Portal:Climate change

The Climate Change Portal

Average surface air temperatures from 2011 to 2020 compared to the 1951-1980 average. Source: NASA.

In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global average temperature is more rapid than previous changes, and is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices increase greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide and methane. Greenhouse gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight. Larger amounts of these gases trap more heat in Earth's lower atmosphere, causing global warming.

Due to climate change, deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Increased warming in the Arctic has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.

Climate change threatens people with food and water scarcity, increased flooding, extreme heat, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Communities may adapt to climate change through efforts like coastline protection or expanding access to air conditioning, but some impacts are unavoidable. Poorer countries are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet they have the least ability to adapt and are most vulnerable to climate change.

Many climate change impacts are already felt at the current 1.2 °C (2.2 °F) level of warming. Additional warming will increase these impacts and can trigger tipping points, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations collectively agreed to keep warming "well under 2 °C". However, with pledges made under the Agreement, global warming would still reach about 2.7 °C (4.9 °F) by the end of the century. Limiting warming to 1.5 °C will require halving emissions by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

Reducing emissions requires generating electricity from low-carbon sources rather than burning fossil fuels. This change includes phasing out coal and natural gas fired power plants, vastly increasing use of wind, solar, and other types of renewable energy, and reducing energy use. Electricity generated from non-carbon-emitting sources will need to replace fossil fuels for powering transportation, heating buildings, and operating industrial facilities. Carbon can also be removed from the atmosphere, for instance by increasing forest cover and by farming with methods that capture carbon in soil. (Full article...)

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Global sea level rise from 1880 to 2015.

Between 1901 and 2018, the globally averaged sea level rose by 15–25 cm (6–10 in), or 1–2 mm per year on average. This rate is accelerating, and sea levels are now rising by 3.7 mm (0.146 inches) per year. This is caused by human-induced climate change, as it continually heats (and therefore expands) the ocean and melts land-based ice sheets and glaciers. Between 1993 and 2018, the thermal expansion of water contributed 42% to sea level rise (SLR); melting of temperate glaciers, 21%; Greenland, 15%; and Antarctica, 8%. Because sea level rise lags changes in Earth temperature, it will continue to accelerate between now and 2050 purely in response to warming which has already occurred: whether it continues to accelerate after that is dependent on the human greenhouse gas emissions. Even if sea level rise does not accelerate, it will continue for a very long time: over the next 2000 years, it is projected to amount to 2–3 m (7–10 ft) if global warming is limited to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), to 2–6 m (7–20 ft) if it peaks at 2 °C (3.6 °F) and to 19–22 metres (62–72 ft) if it peaks at 5 °C (9.0 °F).

The rising seas pose both a direct risk of flooding unprotected areas and indirect threats of higher storm surges, king tides, and tsunamis. They are also associated with the detrimental second-order effects such as the loss of coastal ecosystems like mangroves, losses in crop production due to freshwater salinization of groundwater and irrigation water or the disruption of sea trade due to damaged ports. Globally, just the projected sea level rise by 2050 will expose places currently inhabited by tens of millions of people to annual flooding and this can increase to hundreds of millions in the latter decades of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced drastically. While modest increases in sea level are likely to be offset when cities adapt by constructing sea walls or through relocating people, many coastal areas have large population growth, which results in more people at risk from sea level rise. Later in the century, millions of people will be affected in cities such as Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka and Shanghai under the warming of 3 °C (5.4 °F), which is close to the current trajectory.

While the rise in sea levels ultimately impacts every coastal and island population on Earth, it does not occur uniformly due to local factors like tides, currents, storms, tectonic effects and land subsidence. Moreover, the differences in resilience and adaptive capacity of ecosystems, sectors, and countries again mean that the impacts will be highly variable. For instance, sea level rise along US coasts (and along the US East Coast in particular) is already higher than the global average, and it is expected to be 2 to 3 times greater than the global average by the end of the century. At the same time, Asia will be the region where sea level rise would impact the most people: eight Asian countries — Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam — account for 70% of the global population exposed to sea level rise and land subsidence. Altogether, out of the 20 countries with the greatest exposure to sea level rise, 12 are in Asia. Finally, the greatest near-term impact on human populations will occur in the low-lying Caribbean and Pacific islands — many of those would be rendered uninhabitable by sea level rise later this century. (Full article...)

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Cloud cover

Image: Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA

An image of the Earth's cloud cover, which is the amount of sky obscured by clouds, based largely on observations from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the Terra satellite. Clouds play multiple critical roles in the climate system. In particular, being bright objects in the visible part of sunlight, they efficiently reflect light to space and thus contribute to the cooling of the planet.

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WikiProject Climate change	WikiProject Environment	WikiProject Globalization

In the news

From the Wikinews Climate change category

Additional News

Monsoons in India become more erratic.[1]
Climate modellers Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann win Nobel Prize.[2]

Selected biography –

Katharine Anne Scott Hayhoe (born 1972) is a Canadian atmospheric scientist. She is a Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor and an Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law in the Texas Tech University Department of Political Science. In 2021, Hayhoe joined the Nature Conservancy as Chief Scientist. (Full article...)

