, J. Reagan, D. Seidov, E. Yarosh, M. Zweng, " NCEI ocean heat content, temperature anomalies, salinity anomalies, thermosteric sea level anomalies, halosteric sea level anomalies, and total steric sea level anomalies from 1955 to present calculated from in situ oceanographic subsurface profile data (NCEI Accession 0164586), Version 4.4. (2017) NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index3.html K. von Schuckmann, L. Cheng, L,. D. Palmer, J. Hansen, C. Tassone, V. Aich, S. Adusumilli, H. Beltrami, H., T. Boyer, F. Cuesta-Valero, D. Desbruyeres, C. Domingues, A. Garcia-Garcia, P. Gentine, J. Gilson, M. Gorfer, L. Haimberger, M. Ishii, M., G. Johnson, R. Killick, B. King, G. Kirchengast, N. Kolodziejczyk, J. Lyman, B. Marzeion, M. Mayer, M. Monier, D. Monselesan, S. Purkey, D. Roemmich, A. Schweiger, S. Seneviratne, A. Shepherd, D. Slater, A. Steiner, F. Straneo, M.L. Timmermans, S. Wijffels. "Heat stored in the Earth system: where does the energy go?" Earth System Science Data 12, Issue 3 (07 September 2020): 2013-2041. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2013-2020.

7. I. Velicogna, Yara Mohajerani, A. Geruo, F. Landerer, J. Mouginot, B. Noel, E. Rignot, T. Sutterly, M. van den Broeke, M. Wessem, D. Wiese, "Continuity of Ice Sheet Mass Loss in Greenland and Antarctica From the GRACE and GRACE Follow-On Missions." Geophysical Research Letters 47, Issue 8 (28 April 2020): e2020GL087291. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL087291.

8. National Snow and Ice Data Center World Glacier Monitoring Service

9. National Snow and Ice Data Center D.A. Robinson, D. K. Hall, and T. L. Mote, "MEaSUREs Northern Hemisphere Terrestrial Snow Cover Extent Daily 25km EASE-Grid 2.0, Version 1 (2017). Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. doi: https://doi.org/10.5067/MEASURES/CRYOSPHERE/nsidc-0530.001 . http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. Data History

10. R.S. Nerem, B.D. Beckley, J. T. Fasullo, B.D. Hamlington, D. Masters, and G.T. Mitchum, "Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era." PNAS 15, no. 9 (12 Feb. 2018): 2022-2025. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717312115.

11. https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_ice.html Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) http://psc.apl.washington.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/ http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/projections-of-an-ice-diminished-arctic-ocean/

12. USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, https://doi.org/10.7930/j0j964j6 .

13. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F

14. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification

15. C.L. Sabine, et al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2.” Science 305 (16 July 2004): 367-371. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1097403.

16. Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate , Technical Summary, Chapter TS.5, Changing Ocean, Marine Ecosystems, and Dependent Communities, Section 5.2.2.3. https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/technical-summary/

Header image shows clouds imitating mountains as the sun sets after midnight as seen from Denali's backcountry Unit 13 on June 14, 2019. Credit: NPS/Emily Mesner Image credit in list of evidence: Ashwin Kumar, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

Discover More Topics From NASA

Explore Earth Science

Earth Science in Action

Earth Science Data

Facts About Earth

Responding to the Climate Threat: Essays on Humanity’s Greatest Challenge

A new book co-authored by MIT Joint Program Founding Co-Director Emeritus Henry Jacoby

From the Back Cover

This book demonstrates how robust and evolving science can be relevant to public discourse about climate policy. Fighting climate change is the ultimate societal challenge, and the difficulty is not just in the wrenching adjustments required to cut greenhouse emissions and to respond to change already under way. A second and equally important difficulty is ensuring widespread public understanding of the natural and social science. This understanding is essential for an effective risk management strategy at a planetary scale. The scientific, economic, and policy aspects of climate change are already a challenge to communicate, without factoring in the distractions and deflections from organized programs of misinformation and denial. 

Here, four scholars, each with decades of research on the climate threat, take on the task of explaining our current understanding of the climate threat and what can be done about it, in lay language―importantly, without losing critical  aspects of the natural and social science. In a series of essays, published during the 2020 presidential election, the COVID pandemic, and through the fall of 2021, they explain the essential components of the challenge, countering the forces of distrust of the science and opposition to a vigorous national response.  

Each of the essays provides an opportunity to learn about a particular aspect of climate science and policy within the complex context of current events. The overall volume is more than the sum of its individual articles. Proceeding each essay is an explanation of the context in which it was written, followed by observation of what has happened since its first publication. In addition to its discussion of topical issues in modern climate science, the book also explores science communication to a broad audience. Its authors are not only scientists – they are also teachers, using current events to teach when people are listening. For preserving Earth’s planetary life support system, science and teaching are essential. Advancing both is an unending task.

About the Authors

Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was vice-chair of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Henry Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, in the MIT Sloan School of Management and former co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is focused on the integration of the natural and social sciences and policy analysis in application to the threat of global climate change.

Richard Richels directed climate change research at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). He served as lead author for multiple chapters of the IPCC in the areas of mitigation, impacts and adaptation from 1992 through 2014. He also served on the National Assessment Synthesis Team for the first U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Ben Santer is a climate scientist and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He contributed to all six IPCC reports. He was the lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC report which concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering.

Access the Book

View the book on the publisher's website  here .

Order the book from Amazon  here . 

Related Posts

Earth day colloquium: energizing the global transition.

E3: Do wind turbines kill birds?

The heat is on: Accelerating climate action at a time of record-breaking te...

E2: Do wind turbines freeze up in the cold?

Mit climate news in your inbox.

6.4 Annotated Student Sample: “Slowing Climate Change” by Shawn Krukowski

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the features common to proposals.
• Analyze the organizational structure of a proposal and how writers develop ideas.
• Articulate how writers use and cite evidence to build credibility.
• Identify sources of evidence within a text and in source citations.

Introduction

The proposal that follows was written by student Shawn Krukowski for a first-year composition course. Shawn’s assignment was to research a contemporary problem and propose one or more solutions. Deeply concerned about climate change, Shawn chose to research ways to slow the process. In his proposal, he recommends two solutions he thinks are most promising.

Living by Their Own Words

A call to action.

student sample text The earth’s climate is changing. Although the climate has been changing slowly for the past 22,000 years, the rate of change has increased dramatically. Previously, natural climate changes occurred gradually, sometimes extending over thousands of years. Since the mid-20th century, however, climate change has accelerated exponentially, a result primarily of human activities, and is reaching a crisis level. end student sample text

student sample text Critical as it is, however, climate change can be controlled. Thanks to current knowledge of science and existing technologies, it is possible to respond effectively. Although many concerned citizens, companies, and organizations in the private sector are taking action in their own spheres, other individuals, corporations, and organizations are ignoring, or even denying, the problem. What is needed to slow climate change is unified action in two key areas—mitigation and adaptation—spurred by government leadership in the United States and a global commitment to addressing the problem immediately. end student sample text

annotated text Introduction. The proposal opens with an overview of the problem and pivots to the solution in the second paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Thesis Statement. The thesis statement in last sentence of the introduction previews the organization of the proposal and the recommended solutions. end annotated text

Problem: Negative Effects of Climate Change

annotated text Heading. Centered, boldface headings mark major sections of the proposal. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The three paragraphs under this heading discuss the problem. end annotated text

annotated text Topic Sentence. The paragraph opens with a sentence stating the topics developed in the following paragraphs. end annotated text

student sample text For the 4,000 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures remained relatively constant, with a few dips of less than 1°C. Previous climate change occurred so gradually that life forms were able to adapt to it. Some species became extinct, but others survived and thrived. In just the past 100 years, however, temperatures have risen by approximately the same amount that they rose over the previous 4,000 years. end student sample text

annotated text Audience. Without knowing for sure the extent of readers’ knowledge of climate change, the writer provides background for them to understand the problem. end annotated text

student sample text The rapid increase in temperature has a negative global impact. First, as temperatures rise, glaciers and polar ice are melting at a faster rate; in fact, by the middle of this century, the Arctic Ocean is projected to be ice-free in summer. As a result, global sea levels are projected to rise from two to four feet by 2100 (U.S. Global Change Research Program [USGCRP], 2014a). If this rise actually does happen, many coastal ecosystems and human communities will disappear. end student sample text

annotated text Discussion of the Problem. The first main point of the problem is discussed in this paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Statistics as Evidence. The writer provides specific numbers and cites the source in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Transitions . The writer uses transitions here (first, as a result , and second in the next paragraph) and elsewhere to make connections between ideas and to enable readers to follow them more easily. At the same time, the transitions give the proposal coherence. end annotated text

student sample text Second, weather of all types is becoming more extreme: heat waves are hotter, cold snaps are colder, and precipitation patterns are changing, causing longer droughts and increased flooding. Oceans are becoming more acidic as they increase their absorption of carbon dioxide. This change affects coral reefs and other marine life. Since the 1980s, hurricanes have increased in frequency, intensity, and duration. As shown in Figure 6.5, the 2020 hurricane season was the most active on record, with 30 named storms, a recording-breaking 11 storms hitting the U.S. coastline (compared to 9 in 1916), and 10 named storms in September—the highest monthly number on record. Together, these storms caused more than $40 billion in damage. Not only was this the fifth consecutive above-normal hurricane season, it was preceded by four consecutive above-normal years in 1998 to 2001 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2020). end student sample text

annotated text Discussion of the Problem. The second main point of the problem is discussed in this paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Visual as Evidence. The writer refers to “Figure 6.4” in the text and places the figure below the paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Visual. The writer gives the figure a number, a title, an explanatory note, and a source citation. The source is also cited in the list of references. end annotated text

