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 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 countries 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 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, nuclear 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 farming with methods that capture carbon in soil. (Full article...)

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Heads of delegations at the 2015 United Nations Paris conference.

The politics of climate change results from different perspectives on how to respond to climate change. Global warming is driven largely by the emissions of greenhouse gases due to human economic activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, certain industries like cement and steel production, and land use for agriculture and forestry. Since the Industrial Revolution, fossil fuels have provided the main source of energy for economic and technological development. The centrality of fossil fuels and other carbon-intensive industries has resulted in much resistance to climate friendly policy, despite widespread scientific consensus that such policy is necessary.

Climate change first emerged as a political issue in the 1970s. Efforts to mitigate climate change have been prominent on the international political agenda since the 1990s, and are also increasingly addressed at national and local level. Climate change is a complex global problem. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions contribute to global warming across the world, regardless of where the emissions originate. Yet the impact of global warming varies widely depending on how vulnerable a location or economy is to its effects. Global warming is on the whole having negative impact, which is predicted to worsen as heating increases. Ability to benefit from both fossil fuels and renewable energy sources vary substantially from nation to nation.

Different responsibilities, benefits and climate related threats faced by the world's nations contributed to early climate change conferences producing little beyond general statements of intent to address the problem, and non-binding commitments from the developed countries to reduce emissions. In the 21st century, there has been increased attention to mechanisms like climate finance in order for vulnerable nations to adapt to climate change. In some nations and local jurisdictions, climate friendly policies have been adopted that go well beyond what was committed to at international level. Yet local reductions in GHG emission that such policies achieve will not slow global warming unless the overall volume of GHG emission declines across the planet. (Full article...)

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Credit: NASA

Orbital photograph of human deforestation in progress in the Tierras Bajas project in eastern Bolivia

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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 –

Jyoti Kirit Parikh is the current Executive Director of Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe). She was a Member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change –India and is a recipient of Nobel Peace Prize awarded To IPCC authors in 2007. She was a Senior Professor at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai. She also worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria and served as a senior energy consultant at the National Institution for Transforming India (Niti Aayog) (1978–80). She was a visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of UNU, Tokyo (1995–96). She was the Acting Director of IGIDR for 1997-98. She has experience for nearly thirty years on energy and environment problems of the developing countries. (Full article...)

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General images

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

Image 1Correspondence between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ during the last 800,000 years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 2Top 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 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 4The 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 5CO₂ 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 6Carbon 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)
$Image 7Probability density function (PDF) of fraction of surface temperature trends since 1950 attributable to human activity, based on IPCC AR5 10.5 (from Attribution of recent climate change)$
Image 7Probability 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 8Earth'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 9This 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 10Schematic 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 11Charles Keeling, receiving the National Medal of Science from George W. Bush, in 2001 (from History of climate change science)
Image 12Scientific 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 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 14John 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 15This 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 16In 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 17Joseph Fourier (from History of climate change science)
Image 18Modeled 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 19Cumulative land-use change contributions to emissions, by region. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 20Contributions to climate change broken down by economic sector as of 2019. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 21The 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 22Milutin Milanković (from History of climate change science)
Image 23A 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 24Solar irradiance (yellow) plotted with temperature (red) since 1880. (from Attribution of recent climate change)
Image 25Graph 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 26Mean 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 27The greenhouse effect can be understood as a decrease in the efficiency of planetary cooling. The greenhouse effect is quantified as the portion of the radiation flux emitted by the surface minus that doesn't reach space, i.e., 40% or 159 W/m². Some emitted radiation is effectively cancelled out by downwelling radiation and so doesn't transfer heat. Evaporation and convection partially compensate for this reduction in surface cooling. Low temperatures at high altitudes limit the rate of thermal emissions to space. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 28Frequency 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 29Between 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 30Atmospheric 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 31The 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 32Air-sea exchange of CO₂ (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 33Scientific 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 34Concentration 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 35Radiative forcing drivers of climate change in year 2011, relative to pre-industrial (1750). (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 36Observed 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 37The US, China and Russia have cumulatively contributed the greatest amounts of CO₂ since 1850. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 38Energy 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 39CO₂ concentrations over the last 500 Million years (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 40James Hansen during his 1988 testimony to Congress, which alerted the public to the dangers of global warming (from History of climate change science)
Image 41Erratics, 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 42James Croll (from History of climate change science)
Image 43Photosynthesis changes sunlight into chemical energy, splits water to liberate O₂, and fixes CO₂ into sugar. (from Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere)
Image 44Greenhouse 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 45The 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 46Global 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)

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Climate change

Credit: NASA Multimedia

This video summarizes how climate change, associated with increased carbon dioxide levels, has affected plant growth.

Topics

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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.