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 add to 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.

Climate change is causing a range of increasing impacts on the environment. Deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified 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 increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, 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. Societies and ecosystems will experience more severe risks without action to limit warming. Adapting to climate change through efforts like flood control measures or drought-resistant crops partially reduces climate change risks, although some limits to adaptation have already been reached. Poorer communities are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet 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 reducing energy use and generating electricity from low-carbon sources rather than burning fossil fuels. This change includes phasing out coal and natural gas fired power plants while vastly increasing electricity generated from wind, solar, and nuclear power. This electricity 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 farming with methods that capture carbon in soil. (Full article...)

Selected article –

Google trends data shows that, following the 2006 release of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, searches for the term climate crisis increased, with a resurgence beginning in late 2018. Also graphed: searches for the term climate emergency.

Climate crisis is a term describing global warming and climate change, and their impacts. This term and the term climate emergency have been used to describe the threat of global warming to humanity and the planet, and to urge aggressive climate change mitigation. In the scientific journal BioScience, a January 2020 article, endorsed by over 11,000 scientists worldwide, stated that "the climate crisis has arrived" and that an "immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."

The term is applied by those who "believe it evokes the gravity of the threats the planet faces from continued greenhouse gas emissions and can help spur the kind of political willpower that has long been missing from climate advocacy". They believe that, much as global warming drew out more emotional engagement and support for action than climate change, calling climate change a crisis could have an even stronger impact.

A study has shown that the term invokes a strong emotional response in conveying a sense of urgency; some caution that this response may be counter-productive, and may cause a backlash effect due to perceptions of alarmist exaggeration. (Full article...)

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Vegetation

Credit: NASA image of the day gallery

Global vegetation – Food, fuel and shelter. Vegetation is one of the most important requirements for human populations around the world. Satellites monitor how "green" different parts of the planet are and how that greenness changes over time. These observations help scientists understand the influence of natural cycles, such as drought and pest outbreaks, on vegetation, as well as human influences, such as land-clearing and global warming.

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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 –

Official portrait, 2010

Carol Martha Browner (born December 16, 1955) is an American lawyer, environmentalist, and businesswoman, who served as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2011. Browner previously served as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001. She currently works as a Senior Counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy firm.

Browner grew up in Florida and graduated from the University of Florida and the University of Florida College of Law. After working for the Florida House of Representatives, she was employed by Citizen Action in Washington, D.C. She became a legislative assistant for Senators Lawton Chiles and Al Gore. Browner then headed the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation from 1991 to 1993, where she turned it into one of the most active departments in the state government.

She was the longest-serving administrator in the history of the EPA, staying through both terms of the Clinton presidency. During her tenure, she reorganized the agency's enforcement structure and oversaw two new programs designed to create flexible partnerships with industry as an alternative to traditional regulation. She started a successful program to deal with contaminated lands in urban areas. She took the lead within the administration in defending existing environmental laws and budgets and was the driving force behind a stringent tightening of air quality standards that led to a prolonged political and legal battle. (Full article...)

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General images

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

Image 1Longwave-infrared absorption coefficients of water vapor and carbon dioxide. For wavelengths near 15-microns, CO₂ is a much stronger absorber than water vapor. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 2Modeled 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 3This 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 4Radiative forcing drivers of climate change in year 2011, relative to pre-industrial (1750). (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 5Contributions to climate change broken down by economic sector as of 2019. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 6Exterior of a Stevenson screen used for temperature measurements on land stations. (from History of climate change science)
Image 7Annual 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)
$Image 8Probability density function (PDF) of fraction of surface temperature trends since 1950 attributable to human activity, based on IPCC AR5 10.5 (from Attribution of recent climate change)$
Image 8Probability 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 9The 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 10Since 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 11CO₂ reduces the flux of thermal radiation emitted to space (causing the large dip near 667 cm⁻¹), thereby contributing to the greenhouse effect. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 12CO₂ concentrations over the last 500 Million years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 13Earth's energy balance and imbalance, showing where the excess energy goes: Outgoing radiation is decreasing owing to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to Earth's energy imbalance of about 460 TW. The percentage going into each domain of the climate system is also indicated. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 14Concentration 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 15Between 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 16Schematic drawing of Earth's excess heat inventory and energy imbalance for two recent time periods. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 17James Hansen during his 1988 testimony to Congress, which alerted the public to the dangers of global warming (from History of climate change science)
Image 18John 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 19The US, China and Russia have cumulatively contributed the greatest amounts of CO₂ since 1850. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 20The 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 21In 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 22The impact of the greenhouse effect on climate was presented to the public early in the 20th century, as succinctly described in this 1912 Popular Mechanics article. (from History of climate change science)
Image 23Top 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 24Earth's energy budget (in in W/m²) determines the climate. It is the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation and can be measured by satellites. The Earth's energy imbalance is the "net absorbed" energy amount and grew from +0.6 W/m² (2009 est.) to above +1.0 W/m² in 2019. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 25Observed 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 26Increase in the Earth's non-cloud Greenhouse Effect (2000-2022) based on NASA CERES satellite data. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 27Graph 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 28Charles Keeling, receiving the National Medal of Science from George W. Bush, in 2001 (from History of climate change science)
Image 29CO₂ 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 30Scientific 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 31Mean 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 32Correspondence between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ during the last 800,000 years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 33The 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 34Loss of global ice mass since 1994 and accompanying sea level rise (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 35Atmospheric 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 36The 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 37Erratics, 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 38Solar irradiance (yellow) plotted with temperature (red) since 1880. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 39This 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 40Photosynthesis changes sunlight into chemical energy, splits water to liberate O₂, and fixes CO₂ into sugar. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 41James Croll (from History of climate change science)
Image 42Terms like "climate emergency" and climate crisis" have often been used by activists, and are increasingly found in academic papers. (from History of climate change science)
Image 43Air-sea exchange of CO₂ (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 44A 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 45Cumulative land-use change contributions to emissions, by region. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 46Greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through the atmosphere, heating the planet, but then absorb and redirect the infrared radiation (heat) the planet emits (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 47Global 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 48Frequency 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 49Carbon 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 50Milutin Milanković (from History of climate change science)
Image 51Joseph Fourier (from History of climate change science)
Image 52Energy flows between space, the atmosphere, and Earth's surface. Rising greenhouse gas levels are contributing to an energy imbalance. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 53Eunice Newton Foote recognized carbon dioxide's heat-capturing effect in 1856, appreciating its implications for the planet. (from History of climate change science)

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Glacier retreat

Credit: U.S. Geological Survey – Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK) Authors: Myrna H. P. Hall and Daniel B. Fagre, 2003

Animation of Modeled Climate-Induced Glacier Change in Glacier National Park, 1850- 2100. The simulation reflects the predicted exponential rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations, a 2xCO₂ "global warming" scenario, with a concurrent warming of 2-3 degrees centigrade (4-5 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2050. In addition it assumes that precipitation, primarily in the form of rain, will increase over the same time period about 10 percent (based on the research of Dr. Steven Running, University of Montana).

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.

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