Solutions: Mitigation and Adaptation

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the solutions section of the proposal. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The eight paragraphs under this heading discuss the solutions given in the thesis statement. end annotated text

student sample text To control the effects of climate change, immediate action in two key ways is needed: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigating climate change by reducing and stabilizing the carbon emissions that produce greenhouse gases is the only long-term way to avoid a disastrous future. In addition, adaptation is imperative to allow ecosystems, food systems, and development to become more sustainable. end student sample text

student sample text Mitigation and adaptation will not happen on their own; action on such a vast scale will require governments around the globe to take initiatives. The United States needs to cooperate with other nations and assume a leadership role in fighting climate change. end student sample text

annotated text Objective Stance. The writer presents evidence (facts, statistics, and examples) in neutral, unemotional language, which builds credibility, or ethos, with readers. end annotated text

annotated text Heading. The flush-left, boldface heading marks the first subsection of the solutions. end annotated text

annotated text Topic Sentence. The paragraph opens with a sentence stating the solution developed in the following paragraphs. end annotated text

student sample text The first challenge is to reduce the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Union of Concerned Scientists (2020) warns that “net zero” carbon emissions—meaning that no more carbon enters the atmosphere than is removed—needs to be reached by 2050 or sooner. As shown in Figure 6.6, reducing carbon emissions will require a massive effort, given the skyrocketing rate of increase of greenhouse gases since 1900 (USGCRP, 2014b). end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. In this paragraph, the writer synthesizes factual evidence from two sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Visual as Evidence. The writer refers to “Figure 6.5” in the text and places the figure below the paragraph. end annotated text

student sample text Significant national policy changes must be made and must include multiple approaches; here are two areas of concern: end student sample text

annotated text Presentation of Solutions. For clarity, the writer numbers the two items to be discussed. end annotated text

student sample text 1. Transportation systems. In the United States in 2018, more than one-quarter—28.2 percent—of emissions resulted from the consumption of fossil fuels for transportation. More than half of these emissions came from passenger cars, light-duty trucks, sport utility vehicles, and minivans (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 2020). Priorities for mitigation should include using fuels that emit less carbon; improving fuel efficiency; and reducing the need for travel through urban planning, telecommuting and videoconferencing, and biking and pedestrian initiatives. end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Group Author. The parenthetical citation gives the group’s name, an abbreviation to be used in subsequent citations, and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text Curtailing travel has a demonstrable effect. Scientists have recorded a dramatic drop in emissions during government-imposed travel and business restrictions in 2020. Intended to slow the spread of COVID-19, these restrictions also decreased air pollution significantly. For example, during the first six weeks of restrictions in the San Francisco Bay area, traffic was reduced by about 45 percent, and emissions were roughly a quarter lower than the previous six weeks. Similar findings were observed around the globe, with reductions of up to 80 percent (Bourzac, 2020). end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: One Author. The parenthetical citation gives the author’s name and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text 2. Energy production. The second-largest source of emissions is the use of fossil fuels to produce energy, primarily electricity, which accounted for 26.9 percent of U.S. emissions (EPA, 2020). Fossil fuels can be replaced by solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal sources. Solar voltaic systems have the potential to become the least expensive energy in the world (Green America, 2020). Solar sources should be complemented by wind power, which tends to increase at night when the sun is absent. According to the Copenhagen Consensus, the most effective way to combat climate change is to increase investment in green research and development (Lomborg, 2020). Notable are successes in the countries of Morocco and The Gambia, both of which have committed to investing in national programs to limit emissions primarily by generating electricity from renewable sources (Mulvaney, 2019). end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. The writer develops the paragraph by synthesizing evidence from four sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

student sample text A second way to move toward net zero is to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Forests and oceans are so-called “sinks” that collect and store carbon (EPA, 2020). Tropical forests that once made up 12 percent of global land masses now cover only 5 percent, and the loss of these tropical forest sinks has caused 16 to 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (Green America, 2020). Worldwide reforestation is vital and demands both commitment and funding on a global scale. New technologies also allow “direct air capture,” which filers carbon from the air, and “carbon capture,” which prevents it from leaving smokestacks. end student sample text

student sample text All of these technologies should be governmentally supported and even mandated, where appropriate. end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. The writer develops the paragraph by synthesizing evidence from two sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Heading. The flush-left, boldface heading marks the second subsection of the solutions. end annotated text

student sample text Historically, civilizations have adapted to climate changes, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Our modern civilization is largely the result of climate stability over the past 12,000 years. However, as the climate changes, humans must learn to adapt on a national, community, and individual level in many areas. While each country sets its own laws and regulations, certain principles apply worldwide. end student sample text

student sample text 1. Infrastructure. Buildings—residential, commercial, and industrial—produce about 33 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (Biello, 2007). Stricter standards for new construction, plus incentives for investing in insulation and other improvements to existing structures, are needed. Development in high-risk areas needs to be discouraged. Improved roads and transportation systems would help reduce fuel use. Incentives for decreasing energy consumption are needed to reduce rising demands for power. end student sample text

student sample text 2. Food waste. More than 30 percent of the food produced in the United States is never consumed, and food waste causes 44 gigatons of carbon emissions a year (Green America, 2020). In a landfill, the nutrients in wasted food never return to the soil; instead, methane, a greenhouse gas, is produced. High-income countries such as the United States need to address wasteful processing and distribution systems. Low-income countries, on the other hand, need an infrastructure that supports proper food storage and handling. Educating consumers also must be a priority. end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Group Author. The parenthetical citation gives the group’s name and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text 3. Consumerism. People living in consumer nations have become accustomed to abundance. Many purchases are nonessential yet consume fossil fuels to manufacture, package, market, and ship products. During World War II, the U.S. government promoted the slogan “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, or Do Without.” This attitude was widely accepted because people recognized a common purpose in the war effort. A similar shift in mindset is needed today. end student sample text

student sample text Adaptation is not only possible but also economically advantageous. One case study is Walmart, which is the world’s largest company by revenue. According to Dearn (2020), the company announced a plan to reduce its global emissions to zero by 2040. Among the goals is powering its facilities with 100 percent renewable energy and using electric vehicles with zero emissions. As of 2020, about 29 percent of its energy is from renewable sources. Although the 2040 goal applies to Walmart facilities only, plans are underway to reduce indirect emissions, such as those from its supply chain. According to CEO Doug McMillon, the company’s commitment is to “becoming a regenerative company—one that works to restore, renew and replenish in addition to preserving our planet, and encourages others to do the same” (Dearn, 2020). In addition to encouraging other corporations, these goals present a challenge to the government to take action on climate change. end student sample text

annotated text Extended Example as Evidence. The writer indicates where borrowed information from the source begins and ends, and cites the source in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: One Author. The parenthetical citation gives only the year of publication because the author’s name is cited in the sentence. end annotated text

Objections to Taking Action

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the writer’s discussion of potential objections to the proposed solutions. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The writer devotes two paragraphs to objections. end annotated text

student sample text Despite scientific evidence, some people and groups deny that climate change is real or, if they admit it exists, insist it is not a valid concern. Those who think climate change is not a problem point to Earth’s millennia-long history of changing climate as evidence that life has always persisted. However, their claims do not consider the difference between “then” and “now.” Most of the change predates human civilization, which has benefited from thousands of years of stable climate. The rapid change since the Industrial Revolution is unprecedented in human history. end student sample text

student sample text Those who deny climate change or its dangers seek primarily to relax or remove pollution standards and regulations in order to protect, or maximize profit from, their industries. To date, their lobbying has been successful. For example, the world’s fossil-fuel industry received $5.3 trillion in 2015 alone, while the U.S. wind-energy industry received $12.3 billion in subsidies between 2000 and 2020 (Green America, 2020). end student sample text

Conclusion and Recommendation

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the conclusion and recommendation. end annotated text

annotated text Conclusion and Recommendation. The proposal concludes with a restatement of the proposed solutions and a call to action. end annotated text

student sample text Greenhouse gases can be reduced to acceptable levels; the technology already exists. But that technology cannot function without strong governmental policies prioritizing the environment, coupled with serious investment in research and development of climate-friendly technologies. end student sample text

student sample text The United States government must place its full support behind efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate climate change. Rejoining the Paris Agreement is a good first step, but it is not enough. Citizens must demand that their elected officials at the local, state, and national levels accept responsibility to take action on both mitigation and adaptation. Without full governmental support, good intentions fall short of reaching net-zero emissions and cannot achieve the adaptation in attitude and lifestyle necessary for public compliance. There is no alternative to accepting this reality. Addressing climate change is too important to remain optional. end student sample text

Biello, D. (2007, May 25). Combatting climate change: Farming out global warming solutions. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/combating-climate-change-farming-forestry/

Bourzac, K. (2020, September 25). COVID-19 lockdowns had strange effects on air pollution across the globe. Chemical & Engineering News. https://cen.acs.org/environment/atmospheric-chemistry/COVID-19-lockdowns-had-strange-effects-on-air-pollution-across-the-globe/98/i37

Dearn, G. (2020, September 21). Walmart said it will eliminate its carbon footprint by 2040 — but not for its supply chain, which makes up the bulk of its emissions. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-targets-zero-carbon-emissions-2040-not-suppliers-2020-9

Green America (2020). Top 10 solutions to reverse climate change. https://www.greenamerica.org/climate-change-100-reasons-hope/top-10-solutions-reverse-climate-change.

