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6 Claims Made by Climate Change Skeptics—and How to Respond

Filed Under: Everyday actions | Tagged: Climate Last updated November 1, 2022

It’s hard to believe, but apparently more than a few climate change deniers still roam our ever-heating planet. According to a recent study in the esteemed science journal PLOS , people systematically understate their disbelief in human-caused climate change when answering surveys, so skepticism is more prevalent than many of us realize.

Given the urgency of the climate crisis, it’s crucial that we all do our part to educate any doubters we might encounter. That’s why the Rainforest Alliance has compiled six arguments commonly made by climate change deniers, along with science-backed responses you can deploy to convince them of the truth: that climate change is real, accelerating, and that we need to take bold action ASAP.

1. Climate change denier claim: “This is the coldest winter we’ve had in years! So much for global warming.”

There’s a difference between climate and weather: Weather fluctuates day in, day out, whereas climate refers to long term trends—and the overall trend is clearly and indisputably a warming one. While the impacts of climate change have only just begun to hit the Global North, farmers in the tropics have been contending with impacts—from droughts to floods to a proliferation of crop-destroying pests—for years. That’s why the Rainforest Alliance works with farmers to take a climate-smart approach . That means first assessing a farm’s particular climate risks, taking the crop and local ecosystem into account, then finding the right combination of tools to manage the farms climate challenges. That’s what makes climate-smart agriculture “smart.”

Together, we’re building a future where people and nature thrive. Sign up today and join our movement…

2. “Climate change is natural and normal—it’s happened at other points in history.”

It’s true that there have been periods of global warming and cooling—also related to spikes and lulls in greenhouse gases—during the Earth’s long history. But those historic increases in CO 2 should be a warning to us: They led to serious environmental disruptions, including mass extinctions. Today, humans are emitting greenhouse gases at a far higher rate than any previous increase in history . (Before you collapse into a puddle of despair, however, find out about our work to promote natural climate solutions , like community forestry and regenerative agriculture.)

3. “There’s no consensus among scientists that climate change is real.”

Wrong. There is nearly 100 percent agreement among scientists. Moreover, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that global warming is accelerating, and will reach 1.C above pre-Industrial levels around 2030 —a full decade earlier than previously forecast .

4. “Plants and animals can adapt.”

Wrong again. Because human-caused climate change is happening so rapidly, species simply don’t have time to adapt . Frogs tell the story best: With their semi-permeable skin, unprotected eggs, and reliance on external temperatures to regulate their own, they are often among the first species to die off when ecosystems tip out of balance—and they’re dying off in droves. The Rainforest Alliance chose a frog as its mascot more than 30 years ago precisely because it’s a bio-indicator: A healthy frog population signals a healthy ecosystem, which is what we’ve been working to promote—along with thriving communities—since 1987.

5. “Climate change is good for us.”

It’s hard to even know where to begin to address this statement by climate change deniers, especially when you think about the human cost of a warming planet. The evidence points to a clear link between climate change and a surge in modern slavery : When crop failures, drought, floods, or fires wipe out livelihoods and homes, people migrate in the hopes of improving their lot—but can find themselves vulnerable to human trafficking and forced labor and other human rights abuses. And the overall economic cost is staggering: The global economy could lose $23 trillion to climate change by 2050 .

6. “OK, maybe climate change is real, but there’s nothing to be done—it’s too late.”

It’s true that we don’t have a moment to waste, but it’s not too late. If governments, business, and individuals begin taking drastic action now, we can keep warming within the 1.5C target set by the Paris Agreement. What can you do to make sure that happens? A lot. Here are actions you can take —both to make your daily life more sustainable and to push governments and companies to act—to secure a better future.

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How to use critical thinking to spot false climate claims

Lecturer in Critical Thinking, Director of the UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland

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Peter Ellerton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Queensland provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Much of the public discussion about climate science consists of a stream of assertions. The climate is changing or it isn’t; carbon dioxide causes global warming or it doesn’t; humans are partly responsible or they are not; scientists have a rigorous process of peer review or they don’t, and so on.

Despite scientists’ best efforts at communicating with the public, not everyone knows enough about the underlying science to make a call one way or the other. Not only is climate science very complex, but it has also been targeted by deliberate obfuscation campaigns.

Read more: A brief history of fossil-fuelled climate denial

If we lack the expertise to evaluate the detail behind a claim, we typically substitute judgment about something complex (like climate science) with judgment about something simple (the character of people who speak about climate science).

But there are ways to analyse the strength of an argument without needing specialist knowledge. My colleagues, Dave Kinkead from the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project and John Cook from George Mason University in the US, and I published a paper yesterday in Environmental Research Letters on a critical thinking approach to climate change denial.

We applied this simple method to 42 common climate-contrarian arguments, and found that all of them contained errors in reasoning that are independent of the science itself.

In the video abstract for the paper, we outline an example of our approach, which can be described in six simple steps.

Six steps to evaluate contrarian climate claims

Identify the claim : First, identify as simply as possible what the actual claim is. In this case, the argument is:

The climate is currently changing as a result of natural processes.

Construct the supporting argument: An argument requires premises (those things we take to be true for the purposes of the argument) and a conclusion (effectively the claim being made). The premises together give us reason to accept the conclusion. The argument structure is something like this:

Premise one: The climate has changed in the past through natural processes
Premise two: The climate is currently changing
Conclusion: The climate is currently changing through natural processes.

Determine the intended strength of the claim: Determining the exact kind of argument requires a quick detour into the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. Bear with me!

In our paper we examined arguments against climate change that are framed as definitive claims. A claim is definitive when it says something is definitely the case, rather than being probable or possible .

Definitive claims must be supported by deductive reasoning. Essentially, this means that if the premises are true, the conclusion is inevitably true.

Read more: How I came to know that I am a closet climate denier

This might sound like an obvious point, but many of our arguments are not like this. In inductive reasoning, the premises might support a conclusion but the conclusion need not be inevitable.

An example of inductive reasoning is:

Premise one: Every time I’ve had a chocolate-covered oyster I’ve been sick
Premise two: I’ve just had a chocolate-covered oyster
Conclusion: I’m going to be sick.

