Portal:Climate change

The Climate Change Portal

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 has an increasing impact on the environment. Deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified warming in the Arctic has contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline. 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 have been felt in recent years, with 2023 the warmest on record at +1.48 °C (2.66 °F). Additional warming will increase these impacts and can trigger tipping points, such as melting all 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.

Strategies to phase out fossil fuels involve conserving energy, generating electricity cleanly, and using electricity to power transportation, heat buildings, and operate industrial facilities. The electricity supply can be made cleaner and more plentiful by vastly increasing deployment of wind, and solar power, alongside other forms of renewable energy and nuclear power. 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...)

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Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much Earth's surface will warm for a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration. In technical terms, climate sensitivity is the average change in global mean surface temperature in response to a radiative forcing, which drives a difference between Earth's incoming and outgoing energy. Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science, and a focus area for climate scientists, who want to understand the ultimate consequences of anthropogenic global warming.

The Earth's surface warms as a direct consequence of increased atmospheric CO₂, as well as increased concentrations of other greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide and methane. The increasing temperatures have secondary effects on the climate system, such as an increase in atmospheric water vapour, which is itself also a greenhouse gas. Scientists do not know exactly how strong the climate feedbacks are and it is difficult to predict the precise amount of warming that will result from a given increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. If climate sensitivity turns out to be on the high side of scientific estimates, the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to below 2 °C (3.6 °F) will be difficult to achieve.

The two primary types of climate sensitivity are the shorter-term "transient climate response", the increase in global average temperature that is expected to have occurred at a time when the atmospheric CO₂ concentration has doubled, and "equilibrium climate sensitivity", the higher long-term increase in global average temperature expected to occur after the effects of a doubled CO₂ concentration have had time to reach a steady state. Climate sensitivity is typically estimated in three ways: using direct observations of temperature and levels of greenhouse gases taken during the industrial age, using indirectly-estimated temperature and other measurements from the Earth's more distant past, and computer modelling the various aspects of the climate system with computers. (Full article...)

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Antarctica

Credit: NASA

Image showing the temperature trend in Antarctica between 1957 and 2006

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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.
Climate modellers Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann win Nobel Prize.

Selected biography –

Lavanya Rajamani (born 1973) is an Indian lawyer, author and professor whose area of expertise is international climate change law, environmental law, and policy. She is currently a professor of International Environmental Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, a Yamani Fellow in Public International Law at St Peter's College, Oxford, and a visiting professor at the Centre for Policy Research.

She was the first Rhodes Scholar of National Law School of India University and is the youngest Indian academic to be invited to offer a course in public international law at the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands. (Full article...)

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General images

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

Image 1Between 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 2Erratics, 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 3CO₂ concentrations over the last 500 Million years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 4James Croll (from History of climate change science)
Image 5A 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 6Increase in the Earth's non-cloud Greenhouse Effect (2000-2022) based on NASA CERES satellite data. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 7Earth'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 8Cumulative land-use change contributions to emissions, by region. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 9Solar irradiance (yellow) plotted with temperature (red) since 1880. (from History of climate change science)
Image 10In 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 11Modeled 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 History of climate change science)
Image 12Radiative forcing drivers of climate change in year 2011, relative to pre-industrial (1750). (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 13John 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 14Correspondence between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ during the last 800,000 years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 15Eunice Newton Foote recognized carbon dioxide's heat-capturing effect in 1856, appreciating its implications for the planet. (from History of climate change science)
Image 16The 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 17Over 400,000 years of ice core data: Graph of CO₂ (green), reconstructed temperature (blue) and dust (red) from the Vostok ice core (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 18CO₂ 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 19Earth'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 20Annual 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 21Carbon 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 22Photosynthesis changes sunlight into chemical energy, splits water to liberate O₂, and fixes CO₂ into sugar. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 23The 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 24James Hansen during his 1988 testimony to Congress, which alerted the public to the dangers of global warming (from History of climate change science)
Image 25Atmospheric 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 26Top 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 27Exterior of a Stevenson screen used for temperature measurements on land stations. (from History of climate change science)
Image 28Global 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 29Since 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 30Frequency 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 31Schematic drawing of Earth's excess heat inventory and energy imbalance for two recent time periods. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 32This 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 33The 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 34Observed 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 35Greenhouse 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 36Air-sea exchange of CO₂ (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 37Concentration 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 38The 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 39Joseph Fourier (from History of climate change science)
Image 40Terms 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 41CO₂ 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 42Energy 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 43Scientific 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 44Charles Keeling, receiving the National Medal of Science from George W. Bush, in 2001 (from History of climate change science)
Image 45Loss of global ice mass since 1994 and accompanying sea level rise (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 46Mean 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 47Human fingerprints for global warming (summary of observational evidence that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing the climate to warm). (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 48Milutin Milanković (from History of climate change science)
Image 49This 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 50The US, China and Russia have cumulatively contributed the greatest amounts of CO₂ since 1850. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 51The 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 52Longwave-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)

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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

"GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (v4)". NASA. Retrieved 12 January 2024.
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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This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[1] "GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (v4)". NASA. Retrieved 12 January 2024.

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

[3] 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.