Lomborg, B. (2020, July 17). The alarm about climate change is blinding us to sensible solutions. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-alarm-about-climate-change-is-blinding-us-to-sensible-solutions/

Mulvaney, K. (2019, September 19). Climate change report card: These countries are reaching targets. National Geographic . https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/climate-change-report-card-co2-emissions/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2020, November 24). Record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season draws to an end. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-hurricane-season-draws-to-end

Union of Concerned Scientists (2020). Climate solutions. https://www.ucsusa.org/climate/solutions

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2020). Sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse Gas Emissions. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

U.S. Global Change Research Program (2014a). Melting ice. National Climate Assessment. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/melting-ice

U.S. Global Change Research Program (2014b). Our changing climate. National Climate Assessment. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/our-changing-climate#tab1-images

annotated text References Page in APA Style. All sources cited in the text of the report—and only those sources—are listed in alphabetical order with full publication information. See the Handbook for more on APA documentation style. end annotated text

The following link takes you to another model of an annotated sample paper on solutions to animal testing posted by the University of Arizona’s Global Campus Writing Center.

Discussion Questions

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/1-unit-introduction

• Authors: Michelle Bachelor Robinson, Maria Jerskey, featuring Toby Fulwiler
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Writing Guide with Handbook
• Publication date: Dec 21, 2021
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/1-unit-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/6-4-annotated-student-sample-slowing-climate-change-by-shawn-krukowski

© Dec 19, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

• Biology Article
• 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.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

Very helpful Byju’s

this app is very useful

Sample essay on global warming

Very nice and helpful⭐️

Amazing essay

This essay is very helpful to every student Thank you Byjus! 😊😊😊

This one is so helpful and easy to understand. Thank you, Byju’s!

• Share Share

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

Essay: The Tragedy of Stopping Climate Change

Create an FP account to save articles to read later and in the FP mobile app.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

• World Brief
• Editors’ Picks
• Africa Brief
• China Brief
• Latin America Brief
• South Asia Brief
• Situation Report
• Flash Points
• War in Ukraine
• Israel and Hamas
• U.S.-China competition
• Biden's foreign policy
• Trade and economics
• Artificial intelligence
• Asia & the Pacific
• Middle East & Africa

Inside the GOP’s Foreign Policy

Ones and tooze, foreign policy live.

Spring 2024 Issue

Print Archive

FP Analytics

• In-depth Special Reports
• Issue Briefs
• Power Maps and Interactive Microsites
• FP Simulations & PeaceGames
• Graphics Database

The Atlantic & Pacific Forum

Principles of humanity under pressure, fp global health forum 2024, fp @ unga79.

By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time.

Your guide to the most important world stories of the day

Essential analysis of the stories shaping geopolitics on the continent

The latest news, analysis, and data from the country each week

Weekly update on what’s driving U.S. national security policy

Evening roundup with our editors’ favorite stories of the day

One-stop digest of politics, economics, and culture

Weekly update on developments in India and its neighbors

A curated selection of our very best long reads

The Tragedy of Stopping Climate Change

The race is on to tell—or sell—the right story about global warming..

• Climate Change

As nations everywhere struggle to decide how best to salvage Earth, perhaps it’s only to be expected that our global generalized anxiety disorder has reached the fever pitch of a writer under deadline: How should the plot to save the world proceed?

The 2051 Munich Climate Conference, organized by the Munich-based Büro Grandezza theater troupe and hosted by the Bellevue di Monaco center for refugees, met in September of this year to reverse-engineer an answer to this question. The conference invited scholars from around the world to present on climate attitudes in 2021 as if it were 30 years in the future, exactly one year after the carbon neutrality deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Such a unique call for papers promised an event at once wholly academic and wholly “fictional.” As Andreas Kohn, a founding member of Büro Grandezza, told me over Zoom a few days before I arrived for the gathering, the basic structure of the conference-cum-performance amounted to an urgent thought experiment in 20/20 hindsight: In 2051 people will look back on what we knew about curbing emissions and say, “Why didn’t they do that?’”

In the popular imagination, projections of climate futures tend to fall into one of two categories: utopia or dystopia. The fictional framework of the 2051 Munich Climate Conference is of a piece with a recent swell of interest in reshaping the public imagination for climate adaptation in ways that break through existing cliches, broadening the range of outcomes to include the vast gradient of possibilities that fall between extremes. Climate scientists have been marching more or less to the same, urgent drumbeat since the 1960s, when the first conclusive reports linking fossil fuels to the greenhouse effect were published. The discourse about how that science should be communicated, however, has taken a decisive turn. As part of a greater trend toward storytelling in the social and hard sciences in general, the emphasis has shifted from pumping the public with facts to furnishing voters with actionable climate narratives.

Evidence of the storytelling shift is now everywhere discussions of climate change are found. The Pulitzer Prize-winning climate journalist Dan Fagin has argued that storytelling is part of the solution to the climate crisis and that journalism about it needs to be packaged “in the form of a story, in the form of narrative, with characters, drama, and a connecting thread.” Political scientists, economists, and sociologists also increasingly place climate change in the context of the meaning-making narratives by which societies organize themselves. In Climate Change and Storytelling , Annika Arnold of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation situates climate narratives amid overwhelming evidence that climate adaptation will require cultural change, media coherence, and sidestepping the public paralysis that apocalyptic stories and images promote. A 2017 edition of the journal Energy Research & Social Science devoted an entire issue to “Using stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy and climate change research.” This emphasis on narrative and imagination has trickled from academia into popular discourse by way of public exhibitions like the one in Munich and by way of policymakers who have begun to listen; in 2016, the German Advisory Council on Global Change put these ideas into practice in its outline for a “normative compass” promoting cultural cohesion in matters of nature management and economic inequality.

The consensus couldn’t be clearer: The world is far behind emissions goals, and the right narratives can help to bridge the gap. As a novelist myself, this fascinates me. The greatest challenge of the century has been framed as a kind of writer’s block: What kind of story should we tell? And just how tragic or extreme does it need to be?

Coral and mangrove grows at the protected Bunaken Island Marine National Park in Manado on May 14, 2006. Foreign Policy illustration/ROMEO GACAD/AFP via Getty Images

On the first day of the 2051 climate conference, Munich epitomized the spatial-temporal paradox that makes motivating energy transformation so difficult: The skies were clear; the sun was out; balmy temperatures drew brunchgoers out to sidewalk cafes and picnic blankets, and yours truly into a pharmacy for a travel-sized bottle of sunscreen. Though devastating floods had ravaged southern Germany only a few months prior, on this mild afternoon, imminent disaster could not have seemed farther away.

The conference was organized around the key emissions target set by the Paris Agreement—to restrict global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius—which tends to map to the kind of binary thinking reflected in popular climate narratives. On the first day, presenters spoke from a dystopic 2051 where the world had surpassed the 1.5- or even 2-degree mark; on the second, they heralded from a far rosier future where emissions had been curbed. The dystopian version of 2051 saw the Maldives sink underwater and feasible adaptation strategies thwarted by populist political opportunism; in the more optimistic version, residents of American Samoa had successfully sued oil companies to fund climate adaptation efforts, and carbon capture had proved itself a cost-effective silver bullet. The fact that these scientists were speaking to us from any future at all suggested that, in either world, some iteration of civilized life had survived.

The range of presentations shed light on why talk of “reimagining” climate change can feel so attractive.

The range of presentations shed light on why talk of “reimagining” climate change can feel so attractive. (Indeed, one of the better-attended talks on the first afternoon was titled “The transformative potential of sociological imagination for eco-social change.”) As a voter, and in the face of overwhelming ecological uncertainty, it’s hard not to feel as if you’ve taken a seat at a craps table, and even then that someone else is rolling the dice. Hypothetical accounts of 2051 breathe reality into a variety of potential policy pathways, making an unstable and seemingly distant future less abstract.

Notably, the most engaging of those accounts—like most engaging 20th-century novels—tended to focus on national, as opposed to global, frameworks. In “Locked-in: Revisiting coastal adaptation policies in the Maldives,” Geronimo Gussmann, a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin specializing in oceanographic adaptation, historicized the resilience and innovation of a Maldivian people whose chance for climate preparedness had slipped through the cracks of politicians’ opportunism. Forgone solutions included planting mangrove forests, building sea walls, and diverting resources to the islands most in need, rather than to the islands most likely to vote for a particular candidate. Another performance by the English artist Nico Powell took the form of letters to newspaper advice columnists, and was delivered from a future where a stagnant Gulf Stream has left England under a permanent gray cloud, and automation and fear have eliminated the need for citizens to ever leave their homes. (The COVID-19 lockdown is itself increasingly a reference point for possible climate futures.) These imagined pathways—which also featured some of the best role-playing of the sessions I saw—rested on specificity and detail, on ethical nuance, and, crucially, on problems dramatized at the national, as opposed to global, scale.

There’s No Wake-Up Moment on Climate in America

Even as disasters strike daily, politics will keep obstructing solutions.

Forget About Chips—China Is Coming for Ships

Beijing’s grab for hegemony in a critical sector follows a familiar playbook.

The Terrorist Threat the West Still Ignores

Domestic far-right terrorism has been increasingly internationalized—and requires a coordinated response.