This is not a bad argument – I’ll probably get sick – but it’s not inevitable. It’s possible that every time I’ve had a chocolate-covered oyster I’ve coincidentally got sick from something else. Perhaps previous oysters have been kept in the cupboard, but the most recent one was kept in the fridge.

Because climate-contrarian arguments are often definitive , the reasoning used to support them must be deductive . That is, the premises must inevitably lead to the conclusion.

Check the logical structure: We can see that in the argument from step two – that the climate change is changing because of natural processes – the truth of the conclusion is not guaranteed by the truth of the premises.

In the spirit of honesty and charity, we take this invalid argument and attempt to make it valid through the addition of another (previously hidden) premise.

Premise three: If something was the cause of an event in the past, it must be the cause of the event now

Adding the third premise makes the argument valid, but validity is not the same thing as truth. Validity is a necessary condition for accepting the conclusion, but it is not sufficient. There are a couple of hurdles that still need to be cleared.

Check for ambiguity: The argument mentions climate change in its premises and conclusion. But the climate can change in many ways, and the phrase itself can have a variety of meanings. The problem with this argument is that the phrase is used to describe two different kinds of change.

Current climate change is much more rapid than previous climate change – they are not the same phenomenon. The syntax conveys the impression that the argument is valid, but it is not. To clear up the ambiguity, the argument can be presented more accurately by changing the second premise:

Premise two: The climate is currently changing at a more rapid rate than can be explained by natural processes

This correction for ambiguity has resulted in a conclusion that clearly does not follow from the premises. The argument has become invalid once again.

We can restore validity by considering what conclusion would follow from the premises. This leads us to the conclusion:

Conclusion: Human (non-natural) activity is necessary to explain current climate change.

Importantly, this conclusion has not been reached arbitrarily. It has become necessary as a result of restoring validity.

Note also that in the process of correcting for ambiguity and the consequent restoring of validity, the attempted refutation of human-induced climate science has demonstrably failed.

Check premises for truth or plausibility: Even if there were no ambiguity about the term “climate change”, the argument would still fail when the premises were tested. In step four, the third premise, “If something was the cause of an event in the past, it must be the cause of the event now ”, is clearly false.

Applying the same logic to another context, we would arrive at conclusions like: people have died of natural causes in the past; therefore any particular death must be from natural causes.

Restoring validity by identifying the “hidden” premises often produces such glaringly false claims. Recognising this as a false premise does not always require knowledge of climate science.

When determining the truth of a premise does require deep knowledge in a particular area of science, we may defer to experts. But there are many arguments that do not, and in these circumstances this method has optimal value.

Inoculating against poor arguments

Previous work by Cook and others has focused on the ability to inoculate people against climate science misinformation. By pre-emptively exposing people to misinformation with explanation they become “vaccinated” against it, showing “resistance” to developing beliefs based on misinformation.

Read more: Busting myths: a practical guide to countering science denial

This reason-based approach extends inoculation theory to argument analysis, providing a practical and transferable method of evaluating claims that does not require expertise in climate science.

Fake news may be hard to spot, but fake arguments don’t have to be.

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Argumentative Essay Writing

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change

Make Your Case: A Guide to Writing an Argumentative Essay on Climate Change

Published on: Mar 2, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 31, 2024

What is an Argumentative Essay about Climate Change?

The main focus will be on trying to prove that global warming is caused by human activities. Your goal should be to convince your readers that human activity is causing climate change.

To achieve this, you will need to use a variety of research methods to collect data on the topic. You need to make an argument as to why climate change needs to be taken more seriously.

Argumentative Essay Outline about Climate Change

An argumentative essay about climate change requires a student to take an opinionated stance on the subject.

The outline of your paper should include the following sections:

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change Introduction

The first step is to introduce the topic and provide an overview of the main points you will cover in the essay.

This should include a brief description of what climate change is. Furthermore, it should include current research on how humans are contributing to global warming.

An example is:

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Thesis Statement For Climate Change Argumentative Essay

The thesis statement should be a clear and concise description of your opinion on the topic. It should be established early in the essay and reiterated throughout.

For example, an argumentative essay about climate change could have a thesis statement such as:

âclimate change is caused by human activity and can be addressed through policy solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote cleaner energy sourcesâ.

Climate Change Argumentative Essay Conclusion

The conclusion should restate your thesis statement and summarize the main points of the essay.

It should also provide a call to action, encouraging readers to take steps toward addressing climate change.

For example,

Climate change is an urgent issue that must be addressed now if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences in the future. We must take action to reduce our emissions and transition to cleaner energy sources. It is up to us as citizens to demand policy solutions from our governments that will ensure a safe and sustainable future.

How To Write An Argumentative Essay On Climate Change

Writing an argumentative essay about climate change requires a student to take an opinionated stance on the subject.

Following are the steps to follow for writing an argumentative essay about climate change

Do Your Research

The first step is researching the topic and collecting evidence to back up your argument.

You should look at scientific research, articles, and data on climate change as well as current policy solutions.

Pick A Catchy Title

Once you have gathered your evidence, it is time to pick a title for your essay. It should be specific and concise.

Outline Your Essay

After selecting a title, create an outline of the main points you will include in the essay.

This should include an introduction, body paragraphs that provide evidence for your argument, and a conclusion.

Compose Your Essay

Finally, begin writing your essay. Start with an introduction that provides a brief overview of the main points you will cover and includes your thesis statement.

Then move on to the body paragraphs, providing evidence to back up your argument.

Finally, conclude the essay by restating your thesis statement and summarizing the main points.

Proofread and Revise

Once you have finished writing the essay, it is important to proofread and revise your work.

Check for any spelling or grammatical errors, and make sure the argument is clear and logical.

Finally, consider having someone else read over the essay for a fresh perspective.

By following these steps, you can create an effective argumentative essay on climate change. Good luck!

Examples Of Argumentative Essays About Climate Change

Climate Change is real and happening right now. It is one of the most urgent environmental issues that we face today.

Argumentative essays about this topic can help raise awareness that we need to protect our planet.

Below you will find some examples of argumentative essays on climate change written by CollegeEssay.orgâs expert essay writers.

