Portal:Climate change

The Climate Change Portal

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Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. In a broader sense, climate change also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The modern-day rise in global temperatures is driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel (coal, oil and natural gas) burning since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices release greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere now has roughly 50% more carbon dioxide, the main gas driving global warming, than it did at the end of the pre-industrial era, reaching levels not seen for millions of years.

Climate change has an increasingly large impact on the environment. 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 minimize 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 calls climate change one of the biggest threats 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 observed in the first decades of the 21st century, with 2024 the warmest on record at +1.60 °C (2.88 °F) since regular tracking began in 1850. 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 2.8 °C (5.0 °F) by the end of the century.

There is widespread support for climate action worldwide, and most countries aim to stop emitting carbon dioxide. Fossil fuels can be phased out by ending their subsidies, conserving energy and switching to energy sources that do not produce significant carbon pollution. These energy sources include wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power. Cleanly generated electricity can replace fossil fuels for powering transportation, heating buildings, and running industrial processes. Carbon can also be removed from the atmosphere, for instance by increasing forest cover and farming with methods that store carbon in soil. (Full article...)

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Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science and describes how much Earth's surface will warm in response to a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration. Its formal definition is: "The change in the surface temperature in response to a change in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration or other radiative forcing." This concept helps scientists understand the extent and magnitude of the effects of climate change.

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. These secondary effects are called climate feedbacks. Self-reinforcing feedbacks include for example the melting of sunlight-reflecting ice as well as higher evapotranspiration. The latter effect increases average atmospheric water vapour, which is itself a greenhouse gas.

Scientists do not know exactly how strong these climate feedbacks are. Therefore, 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 even more difficult to achieve. (Full article...)

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Credit: GRID-Arendal

Graph summarizing some of the expected impacts of Global Warming according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperature deviations are from 1990 readings.

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WikiProject Climate change	WikiProject Environment	WikiProject Globalization

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Lavanya Rajamani is an Indian lawyer and academic whose area of expertise is international climate change law, public international law, and 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.

She is amongst the most prominent scholars in the field of international environmental law and has been considered to be "one of the biggest names" in the field. She is also 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 1Meat from cattle and sheep have the highest emissions intensity of any agricultural commodity. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 2Annual 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 the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 3The 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 4Top 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 Causes of climate change)
Image 5Between 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 the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 6Correspondence between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ during the last 800,000 years (from Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 7Concentration 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 the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 8Physical drivers of global warming that has happened so far. Future global warming potential for long lived drivers like carbon dioxide emissions is not represented. Whiskers on each bar show the possible error range. (from Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 9Exterior of a Stevenson screen used for temperature measurements on land stations. (from History of climate change science)
Image 10Erratics, 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 11Atmospheric CO₂ concentration measured at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii from 1958 to 2023 (also called the Keeling Curve). The rise in CO₂ over that time period is clearly visible. The concentration is expressed as μmole per mole, or ppm. (from Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 12Graphs of carbon dioxide concentration and temperature over time. (from Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 13Main sources of global methane emissions (2008–2017) according to the Global Carbon Project (from Causes of climate change)
Image 14Observed temperature 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 Causes of climate change)
Image 15The Keeling Curve shows the long-term increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations since 1958. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 16Eunice Newton Foote recognized carbon dioxide's heat-capturing effect in 1856, appreciating its implications for the planet. (from History of climate change science)
Image 17Cumulative land-use change contributions to CO₂ emissions, by region. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 18James Hansen during his 1988 testimony to Congress, which alerted the public to the dangers of global warming (from History of climate change science)
Image 19Sea ice reflects 50% to 70% of incoming sunlight, while the ocean, being darker, reflects only 6%. As an area of sea ice melts and exposes more ocean, more heat is absorbed by the ocean, raising temperatures that melt still more ice. This is a positive feedback process. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 20Warming influence of atmospheric greenhouse gases has nearly doubled since 1979, with carbon dioxide and methane being the dominant drivers. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 21Joseph Fourier (from History of climate change science)
Image 22The 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 23The Fourth National Climate Assessment ("NCA4", USGCRP, 2017) includes charts illustrating that neither solar nor volcanic activity can explain the observed warming. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 24James Croll (from History of climate change science)
Image 25Schematic drawing of Earth's excess heat inventory and energy imbalance for two recent time periods (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 26Since 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 27Earth's energy budget (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. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 28Brown bars indicate drivers that increase global warming, and blue bars indicate those that decrease global warming. Future global warming potential for long lived drivers like carbon dioxide emissions is not represented. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 29This diagram of the 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 the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 30Terms 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 31Anthropogenic global warming—not global cooling or "imminent ice ages"—dominated peer-reviewed literature in the 1970s, contrary to false claims that climate science subsequently reversed its consensus. (from History of climate change science)
Image 32CO₂ concentrations over the last 500 million years (from Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 33Greenhouse 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 the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 34Milutin Milanković (from History of climate change science)
Image 35Human fingerprints for global warming (summary of observational evidence that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing the climate to warm). (from Causes of climate change)
Image 36The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been increasing in progressively greater amounts. (from Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 37The rate of global tree cover loss has approximately doubled since 2001, to an annual loss approaching an area the size of Italy. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 38Earth'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 39Earth heating estimates from a combination of space altimetry and space gravimetry (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 40Air-sea exchange of CO₂ (from Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 41Earth's energy imbalance has increased in the 21st century, reaching values twice that of prior estimates from the IPCC. The ability to observe this imbalance is deteriorating because satellites are being decommissioned. (from Earth's energy budget)
Image 42Scientific 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 43Over 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 the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 44Mean 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 45CO₂ 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 Causes of climate change)
Image 46The 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 47Longwave-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 the atmosphere of Earth)
Image 48Solar irradiance (yellow) plotted with temperature (red) since 1880. (from History of climate change science)
Image 49Energy flows between space, the atmosphere, and Earth's surface. Rising greenhouse gas levels are contributing to an energy imbalance. (from Causes of climate change)
Image 50Air pollution has substantially increased the presence of aerosols in the atmosphere when compared to the preindustrial background levels. Different types of particles have different effects, but overall, cooling from aerosols formed by sulfur dioxide emissions has the overwhelming impact. However, the complexity of aerosol interactions in atmospheric layers makes the exact strength of cooling very difficult to estimate. (from Causes of climate change)

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... that global warming of the average air temperature rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.3 ± 0.32 °F) during the past century?

(Pictured left: Animated global map of monthly long term mean surface air temperature (Mollweide projection))

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Little Sahara Recreation Area

Credit: Mike Scalora

A view of Sand Mountain campground from the side of Sand Mountain at Little Sahara Recreation Area in Utah. The Little Sahara sand dunes are remnants of a large river delta formed by the Sevier River from about 12,500 to 20,000 years ago. The river emptied into ancient Lake Bonneville near the present day mouth of Leamington Canyon. After Lake Bonneville receded, winds transported the sand from the river delta to the current location. The dunes are still moving 5 to 9 feet (1.5 to 3 m) per year. The area is home to typical Great Basin desert wildlife including mule deer, pronghorn antelope, snakes, lizards and birds of prey. Great horned owls make their home among juniper trees in the Rockwell Natural Area.