Throughout the presentations, scholars became characters of themselves. They spoke of the research they were doing “back in 2021,” revised their ages, referred to their creaking joints. They were acting—and not without a hint of irony. No wonder: In many ways, they were also adopting the perspective of the literary climate novel or the Hollywood disaster film, works of fiction set in ecologically altered futures that explore the dystopian or utopian consequences of environmental neglect. As with any modeling exercise, adapting the techniques and assumptions of a discipline like fiction-making to the purpose of extrapolating real-world outcomes—and climate change narratives have an especially pressing mandate to do so—is a tricky business. The results can be confusing, even fraught. During a Q&A with another scholar who’d called for more abstract renovations of the “eco-sociological imagination,” Gussmann broke character to pose an impassioned query of his own: “But who are we telling these stories to? The public? Multinational corporations? Who is the ‘we’?” The silence that followed marked one of those moments when fiction can begin to strain against the urgency of the real.

Gussmann’s question touched on a problem perennial to all storytellers in a globalized moment. Narratives thrive on the specificity of national and local communities (nationalists, of course, have also been known to leverage the power of storytelling); climate change, by contrast, is terrifyingly global. But for a phenomenon that so readily invites imaginative extremes, equally challenging for climate storytellers is the question of how such narratives ought to end. There is overwhelming evidence that apocalyptic alarmism and utopic techno-optimism alike fail to foster necessary change, instead engendering public paralysis and procrastination. And according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, it is also no longer possible to avoid measurable effects of climate change. While there is still a great deal that humans can and must do, those activities might in fact be best framed in terms of avoiding extremes: We have entered the mitigation phase.

And mitigation can pose a problem, as far as climate storytelling goes. Falling short of either overwhelming victory or disaster, mitigation narratives aim to capture a global audience with the varieties of tragedy that lie in between. When was the last time you saw a blockbuster premiere under the tagline “Well, it could have been worse…”?

Water runs down the melting Northern Schneeferner glacier into a small lake on the Zugspitze plateau near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on on Sept. 8, 2020. Foreign Policy illustration/Sean Gallup/Getty Images

“All of writing is a huge lake,” the British novelist Jean Rhys reportedly told a friend . “There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake.” From the social sciences to marketing studies, the call for narrative often evokes Rhys’s literary sensibility: We are each a little tributary to the collective sea of human experience.

With the rise of digital advertising, however, literary storytelling has ceded ground to corporate strategists who borrow the language and techniques of spinning yarns in order to sell: All that matters is here is real-world outcomes. In the digital space, businesses and individuals have become brands, moving beyond satisfying basic consumer needs and desires to inviting prospective buyers to join their stories. As the self-fashioned marketing guru Joe Pulizzi wrote in a widely distributed 2012 paper “The Rise of Storytelling as the New Marketing,” “Who would have ever guessed that the future of marketing is, in fact, not marketing at all, but publishing?” The most famous adman of the 20th century, David Ogilvy, laid the groundwork for marketing-as-publishing with his “soft sell” approach; by leveraging nuanced narrative to entertain consumers and hold attention, the salesperson forgoes the immediate transaction today to influence long-term buying habits tomorrow. The “hard sell,” by contrast, goes in for the impulse buy and favors alarmist, insistent language. You might say that the discourse on climate change storytelling has recently undergone a shift from hard sell to soft.

With the rise of digital advertising, however, literary storytelling has ceded ground to corporate strategists who borrow the language and techniques of spinning yarns in order to sell.

There’s a reason that the kind of storyteller interested in motivating action—to buy a ticket, to make a purchase, to support a political cause—is attracted to narrating extremes. Narratives of disaster or the victory of good over evil unfold according to simplified moral schema and in realms beyond individual control; support comes easily because the villains and the heroes are made clear, as are the stakes for the reader. Any practitioner of fiction aiming for rapid, popular, emotional engagement might therefore wonder about the dramatic potential of mitigation as a narrative arc. Novelists call this a problem of content and form: The formal narrative structures that seem best equipped to capture the public eco-imagination—dystopian thrillers, techno-utopias, ad campaigns, or policy platforms promising instant gratification—aren’t necessarily those best suited to describing the potential realities we face. This is a recipe for writer’s block indeed.

Climate change is not without its own streamlined moral schema. Oil companies and politicians who actively lobby against energy transformation really do serve the world a serious evil, while inspiration for climate activism is claimed by new technologies and the young. From this view, the ethics of energy transformation seem rather straightforward after all. In the kickoff session to the 2051 Munich Climate Conference, keynote speaker Saleemul Huq, a climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, imagined that a world of mitigated climate change will have young people, fossil fuel-free economic development, and the leadership of women and people of color to thank. Who could argue against the social and ecological value of that future or the redistributed decision-making power it portends? And yet, one suspects that between the oil companies and the charismatic, ambitious new generation of leaders on which we might hang our hopes, there lies a large, diverse sector of the global population for whom climate adaptation will not feel like an immediate victory: In no successful ecological future can a coal worker in West Virginia or South Africa keep their job; in no climate future will citizens of low-lying atoll islands like the Maldives or American Samoa evade an existential threat to their national sovereignty and physical survival. A more complex narrative anticipates long-term, achievable success while also recognizing the short-term pain that attends economic transformation.

When I asked Büro Grandezza about the role of mitigation narratives that clear space for outcomes falling somewhere in between wholesale victory and disaster, there was some reluctance to accept the implication that more sanguine futures have been foreclosed. “I don’t think that we need to think about the in-between,” Kohn said, “because I think at the moment we are only telling this story.” He emphasized that staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius is still technically possible, only “nobody seems to believe it will happen.” The goal of the second day of the conference, he emphasized, was to make that 1.5 degree scenario credible without glossing social inequities. After a pause, however, his colleague Christiane Pfau added, “It’s good for some, it’s bad for others. And that is somehow dystopic and utopic at the same time.”

A 1794 engraving of King Lear. Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

If marketing narratives are explicitly designed to incite targeted action (the sale) and reshape reality (consumer perceptions), literary fictions, by contrast—and to borrow a concept from the novelist Henry James—tend to exist in competition with reality. With such an urgent need to change course on climate, what could an approach prioritizing aesthetics over action possibly have to add?

In the effort to loot existing narrative modes for a climate match, one quasi-literary narrative model that has emerged is the Narrative Policy Framework, which argues that scientific data and facts ought to be presented to the public enmeshed in narratives that tell the story of policy pathways. The framework includes four main elements: characters (victims, villains, and heroes), a political setting in which a problem is contextualized, a moral presented in the form of a solution to the political problem, and a plot linking these elements through relations of cause and effect. It’s a welcome innovation that should and is being introduced in real-world situations.

But it might also be useful to recall that for the modern fiction writer, over and above paradigms of character, setting, moral, and plot, the craft of storytelling comes down to the art of managing reader expectations. In writing workshops, this idea of managing expectations is a veritable cliche. It carries through to other well-worn tropes, such as the idea that a story’s end ought to be both inevitable and surprising: inevitable insofar as we expected something like it to come along; surprising in that the denouement undercuts those expectations just enough to keep the finale from seeming predetermined or contrived. The explanatory power of these stories lies not in furnishing actionable, real-world purpose (truth and beauty, James argued, are “purpose enough”), but in modeling how we prepare ourselves for, and make sense of, endings that cannot possibly be predicted.

Frank Kermode’s A Sense of an Ending , now considered one of the most important works of Western literary criticism of the 20th century, argued that all literature, diverse as it is, bears the trace of the ancient human desire to “make sense” of endings, in particular of the apocalypse. This long-standing need to anticipate and negotiate crisis through narrative is reflected in the history of our fictional frameworks, which, like scientific models, are continually updated as our understanding of the world evolves. As humans began to recognize their own historical agency, narratives drifted away from paradigmatic, ancient story structures of the apocalypse—the Bible, the myth—to embrace uncircumscribed structures that sidestep any resolution at all; “they have become more ‘open,’” Kermode writes. The argument here is that apocalypse is no longer viewed as “imminent,” a conclusion to be anticipated, but “immanent,” a permanent state “stretched” across the present; it has already arrived in the form of genocide, the hydrogen bomb, ecological crisis. This clears a wide, unpredictable space for what lies ahead, given that we’re already living “in the middest” of extremes.

“In their general character our fictions have certainly moved away from the simplicity of the paradigm,” Kermode writes. And loosening those genre conventions fundamentally changes the narrative experience for reader and writer both. The reader has fewer genre cues to set expectations from the get-go, while the writer, meanwhile, bears the responsibility of discovering new narrative forms that prepare the reader for a more moderate kind of close—one that concludes the story but not, necessarily, the narrative world. As an example, consider that the reader of a classical tragedy knows the play must end in a death even before they open the text. What we tend to call modern literature, by contrast, has fewer signposts. The writer has to teach the reader how to read the plot from scratch, incorporating a “sense of an ending” into every stage of the story.

That the reader isn’t able to fully anticipate the bloody culmination or even explicate its significance is part of what lends the play its quality of truth.