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change And Global Warming

Persuasive Essay About Climate Change

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change In The Philippines

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change Caused By Humans

Geography Argumentative Essay About Climate Change

Check our extensive blog on argumentative essay examples to ace your next essay!

Good Argumentative Essay Topics About Climate Change

Choosing a great topic is essential to help your readers understand and engage with the issue.

Here are some suggestions:

Should governments fund projects that will reduce the effects of climate change?
Is it too late to stop global warming and climate change?
Are international treaties effective in reducing carbon dioxide emissions?
What are the economic implications of climate change?
Should renewable energy be mandated as a priority over traditional fossil fuels?
How can individuals help reduce their carbon footprint and fight climate change?
Are regulations on industry enough to reduce global warming and climate change?
Could geoengineering be used to mitigate climate change?
What are the social and political effects of global warming and climate change?
Should companies be held accountable for their contribution to climate change?

Check our comprehensive blog on argumentative essay topics to get more topic ideas!

We hope these topics and resources help you write a great argumentative essay about climate change.

Now that you know how to write an argumentative essay about climate change, itâs time to put your skills to the test.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good introduction to climate change.

An introduction to a climate change essay can include a short description of why the topic is important and/or relevant.

It can also provide an overview of what will be discussed in the body of the essay.

The introduction should conclude with a clear, focused thesis statement that outlines the main argument in your essay.

What is a good thesis statement for climate change?

A good thesis statement for a climate change essay should state the main point or argument you will make in your essay.

You could argue that “The science behind climate change is irrefutable and must be addressed by governments, businesses, and individuals.”

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November 30, 2009

14 min read

7 Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

Evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate

By John Rennie

Alison Seiffer

President Donald Trump has consistently opposed fighting climate change. His administration loosened fuel economy and emissions standards for new motor vehicles, for example—a measure that automakers had not even requested. He replaced the Clean Power Plan championed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, with new regulations that permit more carbon emissions from coal- and gas-burning power plants. In November 2019 he even initiated the year-long process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, an agreement that required nothing from its signatories except an unenforced pledge to help keep the rise in global temperatures below two degrees Celsius.

The reasoning behind those actions has been hard to pin down. Trump has repeatedly denounced global warming as a “hoax” and a Chinese plot to undermine U.S. manufacturing. But then, in a January 2019 press conference, Trump also said “nothing’s a hoax” about climate change. Many of those he had named to head various agencies, including Rick Perry at the Department of Energy and Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, questioned or denied the role of carbon dioxide in climate change. But when reporters have directly asked whether Trump believes global warming is real, White House press secretaries have skirted the question. It’s hard to tell whether his administration is skeptical about the scientific fact of the climate crisis or simply the urgency of doing anything about it.

Ambiguity has often been weaponized by those who prefer to call themselves “climate skeptics”—although they generally seem to be more dedicated to naysaying than to genuine skeptical inquiry. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course: some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is their dedicated opposition to conceding that there is an actionable problem, often with long-disproved arguments about alleged weaknesses in the science of climate change.

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What follows is a partial list of the contrarians’ bad-faith arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.

CLAIM 1: Anthropogenic carbon dioxide can’t be changing climate, because CO 2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO 2 are irrelevant.

Although carbon dioxide makes up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, that small number plays a significant role in climate dynamics. Even at that low concentration, CO 2 absorbs infrared radiation and acts as a greenhouse gas, as physicist John Tyndall demonstrated in 1859. Chemist Svante Arrhenius went further in 1896 by estimating the impact of CO 2 on the climate; after painstaking hand calculations, he concluded that doubling its concentration might cause almost six degrees Celsius of warming—an answer not much out of line with recent, far more rigorous computations.

Forests remove atmospheric CO 2 and offset the nonhuman releases of CO 2 . Human activity, combined with forest clearing ( shown here ), negates this process, however. Credit: Joel W. Rogers Getty Images

Contrary to the contrarians, human activity is by far the largest contributor to the observed increase in atmospheric CO 2 . According to the Global Carbon Project, anthropogenic CO 2 amounts to about 35 billion tons annually—more than 130 times as much as volcanoes produce. True, 95 percent of the releases of CO 2 to the atmosphere are natural, but natural processes such as plant growth and absorption into the oceans pull the gas back out of the atmosphere and almost precisely offset them, leaving the human additions as a net surplus. Moreover, several sets of experimental measurements, including analyses of the shifting ratio of carbon isotopes in the air, further confirm that fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are the primary reasons that CO 2 levels have risen 45 percent since 1832, from 284 parts per million (ppm) to 412 ppm—a remarkable jump to the highest levels seen in millions of years.

Contrarians frequently object that water vapor, not CO 2 , is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas; they insist that climate scientists routinely leave it out of their models. The latter is simply untrue: from Arrhenius on, climatologists have incorporated water vapor into their models. In fact, water vapor is why rising CO 2 has such a big effect on climate. CO 2 absorbs some wavelengths of infrared that water does not, so it independently adds heat to the atmosphere. As the temperature rises, more water vapor enters the atmosphere and multiplies CO 2 ’s greenhouse effect; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that water vapor may “approximately double the increase in the greenhouse effect due to the added CO 2 alone.”

Climate contrarians argue that variation in solar energy reaching the planet is behind global warming. But human influence has a measurably stronger effect on climate. Credit: NASA

Nevertheless, within this dynamic, the CO 2 remains the main driver (what climatologists call a “forcing”) of the greenhouse effect. As NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt has explained, water vapor enters and leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than CO 2 and tends to preserve a fairly constant level of relative humidity, which caps off its greenhouse effect. Climatologists therefore categorize water vapor as a feedback rather than a forcing factor. (Contrarians who don’t see water vapor in climate models are looking for it in the wrong place.)

Because of CO 2 ’s inescapable greenhouse effect, contrarians holding out for a natural explanation for current global warming need to explain why, in their scenarios, CO 2 is not compounding the problem.

CLAIM 2: The alleged “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved. It doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of a “medieval warm period” around a.d. 1000 that was hotter than today is. Therefore, global warming is a myth.

It is hard to know which is greater: contrarians’ overstatement of the flaws in the historical temperature reconstruction from 1998 by Michael E. Mann and his colleagues or the ultimate insignificance of their argument to the case for climate change.