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General images

The following are images from various climate-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Atmospheric CO₂ concentrations measured at Mauna Loa Observatory from 1958 to 2022 (also called the Keeling Curve). Carbon dioxide concentrations have varied widely over the Earth's 4.54 billion year history. However, in 2013 the daily mean concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million (ppmv) - this level has never been reached since the mid-Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 2Solar irradiance (yellow) plotted with temperature (red) since 1880. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 3Since the 1980s, global average surface temperatures during a given decade have almost always been higher than the average temperature in the preceding decade. (from History of climate change science)
Image 4This image shows three examples of internal climate variability measured between 1950 and 2012: the El Niño–Southern oscillation, the Arctic oscillation, and the North Atlantic oscillation. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 5Scientific consensus on causation: Academic studies of scientific agreement on human-caused global warming among climate experts (2010–2015) reflect that the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science. A 2019 study found scientific consensus to be at 100%, and a 2021 study concluded that consensus exceeded 99%. Another 2021 study found that 98.7% of climate experts indicated that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 6Concentration of atmospheric CO₂ over the last 40,000 years, from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present day. The current rate of increase is much higher than at any point during the last deglaciation. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 7Photosynthesis changes sunlight into chemical energy, splits water to liberate O₂, and fixes CO₂ into sugar. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 8Erratics, boulders deposited by glaciers far from any existing glaciers, led geologists to the conclusion that climate had changed in the past. (from History of climate change science)
Image 9Global average temperatures show that the Medieval Warm Period was not a planet-wide phenomenon, and that the Little Ice Age was not a distinct planet-wide time period but rather the end of a long temperature decline that preceded recent global warming. (from Temperature record of the last 2,000 years)
Image 10Carbon dioxide observations from 2005 to 2014 showing the seasonal variations and the difference between northern and southern hemispheres (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 11CO₂ sources and sinks since 1880. While there is little debate that excess carbon dioxide in the industrial era has mostly come from burning fossil fuels, the future strength of land and ocean carbon sinks is an area of study. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 12Air-sea exchange of CO₂ (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 13Annual CO₂ flows from anthropogenic sources (left) into Earth's atmosphere, land, and ocean sinks (right) since year 1960. Units in equivalent gigatonnes carbon per year. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 14James Hansen during his 1988 testimony to Congress, which alerted the public to the dangers of global warming (from History of climate change science)
Image 15Mean temperature anomalies during the period 1965 to 1975 with respect to the average temperatures from 1937 to 1946. This dataset was not available at the time. (from History of climate change science)
Image 16The greenhouse effect traps infrared heat, and ultimately raises Earth's surface temperatures. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 17This diagram of the fast carbon cycle shows the movement of carbon between land, atmosphere, and oceans in billions of metric tons of carbon per year. Yellow numbers are natural fluxes, red are human contributions, white are stored carbon. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 18Charles Keeling, receiving the National Medal of Science from George W. Bush, in 2001 (from History of climate change science)
Image 19The US, China and Russia have cumulatively contributed the greatest amounts of CO₂ since 1850. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 20Schematic drawing of Earth's excess heat inventory as it relates to the planet's energy imbalance for two recent time periods. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 21Between 1850 and 2019 the Global Carbon Project estimates that about 2/3rds of excess carbon dioxide emissions have been caused by burning fossil fuels, and a little less than half of that has stayed in the atmosphere. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 22CO₂ concentrations over the last 500 Million years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 23James Croll (from History of climate change science)
Image 24Probability density function (PDF) of fraction of surface temperature trends since 1950 attributable to human activity, based on IPCC AR5 10.5 (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 25Cumulative land-use change contributions to emissions, by region. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 26The growth in Earth's energy imbalance from satellite and in situ measurements (2005–2019). A rate of +1.0 W/m² summed over the planet's surface equates to a continuous heat uptake of about 500 terawatts (~0.3% of the incident solar radiation). (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 27Energy flows between space, the atmosphere, and Earth's surface. Rising greenhouse gas levels are contributing to an energy imbalance of about +0.9 W/m². (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 28Top panel: Observed global average temperature change (1870— ).
Bottom panel: Data from the Fourth National Climate Assessment is merged for display on the same scale to emphasize relative strengths of forces affecting temperature change. Human-caused forces have increasingly dominated. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 29Earth's climate is largely determined by the planet's energy budget, i.e., the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation. It is measured by satellites and shown in W/m². The imbalance (or rate of global heating; shown in figure as the "net absorbed" amount) grew from +0.6 W/m² (2009 est.) to above +1.0 W/m² in 2019. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 30Modeled simulation of the effect of various factors (including GHGs, Solar irradiance) singly and in combination, showing in particular that solar activity produces a small and nearly uniform warming, unlike what is observed. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 31Scientific consensus on causation: Academic studies of scientific agreement on human-caused global warming among climate experts (2010–2015) reflect that the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science. A 2019 study found scientific consensus to be at 100%, and a 2021 study concluded that consensus exceeded 99%. Another 2021 study found that 98.7% of climate experts indicated that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity. (from History of climate change science)
Image 32A Sankey diagram illustrating a balanced example of Earth's energy budget. Line thickness is linearly proportional to relative amount of energy. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 33Correspondence between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ during the last 800,000 years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 34Radiative forcing drivers of climate change in year 2011, relative to pre-industrial (1750). (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 35The rising accumulation of energy in the oceanic, land, ice, and atmospheric components of Earth's climate system since 1960. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 36In detection and attribution, natural factors include changes in the Sun's output and volcanic eruptions, as well as natural modes of variability such as El Niño and La Niña. Human factors include the emissions of heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases and particulates as well as clearing of forests and other land-use changes. Figure source: NOAA NCDC. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 37Frequency of occurrence (vertical axis) of local June–July–August temperature anomalies (relative to 1951–1980 mean) for Northern Hemisphere land in units of local standard deviation (horizontal axis). According to Hansen et al. (2012), the distribution of anomalies has shifted to the right as a consequence of global warming, meaning that unusually hot summers have become more common. This is analogous to the rolling of a dice: cool summers now cover only half of one side of a six-sided die, white covers one side, red covers four sides, and an extremely hot (red-brown) anomaly covers half of one side. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 38Graph of CO₂ (green), reconstructed temperature (blue) and dust (red) from the Vostok ice core for the past 420,000 years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 39The rate of global tree cover loss has approximately doubled since 2001, to an annual loss approaching an area the size of Italy. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 40John Tyndall's ratio spectrophotometer (drawing from 1861) measured how much infrared radiation was absorbed and emitted by various gases filling its central tube. (from History of climate change science)
Image 41Joseph Fourier (from History of climate change science)
Image 42Greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through the atmosphere, heating the planet, but then absorb and re-radiate the infrared radiation (heat) the planet emits (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 43Observed temperature from NASA vs the 1850–1900 average used by the IPCC as a pre-industrial baseline. The primary driver for increased global temperatures in the industrial era is human activity, with natural forces adding variability. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 44The Keeling Curve shows the long-term increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations from 1958–2018. Monthly CO₂ measurements display seasonal oscillations in an upward trend. Each year's maximum occurs during the Northern Hemisphere's late spring. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 45Milutin Milanković (from History of climate change science)
Image 46Contribution to climate change broken down by economic sectors, according to the IPCC AR5 report. (from Attribution of recent climate change)