The American critic Francine Prose recalls discovering the power of managing reader expectations in this way during a school exercise in which she was asked to track the mention of eyes in Shakespeare’s King Lear , leading up to the famous scene where Gloucester’s own are gouged: “[T]he language of vision and its opposite was preparing us, consciously or unconsciously, for those violent mutilations.” The gore is shocking when it arrives—yet in retrospect, it’s clear Shakespeare took care to prepare us for this outcome all along. That the reader isn’t able to fully anticipate the bloody culmination or even explicate its significance is part of what lends the play its quality of truth. The more a story imitates the contingencies and unpredictability of real life, the more it seems to belong, Kermode says, to one of those tales “which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naïve expectations, is finding something out for us, something real. ”

Perhaps one of the reasons climate change is so difficult to “make sense” of through narrative is that this most modern of crises so clearly reflects ancient structures of apocalyptic prophecy. Business-as-usual climate models predict the end of the world quite as literally and conclusively as medieval Christendom’s anticipation of the Second Coming of A.D. 1000. This prophetic structure—backed, like earlier prophecies, by experts and data—invites intuitive, ancient story arcs that dramatize the exploitative dynamic between godlike powers and human mortals. At the same time, climate change couldn’t be more contemporary, nor could the attitude needed to avert its most terrifying manifestations; preparing ourselves for less tragic endings requires the open-endedness of continual compromise.

A few weeks after the Munich conference, I found myself on a Zoom seminar hosted by the Climate Transparency Report discussing how much the World Bank ought to lend a coal-dependent, middle-income, segregated country like South Africa, where some 80,000 miners—most of them living in rural districts, most of them Black—stand to lose their jobs. It is far too costly to keep coal plants open—and yet to close them also comes with costs.

The modern novel models this kind of modern consciousness, one whose expectations are tied not so much to foreclosed temporal ends but to the negotiation of a present in permanent crisis: How hard are these characters’ lives going to be in the immediate term? The world did not end in A.D. 1000, just as it did not end on so many other occasions it was supposed to have. Even still, “Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited,” Kermode writes. The raison d’être of modern literature, maybe, is precisely to disconfirm apocalyptic narratives, so comforting in their simplicity and yet terrifying in their finality. The End will always wield authority over the human imagination, but combating the attitude of knowingness that frames it as imminent clears space for the anxious-making range of outcomes where life, in fact, goes on.

Polar bears feed at a garbage dump near the village of Belushya Guba, on the remote Russian northern Novaya Zemlya archipelago, on Oct. 31, 2018. Foreign Policy illustration/ALEXANDER GRIR/AFP via Getty Images

So, how do you sell compromise? I went into the Munich Climate Conference as a novelist expecting to write about exercises in imagining varieties of tragedy. The longer I spent in 2051, the more I became convinced that what we are after here isn’t storytelling at all, but marketing. The more important that question of audience action is for the story you’re telling, the more it seems to me that we move from “feeding the lake” to pushing action in the real world—in particular, to selling people on short-term costs for long-term gains.

This isn’t to say that writers, novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights don’t think about audience, activism, or real-world outcomes. Quite to the contrary: Büro Grandezza’s interventionist theater methods intentionally blur the line between political activism and art. As member Benno Heisel said of the troupe’s own artistic relationship to the 2051 conference, “It is an arts project, because that’s what we do. However, the starting point and the goal of the project are political ideas.” But while artists may be politically motivated, most do not tell stories with the primary aim of influencing the audience’s behavior or spending patterns in specific, measurable, and reproduceable ways. Even the climate novelist, journalist, and activist Kim Stanley Robinson, whose recent novel The Ministry for the Future is perhaps one of the most popular examples of climate mitigation narratives to date, has said that above all, he sets out “first, to write a good novel.” A salesperson, by contrast, is motivated solely to persuade you to buy—or buy into—something you never previously imagined. They tell stories not merely to captivate but to persuade.

When I asked a young father attending the first day of the conference if the morning’s sessions had inspired any hope, he reached for Franz Kafka: “He said something about how there’s plenty of hope, just not for us.”

And yet, there is something fundamentally dissatisfying, if not inappropriate, in importing the corporate strategist’s point of view wholesale. The ethical complexities of energy transformation extend up and down social and class hierarchies at the national and global scales, complicating the roles of protagonist and antagonist, and inviting uncathartic limbos—mitigation requires enduring what novelists call “peripeteia,” or sudden reversals in fortunes, which energy transition will require. Perhaps that’s why novels kept coming up at the Munich conference. “In order for everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” the climate economist Michael Pahle paraphrased from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a modern Italian classic of a decadent Sicilian family in decline. When I asked a young father attending the first day of the conference if the morning’s sessions had inspired any hope, he reached for Franz Kafka: “He said something about how there’s plenty of hope, just not for us.”

Luckily, it isn’t the job of a storyteller to provide hope but simply to aim for truth—or at least so says Henry James. The collective writer’s block for climate narratives might therefore seem less insurmountable if the goal is scaled back from saving the life on Earth to providing credible models for how humans manage expectations in a world that has profoundly disappointed them—first by repeatedly disconfirming the arrival of imminent apocalypse, then by allowing apocalypse to slip in nevertheless through the back door of the present and, furthermore, to distribute its effects so unequally. Climate change is one of the greatest regressive taxes the world has ever faced. For policymakers who find themselves in the uncomfortable position of drafting plots to solve it while still remaining open to a range of mitigation efforts, a good place to start might be promising to minimize losses for those who will be required to give something up. This likely means selling us on the truth: In the short term, some will lose.

“The consumer is not a moron,” Ogilvy famously said, in what turned out to be the best sales pitch the soft sell ever had.

Here’s how a novelist might tell a story about rapidly changing course: If you ever take the 6:37 p.m. train from the Berlin Südkreuz railway station to Munich, as I did to attend the 2051 conference, you should know that it splits in Leipzig. One half goes on to Munich; the other, to Jena, a city hundreds of miles to the north. If you choose the wrong half, you’re in for a long night.

To correct my mistake, I backtracked to a regional hub where I could catch another high-speed train. En route, I met a young doctor from Mexico looking to make the same connection. We talked about vaccines. We talked about Haruki Murakami fan fiction. (He’d written some.) Our regional train was delayed, and the transfer would be tight. A third passenger walked up and down the aisles, looking for a conductor who might call ahead. Didn’t anybody work here? Who the hell was in charge? As we pulled into the station and shouldered our bags, readying ourselves to sprint, I joked, “ Wer als Erster kommt an, halte die Tür auf. ”

Whoever gets there first, hold the door.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is a writer of fiction and criticism. She is the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q and the forthcoming novel The Visitors .

Join the Conversation

Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription.

Already a subscriber? Log In .

Subscribe Subscribe

View Comments

Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now.

Not your account? Log out

Please follow our comment guidelines , stay on topic, and be civil, courteous, and respectful of others’ beliefs.

Change your username:

I agree to abide by FP’s comment guidelines . (Required)

Confirm your username to get started.

The default username below has been generated using the first name and last initial on your FP subscriber account. Usernames may be updated at any time and must not contain inappropriate or offensive language.

More from Foreign Policy

Israel is facing an iraq-like quagmire.

Six months in, there’s still no plan for after the war, U.S. officials say.

NATO Doesn’t Have Enough Troops

For the first time in decades, NATO has a plan to fight Russia. Now it just needs the forces to do it.

Biden’s ‘Coalitions of the Willing’ Foreign-Policy Doctrine

The latest flurry of U.S. diplomacy shows how the president is all about “minilateralism.”

The New Idea of India

Narendra Modi’s reign is producing a less liberal but more assured nation.

The World’s Biggest Election Is Set to Begin

Arab countries have israel’s back—for their own sake, iran’s nuclear crisis has no military solution, iran has defined its red line with israel, america fueled the fire in the middle east, u.s. and israel meet to discuss rafah operation.

Sign up for World Brief

FP’s flagship evening newsletter guiding you through the most important world stories of the day, written by Alexandra Sharp . Delivered weekdays.

Ending the climate crisis has one simple solution: Stop using fossil fuels

Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Climate Science and Sustainability, Concordia University

Professor of Earth Science and Canada Research Chair in Human-Earth System Dynamics, McGill University

Disclosure statement

H. Damon Matthews receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Eric Galbraith receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Concordia University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA.

Universitié Concordia provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA-FR.

McGill University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA.

McGill University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR.

View all partners

As COP27 unfolds in Egypt, we are hearing about a large array of climate change solutions, ranging from building with carbon-absorbing bamboo and using less plastic to growing more kelp in the oceans to retain its carbon stores and enhance biodiversity.

All of these ideas are important and could lead to positive environmental outcomes if successfully implemented.

However, as climate scientists we believe that they also have the potential to be dangerous distractions, drawing attention away from the three things we absolutely need to do to end the climate crisis: Stop burning coal, stop burning oil and stop burning natural gas.

Ending fossil fuel use is essential to end the climate crisis, and there is no alternative.

A simple problem with a simple solution

Global warming is fundamentally a very simple problem.

Human use of fossil fuels — whether in the form of coal, oil or natural gas — releases carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, making the Earth’s greenhouse effect stronger and increasing the Earth’s temperature.

The temperature rise, which has reached 1.25 C and counting will continue unless we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere. The only way to achieve this is to end the use of coal, oil and natural gas.

Other solutions including less deforestation , more conserved and restored natural areas and better agricultural practices could help to slow global warming. These would also have additional benefits such as strenghtening biodiversity and increasing community resilience to climate impacts.

Capturing and storing carbon may also eventually play a minor role in limiting the worst effects of climate change, but after decades of research we still don’t have a cost-effective strategy to put hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 back into the ground once the fossil fuels have been burned.