First, there is not simply one hockey-stick reconstruction of historical temperatures using one set of proxy data. Similar evidence for sharply increasing temperatures over the past couple of centuries has turned up independently while looking at ice cores, tree rings and other proxies for direct measurements, from many locations. Notwithstanding their differences, they corroborate that the planet has been getting sharply warmer.

A 2006 National Research Council review of the evidence concluded “with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries”—which is the section of the graph most relevant to current climate trends. The report placed less faith in the reconstructions back to a.d. 900, although it still viewed them as “plausible.” Medieval warm periods in Europe and Asia with temperatures comparable to those seen in the 20th century were therefore similarly plausible but might have been local phenomena: the report noted “the magnitude and geographic extent of the warmth are uncertain.” And a research paper by Mann and his colleagues seems to confirm that the Medieval Warm Period and the “Little Ice Age” between 1400 and 1700 were both caused by shifts in solar radiance and other natural factors that do not seem to be happening today.

After the NRC review was released, another analysis by four statisticians, called the Wegman report, which was not formally peer-reviewed, was more critical of the hockey-stick paper. But correction of the errors it pointed out did not substantially change the shape of the hockey-stick graph. In 2008 Mann and his colleagues issued an updated version of the temperature reconstruction that echoed their earlier findings.

But hypothetically, even if the hockey stick was busted ... What of it? The case for anthropogenic global warming originally came from studies of climate mechanics, not from reconstructions of past temperatures seeking a cause. Warnings about current warming trends came out years before Mann’s hockey-stick graph. Even if the world were incontrovertibly warmer 1,000 years ago, it would not change the fact that the recent rapid rise in CO 2 explains the current episode of warming more credibly than any natural factor does—and that no natural factor seems poised to offset further warming in the years ahead.

CLAIM 3: Global warming stopped in 1998; Earth has been cooling since then.

This contrarian argument might be the most obsolete and unintentionally hilarious. Here’s how it goes: 1998 was the world’s warmest year, according to the U.K. Met Office Hadley Center’s records; the following decade was cooler; therefore, the previous century’s global warming trend is over, right?

Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with statistics should be able to spot the weaknesses of that argument. Given the extended duration of the warming trend, the expected (and observed) variations in the rate of increase and the range of uncertainties in the temperature measurements and forecasts, a decade’s worth of mild interruption is too small a deviation to prove a break in the pattern, climatologists say.

If a lull in global warming had continued for another decade, would that have vindicated the contrarians’ case? Not necessarily, because climate is complex. For instance, Mojib Latif, then at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, and his colleagues published a paper in 2008 that suggested ocean-circulation patterns might cause a period of cooling in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, even though the long-term pattern of warming remained in effect. Fundamentally, contrarians who have resisted the abundant evidence that supports warming should not be too quick to leap on evidence that only hints at the opposite.

In any case, the claim that a “warming pause” disproved ongoing climate change became completely academic when 1998 stopped being the warmest year on record. That title now belongs to 2016, with 2019 right behind it. In fact, the past 15 years have included all 10 of the hottest years on record.

CLAIM 4: The sun or cosmic rays are much more likely the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too.

Astronomical phenomena are obvious natural factors to consider when trying to understand climate, particularly the brightness of the sun and details of Earth’s orbit because those seem to have been major drivers of the ice ages and other climate changes before the rise of industrial civilization. Climatologists, therefore, do take them into account in their models. But in defiance of the naysayers who want to chalk the recent warming up to natural cycles, there is insufficient evidence that enough extra solar energy is reaching our planet to account for the observed rise in global temperatures.

The IPCC has noted that between 1750 and 2005, the radiative forcing from the sun increased by 0.12 watt per square meter—less than a tenth of the net forcings from human activities (1.6 W/ m 2 ). The largest uncertainty in that comparison comes from the estimated effects of aerosols in the atmosphere, which can variously shade Earth or warm it. Even granting the maximum uncertainties to these estimates, however, the increase in human influence on climate exceeds that of any solar variation.

Moreover, remember that the effect of CO 2 and the other greenhouse gases is to amplify the sun’s warming. Contrarians looking to pin global warming on the sun can’t simply point to any trend in solar radiance: they also need to quantify its effect and explain why CO 2 does not consequently become an even more powerful driver of climate change. (And is what weakens the greenhouse effect a necessary consequence of the rising solar influence or an ad hoc corollary added to give the desired result?)

Contrarians therefore gravitated toward work by Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark, who argued that the sun’s influence on cosmic rays needed to be considered. Cosmic rays entering the atmosphere help to seed the formation of aerosols and clouds that reflect sunlight. In Svensmark’s theory, the high solar magnetic activity over the past 50 years shielded Earth from cosmic rays and allowed exceptional heating, but now that the sun is more magnetically quiet again, global warming would reverse. Svensmark claimed that, in his model, temperature changes correlate better with cosmic-ray levels and solar magnetic activity than with other greenhouse factors.

Svensmark’s theory failed to persuade most climatologists, however, because of weaknesses in its evidence. In particular, there do not seem to be clear long-term trends in the cosmic-ray influxes or in the clouds that they are supposed to form, and his model does not explain (as greenhouse explanations do) some of the observed patterns in how the world is getting warmer (such as that more of the warming occurs at night). For now, at least, cosmic rays remain a less plausible culprit in climate change.

And the apparent warming seen on Mars? Because it is based on a very small base of measurements, it may not represent a true trend. Too little is yet known about what governs the Martian climate to be sure, but a period when there was a darker surface might have increased the amount of absorbed sunlight and raised temperatures.

Elevated CO 2 makes oceans acidic, which could have irreversible harmful effects on coral reefs, such as coral bleaching ( shown here ). Credit: Getty Images

CLAIM 5: Climatologists conspire to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data. Their so-called consensus on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn’t settled by popularity.

It is virtually impossible to disprove accusations of giant global conspiracies to those already convinced of them (can anyone prove that the Freemasons and the Roswell aliens aren’t involved, too?). Let it therefore be noted that the magnitude of this hypothetical conspiracy would need to encompass many thousands of uncontroversial publications and respected scientists from around the world, stretching back through Arrhenius and Tyndall for almost 150 years. A conspiracy would have to be so powerful that it has co-opted the official positions of dozens of scientific organizations, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.K.’s Royal Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics and the American Meteorological Society.