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Global Historical Climatology Network

Credit: Created by Robert A. Rohde from data published by the U.S. NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Division

The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) is one of the primary reference compilations of temperature data used for climatology, and is the foundation of the GISTEMP Temperature Record. This map shows the 7,280 fixed temperature stations in the GHCN catalog color coded by the length of the available record. Sites that are actively updated in the database (2,277) are marked as "active" and shown in large symbols, other sites are marked as "historical" and shown in small symbols. In some cases, the "historical" sites are still collecting data but due to reporting and data processing delays (of more than a decade in some cases) they do not contribute to current temperature estimates. As is evident from this plot, the most densely instrumented portion of the globe is in the United States, while Antarctica is the most sparsely instrumented land area. Parts of the Pacific and other oceans are more isolated from fixed temperature stations, but this is supplemented by volunteer observing ships that record temperature information during their normal travels. This image shows 3,832 records longer than 50 years, 1,656 records longer than 100 years, and 226 records longer than 150 years. The longest record in the collection began in Berlin in 1701 and is still collected in the present day.

Topics

Web resources

Research

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies – Global change research
NOAA State of the Climate Report – U.S. and global monthly state of the climate reports
Climate Change at the National Academies — repository for reports
Nature Reports Climate Change — free-access web resource
Met Office: Climate change — UK National Weather Service

Educational

What Is Global Warming? — by National Geographic
Global Climate Change Indicators – from NOAA
NOAA Climate Services – from NOAA
Global Warming Frequently Asked Questions — from NOAA
Global climate change — from BBC Bitesize(help with school exam revision)

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References

Bhargav, Vishal (2021-10-11). "Climate Change Is Making India's Monsoon More Erratic". www.indiaspend.com. Retrieved 2021-10-11.
Tiwari, Dr Pushp Raj; Conversation, The. "Nobel prize: Why climate modellers deserved the physics award – they've been proved right again and again". phys.org. Retrieved 2021-10-11.

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[1] Bhargav, Vishal (2021-10-11). "Climate Change Is Making India's Monsoon More Erratic". www.indiaspend.com. Retrieved 2021-10-11.

[2] Tiwari, Dr Pushp Raj; Conversation, The. "Nobel prize: Why climate modellers deserved the physics award – they've been proved right again and again". phys.org. Retrieved 2021-10-11.