If we don’t end the use of fossil fuels, all of the rest adds up to little more than branches piled on the tracks in front of a runaway train. They might slow the train temporarily, but until we get inside the engine and shut off the throttle, the train will keep accelerating.

It’s a big challenge, but not a complex one

The solution to the climate crisis is not complex. But it is big.

The amount of coal, oil and natural gas extracted from the Earth adds up to billions of tons per year . So, shifting from fossil fuels to improved energy systems will require efforts far beyond what has so far been allocated to solving the climate problem.

But “big” is not the same as “complex.” The term “complex” implies that we don’t really know what the solutions are or whether they will in fact work. Neither is true here: we know with absolute certainty that replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free energy systems would solve the climate problem. What’s more, it’s the only way to do so.

So far, we have failed to take the actions necessary to tackle this big, but simple, problem mainly because the problem has been made to appear complex.

Complexifying the nature of the climate problem has been a strategy of the fossil fuel industry for decades, and fossil fuel lobbyists continue to push their agenda at COP27 .

For many years, the argument was that the climate system is complex and that maybe greenhouse gas emissions were not a problem. Today, this same guise of complexity is being used to propagate doubt on the efficacy of real solutions and to promote actions that will take us in the wrong direction. Even now, gas representatives at COP27 are suggesting that burning more natural gas is part of the solution.

It is time we looked through this facade of complexity and get to work on the solutions that we know will work.

Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty shows the way

We do know what needs to be done. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is a promising step in the right direction. The treaty, which was launched at the New York Climate Action Week in 2020, called, at last, to stop the expansion of new fossil fuel development and manage a just transition away from coal, oil and gas to clean energy.

Read more: COP27: Which countries will push to end fossil fuel production? And which won't?

But we can’t stop there. We need to quickly move to shut down fossil fuel use altogether, by replacing existing infrastructure as quickly as possible with solar, wind and other non-fossil energy sources so that people can thrive in a safe climate future.

It’s time to look past the distractions and focus on the simple solution to the climate crisis. We need to stop burning coal, oil and natural gas. Our climate future depends on this.

• Fossil fuels
• Climate change
• Deforestation
• Clean energy
• Global warming
• Natural gas
• Solar energy
• Wind energy
• nature conservation
• agricultural practices
• climate crises
• Listen to this article

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

Senior Disability Services Advisor

Deputy Social Media Producer

Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

GRAINS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION CHAIRPERSON

• Request new password

You are here

Global warming conclusion.

Global warming is not something to take lightly. The oceans are warming, the polar ice caps are melting, and greenhouse gas levels are at an all-time high. These are just some of the things that the claims-makers for the global warming cause have said. The science has proven them right. So, the ultimate claim is that humans are a large factor in the increased rate of global warming. There are claims-makers of all kinds fighting about whether that is true or not. The solutions proposed deal with a cleaner world, while the deniers will opt to do nothing.  This issue has turned political, and it seems like nothing gets done until someone who believes in global warming is in charge. Right now, that is not the case. This issue will continue to get worse until there is no turning back. Hopefully society can come to a consensus to try and inhibit global warming. This is the only way to keep the place we live healthy.

• rdigregorio's blog

Perfect Paragraphs

Each week, post your own Perfect Paragraph and comment on three Perfect Paragraphs . Suggest improvements. Don't just say "Looks good."

Recent comments

• Comments   4 years 11 months ago
• Feedback   4 years 11 months ago
• Descriptive words   4 years 11 months ago
• Sentences   4 years 11 months ago
• Suggestion   4 years 11 months ago

Blogs Updated This Week

• angelinamart
• cnwokemodoih
• cynthiaguzma
• danielnguyen
• ddoyleperkin
• nalexandroum
• rdigregorio

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late

IPCC report says only swift and drastic action can avert irrevocable damage to world

• Analysis: Humanity at the crossroads
• Timeline: The IPCC’s reports

Scientists have delivered a “final warning” on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth assessment report on Monday.

The comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

In sober language, the IPCC set out the devastation that has already been inflicted on swathes of the world. Extreme weather caused by climate breakdown has led to increased deaths from intensifying heatwaves in all regions, millions of lives and homes destroyed in droughts and floods, millions of people facing hunger, and “increasingly irreversible losses” in vital ecosystems.

Monday’s final instalment, called the synthesis report , is almost certain to be the last such assessment while the world still has a chance of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible .

Kaisa Kosonen, a climate expert at Greenpeace International, said: “This report is definitely a final warning on 1.5C. If governments just stay on their current policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC report [due in 2030].”

More than 3bn people already live in areas that are “highly vulnerable” to climate breakdown, the IPCC found, and half of the global population now experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. In many areas, the report warned, we are already reaching the limit to which we can adapt to such severe changes, and weather extremes are “increasingly driving displacement” of people in Africa, Asia, North, Central and South America, and the south Pacific.

All of those impacts are set to increase rapidly, as we have failed to reverse the 200-year trend of rising greenhouse gas emissions, despite more than 30 years of warnings from the IPCC, which published its first report in 1990.

The world heats up in response to the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so every year in which emissions continue to rise eats up the available “carbon budget” and means much more drastic cuts will be needed in future years.

Yet there is still hope of staying within 1.5C, according to the report. Hoesung Lee, the chair of the IPCC, said: “This synthesis report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a livable sustainable future for all.”

Temperatures are now about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC found. If greenhouse gas emissions can be made to peak as soon as possible, and are reduced rapidly in the following years, it may still be possible to avoid the worst ravages that would follow a 1.5C rise.

Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said: “Every bit of warming avoided due to the collective actions pulled from our growing, increasingly effective toolkit of options is less worse news for societies and the ecosystems on which we all depend.”

Guterres called on governments to take drastic action to reduce emissions by investing in renewable energy and low-carbon technology. He said rich countries must try to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions “as close as possible to 2040”, rather than waiting for the 2050 deadline most have signed up to.

after newsletter promotion

He said: “The climate timebomb is ticking. But today’s report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate timebomb. It is a survival guide for humanity. As it shows, the 1.5C limit is achievable.”

John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said: “Today’s message from the IPCC is abundantly clear: we are making progress, but not enough. We have the tools to stave off and reduce the risks of the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but we must take advantage of this moment to act now.”

Monday’s “synthesis report” is the final part of the sixth assessment report (AR6) by the IPCC, which was set up in 1988 to investigate the climate and provide scientific underpinning to international policy on the crisis. The first three sections of AR6, published between August 2021 and April 2022, covered the physical science behind the climate crisis, and warned irreversible changes were now almost inevitable ; section two covered the impacts , such as the loss of agriculture, rising sea levels, and the devastation of the natural world; and the third covered the means by which we can cut greenhouse gases , including renewable energy, restoring nature and technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide.

The “synthesis report” contains no new science, but draws together key messages from all of the preceding work to form a guide for governments. The next IPCC report is not due to be published before 2030, making this report effectively the scientific gold standard for advice to governments in this crucial decade.

The final section of AR6 was the “summary for policymakers”, written by IPCC scientists but scrutinised by representatives of governments around the world , who can – and did – push for changes. The Guardian was told that in the final hours of deliberations at the Swiss resort of Interlaken over the weekend, the large Saudi Arabian delegation, of at least 10 representatives, pushed at several points for the weakening of messages on fossil fuels, and the insertion of references to carbon capture and storage, touted by some as a remedy for fossil fuel use but not yet proven to work at scale.

In response to the report, Peter Thorne, the director of the Icarus climate research centre at Maynooth University in Ireland, said next year global temperatures could breach the 1.5C limit, though this did not mean the limit had been breached for the long term. “We will, almost regardless of the emissions scenario given, reach 1.5C in the first half of the next decade,” he said. “The real question is whether our collective choices mean we stabilise around 1.5C or crash through 1.5C, reach 2C and keep going.”

• Climate crisis
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Most viewed

Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

• About YPCCC
• Yale Climate Connections
• Student Employment
• For The Media
• Past Events
• YPCCC in the News
• Climate Change in the American Mind (CCAM)
• Publications
• Climate Opinion Maps
• Climate Opinion Factsheets
• Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY)
• Resources for Educators
• All Tools & Interactives
• Partner with YPCCC

Home / For Educators: Grades 6-12 / Climate Explained: Introductory Essays About Climate Change Topics

Climate Explained: Introductory Essays About Climate Change Topics

Filed under: backgrounders for educators ,.

Climate Explained, a part of Yale Climate Connections, is an essay collection that addresses an array of climate change questions and topics, including why it’s cold outside if global warming is real, how we know that humans are responsible for global warming, and the relationship between climate change and national security.

More Activities like this

Climate Change Basics: Five Facts, Ten Words

Backgrounders for Educators

To simplify the scientific complexity of climate change, we focus on communicating five key facts about climate change that everyone should know. 

Why should we care about climate change?

Having different perspectives about global warming is natural, but the most important thing that anyone should know about climate change is why it matters.  

External Resources

Looking for resources to help you and your students build a solid climate change science foundation? We’ve compiled a list of reputable, student-friendly links to help you do just that!  

Subscribe to our mailing list

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Yale Program on Climate Change Communication:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Talk to our experts

1800-120-456-456

• Essay on Effects of Global Warming

Introduction

Our world, as well as all living things such as animals, birds, insects, trees, and plants, were created by nature. They all have the right to live their lives as they see fit, but the human being is the most perplexing of all living creatures. For our own needs and greed, we humans are killing nature, and we will pay the price in the form of catastrophe. Here we have provided both long and short essays on the effects of Global Warming for students of Classes 1 to 12.