If there were a massive conspiracy to defraud the world on climate (and to what end?), surely the thousands of e-mails and other files stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in England and distributed by hackers in 2009 would bear proof of it. None did. Most of the few statements from those e-mails that critics claimed as evidence of malfeasance had more innocent explanations that make sense in the context of scientists conversing privately and informally. If any of the scientists involved manipulated data dishonestly or thwarted Freedom of Information requests, it would have been deplorable; however, there is no evidence that happened. What is missing is any clear indication of a widespread attempt to falsify and coordinate findings on a scale that could hold together a global cabal or significantly distort the record on climate change.

Climatologists are often frustrated by accusations that they are hiding data or the details of their models because, as NASA’s Schmidt points out, much of the relevant information is in public databases or otherwise accessible—a fact that contrarians conveniently ignore when insisting that scientists stonewall their requests. (And because nations differ in their rules on data confidentiality, scientists are not always at liberty to comply with some requests.) If contrarians want to deal a devastating blow to global warming theories, they should use the public data and develop their own credible models to demonstrate sound alternatives.

Yet that rarely occurs. In 2004 historian of science Naomi Oreskes published a landmark analysis of the peer-reviewed literature on global warming, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Out of 928 papers whose abstracts she surveyed, she wrote, 75 percent explicitly or implicitly supported anthropogenic global warming, 25 percent were methodological or otherwise took no position on the subject—and none argued for purely natural explanations. Notwithstanding some attempts to debunk Oreskes’s findings that eventually fell apart, her conclusion stands.

Oreskes’s work does not mean that all climate scientists agree about climate change—obviously, some do not (although they are very much a minority). Rather the meaningful consensus is not among the scientists but within the science: the overwhelming predominance of evidence for greenhouse-driven global warming that cannot easily be overturned even by a few contrary studies. (Oreskes currently is a columnist for Scientific American .)

CLAIM 6: Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige.

If climate scientists are angling for more money by hyping fears of climate change, they are not doing so very effectively. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, between 1993 and 2014 federal spending on climate change research, technology, international assistance and adaptation rose from $2.4 billion to $11.6 billion. (An additional $26.1 billion was also allocated to climate change programs and activities by the economic stimulus package of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. Total federal nondefense spending on research in 2014 exceeded $65 billion.) Yet the scientific research share of that money fell sharply throughout that period: most of the budgeted money went to energy-conservation projects and other technology programs. Climatologists’ funding therefore stayed almost flat, whereas others, including those in industry, benefited handsomely. Surely the Freemasons could do better than that.

CLAIM 7: Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don’t produce CO 2 or geoengineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint.

Critics of standard policy responses to climate change have often seemed to imply that environmentalists are obsessed with regulatory reductions in CO 2 emissions and uninterested in technological solutions. That interpretation is at best bizarre: such innovations in energy efficiency, conservation and production are exactly what caps or levies on CO 2 are meant to encourage.

The relevant question is whether it is prudent for civilization to defer curbing or reducing its CO 2 output before such technologies are ready and can be deployed at the needed scale. The most common conclusion is no. Remember that as long as CO 2 levels are elevated, additional heat will be pumped into the atmosphere and oceans, extending and worsening the climate consequences. As climatologist James Hansen of the Earth Institute at Columbia University has pointed out, even if current CO 2 levels could be stabilized overnight, surface temperatures would continue to rise by 0.5 degree C over the next few decades because of absorbed heat being released from the ocean. The longer we wait for technology alone to reduce CO 2 , the faster we will need for those solutions to pull CO 2 out of the air to minimize the warming problems. Minimizing the scope of the challenge by restricting the accumulation of CO 2 only makes sense.

Moreover, climate change is not the only environmental crisis posed by elevated CO 2 : it also makes the oceans acidic, which could have irreversibly harmful effects on coral reefs and other marine life. Only the immediate mitigation of CO 2 release can contain those losses.

Much has already been written on why schemes for geoengineering—altering Earth’s climate systems by design—seem ill advised except as a desperate last-chance strategy for dealing with climate change. The more ambitious proposals involve largely untested technologies, so it is unclear how well they would achieve their desired purpose; even if they did curb warming, they might cause other significant environmental problems in the process. Methods that did not remove CO 2 from the air would have to be maintained in perpetuity to prevent drastic rebound warming. And the governance of the geoengineering system could become a political minefield, with nations disagreeing about what the optimal climate settings should be. And of course, as with any of the other technological solutions, reducing the emission and accumulation of CO 2 in the atmosphere first would only make any geoengineering solution easier.

All in all, counting on future technological developments to solve climate change rather than engaging with the problem straightforwardly by all available means, including regulatory ones, seems like the height of irresponsibility. But then again, responsible action on climate change is what the contrarians seem most interested in denying.

John Rennie is a former editor in chief of Scientific American .

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Debunking eight common myths about climate change

The world is warming at a record pace , with unseasonable heat baking nearly every continent on Earth. April, the last month for which statistics are available, marked the 11th consecutive month the planet has set a new temperature high.

Experts say that is a clear sign the Earth’s climate is rapidly changing. But many believe – or at least say they believe – that climate change is not real, relying on a series of well-trodden myths to make their point.

“Most of the world rightly acknowledges that climate change is real,” says Dechen Tsering, Acting Director of the Climate Change Division at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “But in many places, misinformation is delaying the action that is so vital to countering what is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.”

This month, delegates will be meeting in Bonn, Germany for a key conference on climate change. Ahead of that gathering, here is a closer look at eight common climate-related myths and why they are simply not true.

Myth #1: Climate change has always happened, so we should not worry about it.

It is true that the planet’s temperature has long fluctuated, with periods of warming and cooling. But since the last ice age 10,000 years ago, the climate has been relatively stable, which scientists say has been crucial to the development of human civilization.

That stability is now faltering. The Earth is heating up at its fastest rate in at least 2,000 years and is about 1.2°C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times. The last 10 years have been the warmest on record, with 2023 smashing global temperature records.

Other key climate-related indicators are also spiking. Ocean temperatures , sea levels and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses are rising at record rates while sea ice and glaciers are retreating at alarming speeds.

Myth #2: Climate change is a natural process. It has nothing to do with people.

While climate change is a natural process human activity is pushing it into overdrive. A landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which draws on the research of hundreds of leading climate scientists, found that humans are responsible for almost all the global warming over the past 200 years.

The vast majority of warming has come from the burning of coal, oil and gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels is flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, which act like a blanket around the planet, trapping heat.

By measuring everything from ice cores to tree rings, scientists have been able to track concentrations of greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide levels are at their highest in 2 million years , while two other greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, are at their highest in 800,000 years .

Myth #3: A couple of degrees of warming is not that big of a deal.

Actually, small temperature rises can throw the world’s delicate ecosystems into disarray, with dire implications for humans and other living things. The Paris Agreement on climate change aims to limit average global temperature rise to “well below” 2°C, and preferably to 1.5°C, since pre-industrial times.

Even that half-a-degree swing could make a massive difference. The IPCC found that at 2°C of warming, more than 2 billion people would regularly be exposed to extreme heat than they would at 1.5°C. The world would also lose twice as many plants and vertebrate species and three times as many insects. In some areas, crop yields would decrease by more than half, threatening food security.

At 1.5°C of warming, 70 per cent to 90 per cent of corals, the pillars of many undersea ecosystems, would die. At 2°C of warming, some 99 per cent would perish. Their disappearance would likely lead to the loss of other marine species, many of which are a critical source of protein for coastal communities.

“Every fraction of a degree of warming matters,” says Tsering.

Myth #4: An increase in cold snaps shows climate change is not real.

This statement confuses weather and climate, which are two different things. Weather is the day-to-day atmospheric conditions in a location and climate is the long-term weather conditions in a region. So, there could still be a cold snap while the general trend for the planet is warming.

Some experts also believe climate change could lead to longer and more intense cold in some places due to changes in wind patterns and other atmospheric factors. One much-publicized paper found the rapid warming of the Arctic may have disrupted the swirling mass of cold air above the North Pole in 2021. This unleashed sub-zero temperatures as far south as Texas in the United States, causing billions of dollars in damages.

Myth #5: Scientists disagree on the cause of climate change.

A 2021 study revealed that 99 per cent of peer-reviewed scientific literature found that climate change was human-induced. That was in line with a widely read study from 2013 , which found 97 per cent of peer-reviewed papers that examined the causes of climate change said it was human-caused.

“The idea that there is no consensus is used by climate deniers to muddy the waters and sow the seeds of doubt,” says Tsering. “But the scientific community agrees: the global warming we are facing is not natural. It is caused by humans.”

Myth #6: It is too late to avert a climate catastrophe, so we might as well keep burning fossil fuels.

While the situation is dire, there is still a narrow window for humanity to avoid the worst of climate change.

UNEP’s latest Emissions Gap Report found that cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 42 per cent by 2030, the world could limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C compared with pre-industrial levels.

A little math reveals that to reach that target, the world must reduce its annual emissions by 22 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent in less than seven years. That might seem like a lot. But by ramping up financing and focusing on low-carbon development in key transport , agriculture and forestry, the world can get there.

“There is no question the task ahead of us is massive,” Tsering says. “But we have the solutions we need to reduce emissions today and there is an opportunity to raise ambition in the new round of national climate action plans.”

Myth #7: Climate models are unreliable.

Climate skeptics have long argued that the computer models used to project climate change are unreliable at best and completely inaccurate at worst.

But the IPCC, the world’s leading scientific authority on climate change, says that over decades of development, these models have consistently provided “a robust and unambiguous picture” of planetary warming.

Meanwhile, a 2020 study by the University of California showed that global warming models were largely accurate. The study looked at 17 models that were generated between 1970 and 2007 and found 14 of them closely matched observations.

Myth #8: We do not need to worry about lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Humanity is inventive; we can just adapt to climate change.

Some countries and communities can adapt to rising temperatures, lower precipitation and the other impacts of climate change. But many cannot.

The world’s developing countries collectively need between US$215 billion and US$387 billion per year to adapt to climate change, yet only have access to a fraction of that total, found UNEP’s latest Adaptation Gap Report . Even wealthy nations will struggle to afford the cost of adaptation, which in some cases will require radical measures, such as displacing vulnerable communities, relocating vital infrastructure or changing staple foods.

In many places, people are already facing hard limits on how much they can adapt. Small island developing states , for example, can only do so much to hold back the rising seas that threaten their existence.

Without significant action to lower greenhouse gas emissions, communities will reach these hard limits faster and begin to suffer irreparable damage from climate change, say experts.

The Sectoral Solution to the climate crisis

UNEP is at the forefront of supporting the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global temperature rise well below 2°C, and aiming for 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. To do this, UNEP has developed the Sectoral Solution, a roadmap to reducing emissions across sectors in line with the Paris Agreement commitments and in pursuit of climate stability. The six sectors identified are: energy; industry; agriculture and food; forests and land use; transport; and buildings and cities.

Further Resources

UNEP’s work on climate change
The Sectoral Solution to Climate Change
Adaptation Gap Report 2023
Emissions Gap Report 2023

Related Sustainable Development Goals

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Science News

How did we get here the roots and impacts of the climate crisis.

People’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels and the cutting down of carbon-storing forests have transformed global climate.

illustration in the shape of the Earth showing a train, a car, airplanes, felled trees, an oil spill, and other examples of humans' impact on their environment

For more than a century, researchers have honed their methods for measuring the impacts of human actions on Earth's atmosphere.

Sam Falconer

Setting the stage

One day in the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and a women’s rights activist living in upstate New York, put two glass jars in sunlight. One contained regular air — a mix of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases including carbon dioxide — while the other contained just carbon dioxide. Both had thermometers in them. As the sun’s rays beat down, Foote observed that the jar of CO 2 alone heated up more quickly, and was slower to cool down, than the one containing plain air.