Long Effect of Global Warming Essay in English

As carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and other air pollution and greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere, they absorb sunlight and solar radiation that has bounced off the earth's surface, resulting in global warming. Normally, this radiation will disperse into space, but these contaminants, which can remain in the atmosphere for years or decades, trap the heat and cause the earth to get hotter. The greenhouse effect is the result of this.

So, What causes Global Warming?

Natural Causes of Global Warming:

For decades, the world has been shifting. The natural rotation of the sun causes global warming by changing the strength of sunlight and bringing it closer to the earth.

Greenhouse emissions are another contributor to global warming. 

Carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide are greenhouse gases that absorb solar heat rays and prevent them from escaping the earth's surface. The earth's temperature has increased as a result of this.

Another factor that contributes to global warming is volcanic eruptions. A single volcanic eruption, for example, can release a significant amount of carbon dioxide and ash into the atmosphere.

As carbon dioxide levels rise, the earth's temperature rises, and greenhouse gases absorb solar radiation.

Finally, methane is a contributor to global warming. Methane is a greenhouse gas as well. Methane is 20 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Methane gas can usually be used in a variety of places. Cattle, landfills, natural gas, petroleum systems, coal mining, mobile explosions, and industrial waste processes are only a few examples.

Human Influences on Global Warming:

Humans are more responsible for global warming than natural causes. Because of modern human lifestyles, the earth has been evolving for many years and continues to do so. Industrial production, fossil fuel combustion, mining, cattle rearing, and deforestation are all examples of human activities.

The industrial revolution is the first thing. Industrial devices have been powered by fossil fuels. All we use is made up of fossil fuels. When we purchase a cell phone, for example, the process of manufacturing the phone involves machines, which use fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide is released into the environment during the process. Aside from industry, transportation, such as automobiles, emits carbon dioxide by the exhaust.

Mining is another problem. Methane would be trapped under the earth during the mining process. Furthermore, raising cattle results in the release of methane in the form of manure. Cattle, on the other hand, are noteworthy because they are equally responsible for the occurrence of global warming.

Then there's deforestation, which is by far the most common problem. Humans have been cutting down trees to manufacture documents, wood, build homes, and other things, so deforestation is a human factor.

Humans also emit carbon dioxide as they breathe. As a result, carbon dioxide has been released into the atmosphere by millions of people. If human deforestation continues, the carbon dioxide released by human breathing will remain in the atmosphere.

Effects of Global Warming

Every year, scientists learn more about the effects of global warming, and all agree that if current patterns continue, environmental, economic, and health impacts are likely. Here's a taste of what we can expect in the coming months:

Melting glaciers, early snowmelt, and extreme droughts would intensify water shortages in the American West, raising the risk of wildfires.

Coastal flooding will occur along the Eastern Seaboard, especially in Florida, as well as in other areas such as the Gulf of Mexico.

New pests will wreak havoc on forests, crops, and towns, as will heat waves, heavy rains, and increased flooding.

Many plant and animal species could become extinct if ecosystems such as coral reefs and Alpine meadows are disrupted.

Increased pollen-producing ragweed growth, higher levels of air pollution, and the spread of conditions favorable to pathogens and mosquitoes will make allergies, asthma, and infectious disease outbreaks more likely.

In the above effect of global warming essay in English, we have discussed in depth all the natural causes of global warming and how humans have contributed towards its drastic increase. Below we have provided short effects of the Global Warming essay for students of Classes 1 to 5.

Effect of Global Warming Short Essay

Since hundreds of years ago, greenhouse gases have remained in the atmosphere for several years. Global warming, on the other hand, would have disastrous consequences for the planet. If global warming persists, a slew of negative consequences will emerge. Melting polar ice caps, economic effects, warming oceans, and more storms, disease transmission, and earthquakes are all examples.

The melting of the polar ice caps is the first consequence. The ice at the North Pole will melt as the temperature increases. Since melting glaciers become seas, the first result of ice melting would be an increase in sea levels. “If the ice melted today, the seas will rise about 230 feet,” according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Many low-lying areas, such as the Netherlands, are affected. Once the North Pole melts, the Netherlands will be submerged in water. However, that will not happen easily, and the sea level will continue to rise.

Another impact is the loss of habitat for some species. Polar bears and tropical frogs would become extinct as a result of climate change. Furthermore, since animals are not like humans, different birds will migrate to other locations. They are unable to adjust to changes in their climate, such as temperature or living conditions.

The next result is that more hurricanes will occur, with economic implications. Houses are damaged by hurricanes, and the government will have to spend billions of dollars to repair the damage, and people will need places to stay or will be killed. When a disaster strikes, many people die and illnesses spread. Diseases are more serious because they can spread rapidly to other people, allowing more people to catch the disease. Diseases can also become more serious as the weather changes.

Importance of an Essay on Global Warming

The essay on global warming is important because it will help students to understand the effects of global warming and how it impacts life on earth. They will then be aware and likewise, share their knowledge with their fellow beings and make them conscious of the human actions that lead to an increase in global warming.

Climate change is an issue that humans are actually facing, and the ones causing these problems are humans. Although it is difficult to avoid global warming, people can indeed help to mitigate and slow its effects. If no action is taken to address this problem, people will perish as a result of cli mate change and natural disasters. Humans changed the world; now it's time for humans to change themselves.

FAQs on Essay on Effects of Global Warming

1. State Some Ways to Reduce Global Warming ?

We should reduce the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to reduce global warming. 

We can minimise global warming by reducing our use of oil, electricity, and other practices that contribute to global warming. To save fuel, we should opt for a hybrid vehicle that uses less gasoline. 

Taking public transportation or carpooling to work has the potential to minimise carbon dioxide emissions while still saving money. 

Recycling is another way to help combat global warming. Reusing plastic bags, bottles, documents, or glass may help to minimise waste. 

Finally, open burning should be forbidden, such as the burning of dry leaves or garbage. When garbage is burned with plastic, carbon dioxide and toxic gases are released. Furthermore, since global temperatures are rising, the government should minimise deforestation. Trees will assist in the reduction of global warming.

2. Define Global Warming ?

Global warming is the long-term warming of Earth's climate system that has been observed since the pre-industrial era (between 1850 and 1900) as a result of human activities, mainly fossil fuel combustion, which raises heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. The words are sometimes used interchangeably, though the latter applies to both human- and naturally-caused warming, as well as the implications for our world. The average rise in Earth's global surface temperature is the most common metric.

3. How to download the Essay on Effects of Global Warming from the Vedantu Website?

The Vedantu website provides a download of the Essay on Effects of Global Warming, which is accurate and well-structured. Vedantu's official website provides the Essay in PDF version which is available for download for free of cost. Students are advised to download the Essay on Global Warming from the Vedantu website to get an idea of the word limit, sentence construction, and basic understanding of what a good essay consists of. Vedantu essay is concise and apt for school-going, students. It uses simple language, perfect for students with limited vocabulary. Following the Vedantu essay enables students to be sufficiently prepared for any essay topics and guarantees that students will score good marks. To access the Essay on Plastic Ban, click on the link available above.

4. Why is plastic bad for the environment?

Nonrenewable resources such as coal, natural gas, and crude oil are used to make plastics. Because plastic bags take a long time to disintegrate, they have a substantial environmental impact. If toxic compounds are allowed to deteriorate, there is concern that they will leak into the environment. Rather than degrading completely, plastic dissolves into smaller chunks and microscopic particles known as microplastics. Microplastics regularly end up in bodies of water, endangering animals. Furthermore, dangerous chemicals are released into the soil when plastic bags degrade in the sun, and harmful substances are released into the air when plastic bags are burnt, resulting in air pollution. All of these reasons make plastic one of the most harmful materials on the earth for all of these reasons. Plastic is one of the main reasons for Global Warming and thus needs to be eliminated from the world.

5. Is writing an essay hard?

Essay writing is a difficult task that needs a great deal of study, time, and focus. It's also an assignment that you can divide down into manageable chunks such as introduction, main content, and conclusion. Breaking down and focusing on each individually makes essay writing more pleasant. It's natural for students to be concerned about writing an essay. It's one of the most difficult tasks to do, especially for people who aren't confident in their writing abilities. While writing a decent essay is difficult, the secret to being proficient at it is reading a lot of books, conducting extensive research on essential topics, and practicing essay writing diligently.

6. Who prepares the essay on global warming for Vedantu?

The Essay on Effects on Global, designed by Vedantu, is created by a group of experts and experienced teachers. The panel of experts have created the essay after analyzing important essay topics that have been repeatedly asked in various examinations. The Essays that are provided by Vedantu are not only well-structured but also accurate and concise. They are aptly suited for young students with limited vocabulary. For best results, the students are advised to go through multiple essays and practice the topics on their own to inculcate the habits of time management and speed.

7. What will be the impact on the phenomena of Global Warming if we ban plastic and petroleum products?

Plastic and petroleum product bans can undoubtedly aid in the conservation of non-renewable resources that, once gone, may not be recovered. Plastic use has two significant negative consequences: it emits carbon dioxide, which contributes to the greenhouse effect, and it increases rubbish collecting in landfills and seas. Bans should be implemented since they are successful in eliminating large amounts of plastic trash. Plastic can be eliminated; but, it will need advances in engineering and applied science, and the capability to do so currently exists. With each passing year, humanity's reliance on plastic gets greater. Thus, one of the only ways to eliminate or reduce global warming is through the elimination of the use of plastic and petroleum products.