The results prompted Foote to muse on the relationship between CO 2 , the planet and heat. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in an 1856 paper summarizing her findings .

black and white image of Eunice Newton Foote seated and petting a dog

Three years later, working independently and apparently unaware of Foote’s discovery, Irish physicist John Tyndall showed the same basic idea in more detail. With a set of pipes and devices to study the transmission of heat, he found that CO 2 gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate.

Today Tyndall is widely credited with the discovery of how what we now call greenhouse gases heat the planet, earning him a prominent place in the history of climate science. Foote faded into relative obscurity — partly because of her gender, partly because her measurements were less sensitive. Yet their findings helped kick off broader scientific exploration of how the composition of gases in Earth’s atmosphere affects global temperatures.

Heat-trapping gases

In 1859, John Tyndall used this apparatus to study how various gases trap heat. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with gas and measured the resulting temperature changes. Carbon dioxide and water vapor, he showed, absorb more heat than air does.

illustration of an apparatus used by John Tyndall to study how gases trap heat

Carbon floods in

Humans began substantially affecting the atmosphere around the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain. Factories burned tons of coal; fueled by fossil fuels, the steam engine revolutionized transportation and other industries. Since then, fossil fuels including oil and natural gas have been harnessed to drive a global economy. All these activities belch gases into the air.

Yet Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius wasn’t worried about the Industrial Revolution when he began thinking in the late 1800s about changes in atmospheric CO 2 levels. He was instead curious about ice ages — including whether a decrease in volcanic eruptions, which can put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, would lead to a future ice age. Bored and lonely in the wake of a divorce, Arrhenius set himself to months of laborious calculations involving moisture and heat transport in the atmosphere at different zones of latitude. In 1896, he reported that halving the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere could indeed bring about an ice age — and that doubling CO 2 would raise global temperatures by around 5 to 6 degrees C.

It was a remarkably prescient finding for work that, out of necessity, had simplified Earth’s complex climate system down to just a few variables. But Arrhenius’ findings didn’t gain much traction with other scientists at the time. The climate system seemed too large, complex and inert to change in any meaningful way on a timescale that would be relevant to human society. Geologic evidence showed, for instance, that ice ages took thousands of years to start and end. What was there to worry about?

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One researcher, though, thought the idea was worth pursuing. Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, had tallied weather records over time, obsessively enough to determine that average temperatures were increasing at 147 weather stations around the globe. In a 1938 paper in a Royal Meteorological Society journal, he linked this temperature rise to the burning of fossil fuels . Callendar estimated that fossil fuel burning had put around 150 billion metric tons of CO 2 into the atmosphere since the late 19th century.

Like many of his day, Callendar didn’t see global warming as a problem. Extra CO 2 would surely stimulate plants to grow and allow crops to be farmed in new regions. “In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely,” he wrote. But his work revived discussions tracing back to Tyndall and Arrhenius about how the planetary system responds to changing levels of gases in the atmosphere. And it began steering the conversation toward how human activities might drive those changes.

When World War II broke out the following year, the global conflict redrew the landscape for scientific research. Hugely important wartime technologies, such as radar and the atomic bomb, set the stage for “big science” studies that brought nations together to tackle high-stakes questions of global reach. And that allowed modern climate science to emerge.

The Keeling curve

One major effort was the International Geophysical Year, or IGY, an 18-month push in 1957–1958 that involved a wide array of scientific field campaigns including exploration in the Arctic and Antarctica. Climate change wasn’t a high research priority during the IGY, but some scientists in California, led by Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, used the funding influx to begin a project they’d long wanted to do. The goal was to measure CO 2 levels at different locations around the world, accurately and consistently.

The job fell to geochemist Charles David Keeling, who put ultraprecise CO 2 monitors in Antarctica and on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa. Funds soon ran out to maintain the Antarctic record, but the Mauna Loa measurements continued. Thus was born one of the most iconic datasets in all of science — the “Keeling curve,” which tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 .

black and white photo of Charles David Keeling in a lab

When Keeling began his measurements in 1958, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Within just a few years it became clear that the number was increasing year by year. Because plants take up CO 2 as they grow in spring and summer and release it as they decompose in fall and winter, CO 2 concentrations rose and fell each year in a sawtooth pattern. But superimposed on that pattern was a steady march upward.

“The graph got flashed all over the place — it was just such a striking image,” says Ralph Keeling, who is Keeling’s son. Over the years, as the curve marched higher, “it had a really important role historically in waking people up to the problem of climate change.” The Keeling curve has been featured in countless earth science textbooks, congressional hearings and in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth .

Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016, it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. Today it is at 413 ppm. (Before the Industrial Revolution, CO 2 levels in the atmosphere had been stable for centuries at around 280 ppm.)

Around the time that Keeling’s measurements were kicking off, Revelle also helped develop an important argument that the CO 2 from human activities was building up in Earth’s atmosphere. In 1957, he and Hans Suess, also at Scripps at the time, published a paper that traced the flow of radioactive carbon through the oceans and the atmosphere . They showed that the oceans were not capable of taking up as much CO 2 as previously thought; the implication was that much of the gas must be going into the atmosphere instead.

Steady rise

Known as the Keeling curve, this chart shows the rise in CO 2 levels as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii due to human activities. The visible sawtooth pattern is due to seasonal plant growth: Plants take up CO 2 in the growing seasons, then release it as they decompose in fall and winter.

Monthly average CO 2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory

“Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future,” Revelle and Suess wrote in the paper. It’s one of the most famous sentences in earth science history.

Here was the insight underlying modern climate science: Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and humans are causing the buildup. Revelle and Suess became the final piece in a puzzle dating back to Svante Arrhenius and John Tyndall. “I tell my students that to understand the basics of climate change, you need to have the cutting-edge science of the 1860s, the cutting-edge math of the 1890s and the cutting-edge chemistry of the 1950s,” says Joshua Howe, an environmental historian at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Evidence piles up

Observational data collected throughout the second half of the 20th century helped researchers gradually build their understanding of how human activities were transforming the planet.