U.N. climate chief says two years to save the planet

• Medium Text

• U.N. demands stronger climate plans from G20
• Calls for jump in funds for developing countries
• Warns climate is 'slipping down cabinet agendas'

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Reporting by Simon Jessop, Kate Abnett Editing by Ros Russell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

Thomson Reuters

Kate Abnett covers EU climate and energy policy in Brussels, reporting on Europe’s green transition and how climate change is affecting people and ecosystems across the EU. Other areas of coverage include international climate diplomacy. Before joining Reuters, Kate covered emissions and energy markets for Argus Media in London. She is part of the teams whose reporting on Europe’s energy crisis won two Reuters journalist of the year awards in 2022.

Simon leads a team tracking how the financial system and companies more broadly are responding to the challenges posed by climate change, nature loss and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues including diversity and inclusion.

World Chevron

Taiwan says new Chinese air routes threaten Taiwanese islands' flight safety

Taiwan said on Friday China's decision to open new air routes that run close to two Taiwanese-controlled islands was a flight safety risk taken without consultation, and said it would demand any aircraft using them be asked to turn around.

Russian oil producer Bashneft has installed anti-drone nets to protect key facilities at its refineries from potential Ukrainian attack, the head of the republic of Bashkortostan where the company is based was quoted as saying on Friday.

April 2024 ENSO update: gone fishing

The El Niño of 2023–24 is weakening. Forecasters estimate an 85% chance that El Niño will end and the tropical Pacific will transition to neutral conditions by the April–June period. There’s a 60% chance that La Niña will develop by June–August. Overall, the forecast this month is very similar to last month , and we continue to expect La Niña for the Northern Hemisphere fall and early winter (around 85% chance).

La Niña and El Niño are opposite phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern. “ENSO” for short. Just like El Niño, La Niña changes the ocean and atmospheric circulation in the tropics. Those changes start in the Pacific Ocean and then ripple around the world in predictable ways. So, the arrival of La Niña gives us an early picture of potential upcoming climate conditions.

Why are our probabilities relatively high, even though we’re still solidly in the grip of the “ spring predictability barrier ,” a time of year when forecasts are often trickier? What could La Niña mean for summer and fall climate? And what might we expect for the global average surface temperature, after a record-setting year? So many questions! The hooks are baited, let’s cast our lines.

Tropical fishes

First things first: current ENSO conditions. The sea surface temperature anomaly in the Niño-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific is our primary metric for ENSO (anomaly = departure from the long-term average, long-term in this case is 1991–2020). Since El Niño’s peak in November–December 2023 at about 2.0 °C (3.6 °F) , this anomaly has been dropping steadily, but, at 1.2 °C, it is still well above the El Niño threshold of 0.5 °C (0.9 °F).

2-year history of sea surface temperatures in the Niño-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific for all strong El Niño events since 1950 (gray lines) and the current event (purple line). Graph by Emily Becker based on monthly Niño-3.4 index data  from CPC  using  ERSSTv5 .

Looking at the atmosphere over the tropical Pacific, however, we find that the expected El Niño pattern—weaker-than-average trade winds, more rain and clouds in the central tropical Pacific, drier conditions over Indonesia, reflecting a weaker Walker Circulation —has largely disappeared. This is not unexpected; as ENSO events decay, sometimes the atmosphere and the ocean are on somewhat different schedules. (This is also the case when they begin.) What it tells us is that the ocean-atmosphere coupling , an essential component of ENSO, has likely ended. That provides confidence that the warm sea surface temperature anomaly will continue to diminish, likely crossing into neutral (between 0.5 and -0.5 °C) by April–June.

Animation of maps of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean compared to the long-term average over five-day periods from February through early April 2024. El Niño’s warm surface is weakening and some regions of cooler-than-average sea surface temperature are appearing. NOAA Climate.gov, based on Coral Reef Watch maps available from  NOAA View.

Creatures of the deep

More evidence that El Niño is likely to give way to neutral soon, with La Niña right on its tail, can be found under the surface of the tropical Pacific. We keep a close eye on the temperature of the water in the upper 300 meters (~1000 feet) of the equatorial Pacific because this water provides a source to the surface. Since January, two upwelling Kelvin waves —blobs of cooler water that travel from the west to the east under the surface—have been moving through.

Water temperatures in the top 300 meters (1,000 feet) of the tropical Pacific Ocean compared to the 1991–2020 average in February–April 2024. NOAA Climate.gov animation, based on data from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.

The more recent upwelling Kelvin wave will continue to shift eastward and rise up, providing a source of cooler-than-average water to the surface.

As I mentioned above, La Niña causes changes in global atmospheric circulation, making certain temperature and rainfall patterns more likely. We’ll dig into this a bit more after El Niño ends, but one potential La Niña impact has been getting some notice recently: La Niña tends to encourage a more active Atlantic hurricane season . It does this by reducing vertical wind shear—the change in wind from near the surface to high up in the atmosphere—over the Atlantic Ocean, making it easier for hurricanes to grow. Considering that the tropical Atlantic Ocean is already very warm, you can bet that NOAA’s hurricane outlook team is paying close attention to the likelihood of La Niña. NOAA’s early seasonal hurricane outlook will come out next month, and we’ll have a post about hurricanes on the ENSO Blog in June.

NOAA Climate Prediction Center forecast for each of the three possible ENSO categories for the next 8 overlapping 3-month seasons. Blue bars show the chances of La Niña, gray bars the chances for neutral, and red bars the chances for El Niño. Graph by Michelle L'Heureux.

Speaking of the bathwater Atlantic, let’s revisit the topic of the global average surface temperature . This metric isn’t particularly relevant to anyone’s day-to-day operation—when’s the last time you woke up in the morning and thought “I’ll just check the global mean surface temperature forecast for today!”—but it’s a critical monitoring tool for climate change.

El Niño’s warmer-than-average tropical Pacific tends to contribute to higher global average surface temperature, while La Niña’s cooler tropical Pacific usually contributes to relatively cooler years. However, emphasis is on the relative since more recent La Niña events have been among the top ten warmest years ever .  One can see that much of the global oceans are warmer than average, going beyond El Niño.

Like with ENSO, we track the global surface temperature anomaly as the departure from the long-term average. Unlike ENSO, a few different “long-term” base periods are used by different researchers and in different situations, including 1991–2020 (recent normal), 1901–2000 (the 20 th century), and 1850–1900 (the pre-industrial era). However, so long as you pay attention to which base period is being used, the message is still the same—the global average temperature anomaly is breaking records .

According to NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information , “the February global surface temperature was 2.52 °F (1.40 °C) above the 20th-century average of 53.8 °F (12.1 °C), making it the warmest February on record [dating back to 1850] and the ninth consecutive month of record-high global temperatures.”

This map from the National Center for Environmental Information shows where February 2024 temperatures fall in the 1951–2024 record. Record-warm February temperatures covered large areas of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Approximately 13.8% of the world's surface experienced record warm temperature this February, the highest percentage for February since the start of records in 1951.

Could a developing La Niña return the global average surface temperature closer to normal? Not very likely. We are just a few months in, and NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Outlook already predicts “a 45% chance that 2024 will rank as the warmest year on record and a 99% chance that it will rank in the top five.” For more info on how NCEI makes this prediction, check out this post .

The forecast from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) , a collection of state-of-the-art climate models from U.S. and Canadian centers, predicts only a slight reduction in the global surface temperature anomaly over the next several months. Note that the NMME prediction uses a base period of 1850–1900 to provide an estimate of the increase in global temperature over “pre-industrial” times .

Monthly average temperatures (red dots and line) rose to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average in late 2023. On average, forecasts from the North American Multi-model Ensemble (NMME) system indicate temperatures are likely to decline only slightly as El Niño continues to wane through early 2024. Graph by Kayla Besong based on data from NCEI and Emily Becker/IRI.

It could be another very interesting year, climate-wise. Stay tuna-ed for more from us on ENSO and global climate!

Add new comment

Summer 2024.

Despite the anticipated rapid shift from Nino to Nina this summer 2024, what can we expect for summer temperatures in the Pacific Northwest?  Is there any evidence of a pattern of warmer temperatures in summers following a 'strong Nino' (regardless of emerging neutral or Nina conditions), or is that just my imagination?

There isn't a clear warming…

There isn't a clear warming signal for summers after a strong El Nino.

But one thing of note is that summer trends have been on the warm side over the last thirty years

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/us-trends/tavg/sum

So in general the Pacific NW has been seeing warmer summers than average.

Thank you for this article,…

Thank you for this article, Emily. I liked the fish/shark analogy for explaining temperature at different depths.

The effect of the sun flares

Is there someone that investigate the earth temperature anomalies against the sun flare activities to determine if there is any relationship?

Hi Aletta, Yes scientists…

Yes scientists have looked into any relationship between the two and found that there really isn't any. Learn more:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/do-solar-storms-cause-…

Related Content

News & features, where does global warming go during la niña, the pushy pacific: variability and change in global temperature, time lapse of ocean temperatures shows el niño fading, hints of la niña, maps & data, el niño-southern oscillation - indicators and technical discussions, sst - enso region, monthly difference from average, sst - global, yearly difference from average, teaching climate, climate youth engagement, toolbox for teaching climate & energy, international climate change forum, climate resilience toolkit, sea surface temperature anomaly—december 2010, preparing for la niña, climate.gov's el niño & la niña page.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.