Ice cores pulled from ice sheets, such as that atop Greenland, offer some of the most telling insights for understanding past climate change. Each year, snow falls atop the ice and compresses into a fresh layer of ice representing climate conditions at the time it formed. The abundance of certain forms, or isotopes, of oxygen and hydrogen in the ice allows scientists to calculate the temperature at which it formed, and air bubbles trapped within the ice reveal how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were in the atmosphere at that time. So drilling down into an ice sheet is like reading the pages of a history book that go back in time the deeper you go.

photo of Geoffrey Hargreaves holding an ice core

Scientists began reading these pages in the early 1960s, using ice cores drilled at a U.S. military base in northwest Greenland . Contrary to expectations that past climates were stable, the cores hinted that abrupt climate shifts had happened over the last 100,000 years. By 1979, an international group of researchers was pulling another deep ice core from a second location in Greenland — and it, too, showed that abrupt climate change had occurred in the past. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a pair of European- and U.S.-led drilling projects retrieved even deeper cores from near the top of the ice sheet, pushing the record of past temperatures back a quarter of a million years.

Together with other sources of information, such as sediment cores drilled from the seafloor and molecules preserved in ancient rocks, the ice cores allowed scientists to reconstruct past temperature changes in extraordinary detail. Many of those changes happened alarmingly fast. For instance, the climate in Greenland warmed abruptly more than 20 times in the last 80,000 years , with the changes occurring in a matter of decades. More recently, a cold spell that set in around 13,000 years ago suddenly came to an end around 11,500 years ago — and temperatures in Greenland rose 10 degrees C in a decade.

Evidence for such dramatic climate shifts laid to rest any lingering ideas that global climate change would be slow and unlikely to occur on a timescale that humans should worry about. “It’s an important reminder of how ‘tippy’ things can be,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

More evidence of global change came from Earth-observing satellites, which brought a new planet-wide perspective on global warming beginning in the 1960s. From their viewpoint in the sky, satellites have measured the rise in global sea level — currently 3.4 millimeters per year and accelerating, as warming water expands and as ice sheets melt — as well as the rapid decline in ice left floating on the Arctic Ocean each summer at the end of the melt season. Gravity-sensing satellites have “weighed” the Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets from above since 2002, reporting that more than 400 billion metric tons of ice are lost each year.

Temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world also confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005 . And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

Worrisome predictions

By the 1960s, there was no denying that the planet was warming. But understanding the consequences of those changes — including the threat to human health and well-being — would require more than observational data. Looking to the future depended on computer simulations: complex calculations of how energy flows through the planetary system.

A first step in building such climate models was to connect everyday observations of weather to the concept of forecasting future climate. During World War I, British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson imagined tens of thousands of meteorologists, each calculating conditions for a small part of the atmosphere but collectively piecing together a global forecast.

But it wasn’t until after World War II that computational power turned Richardson’s dream into reality. In the wake of the Allied victory, which relied on accurate weather forecasts for everything from planning D-Day to figuring out when and where to drop the atomic bombs, leading U.S. mathematicians acquired funding from the federal government to improve predictions. In 1950, a team led by Jule Charney, a meteorologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., used the ENIAC, the first U.S. programmable, electronic computer, to produce the first computer-driven regional weather forecast . The forecasting was slow and rudimentary, but it built on Richardson’s ideas of dividing the atmosphere into squares, or cells, and computing the weather for each of those. The work set the stage for decades of climate modeling to follow.

By 1956, Norman Phillips, a member of Charney’s team, had produced the world’s first general circulation model, which captured how energy flows between the oceans, atmosphere and land. The field of climate modeling was born.

The work was basic at first because early computers simply didn’t have much computational power to simulate all aspects of the planetary system.

An important breakthrough came in 1967, when meteorologists Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald — both at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, a lab born from Charney’s group — published a paper in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences that modeled connections between Earth’s surface and atmosphere and calculated how changes in CO 2 would affect the planet’s temperature. Manabe and Wetherald were the first to build a computer model that captured the relevant processes that drive climate , and to accurately simulate how the Earth responds to those processes.

The rise of climate modeling allowed scientists to more accurately envision the impacts of global warming. In 1979, Charney and other experts met in Woods Hole, Mass., to try to put together a scientific consensus on what increasing levels of CO 2 would mean for the planet. The resulting “Charney report” concluded that rising CO 2 in the atmosphere would lead to additional and significant climate change.

In the decades since, climate modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated . And as climate science firmed up, climate change became a political issue.

The hockey stick

This famous graph, produced by scientist Michael Mann and colleagues, and then reproduced in a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, dramatically captures temperature change over time. Climate change skeptics made it the center of an all-out attack on climate science.

The rising public awareness of climate change, and battles over what to do about it, emerged alongside awareness of other environmental issues in the 1960s and ’70s. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring , which condemned the pesticide DDT for its ecological impacts, catalyzed environmental activism in the United States and led to the first Earth Day in 1970.

In 1974, scientists discovered another major global environmental threat — the Antarctic ozone hole, which had some important parallels to and differences from the climate change story. Chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, of the University of California, Irvine, reported that chlorofluorocarbon chemicals, used in products such as spray cans and refrigerants, caused a chain of reactions that gnawed away at the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer . The resulting ozone hole, which forms over Antarctica every spring, allows more ultraviolet radiation from the sun to make it through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface, where it can cause skin cancer and eye damage.

Governments worked under the auspices of the United Nations to craft the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which strictly limited the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons . In the years following, the ozone hole began to heal. But fighting climate change is proving to be far more challenging. Transforming entire energy sectors to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions is much more difficult than replacing a set of industrial chemicals.

In 1980, though, researchers took an important step toward banding together to synthesize the scientific understanding of climate change and bring it to the attention of international policy makers. It started at a small scientific conference in Villach, Austria, on the seriousness of climate change. On the train ride home from the meeting, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin talked with other participants about how a broader, deeper and more international analysis was needed. In 1988, a United Nations body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was born. Bolin was its first chairperson.

The IPCC became a highly influential and unique body. It performs no original scientific research; instead, it synthesizes and summarizes the vast literature of climate science for policy makers to consider — primarily through massive reports issued every couple of years. The first IPCC report, in 1990 , predicted that the planet’s global mean temperature would rise more quickly in the following century than at any point in the last 10,000 years, due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

IPCC reports have played a key role in providing scientific information for nations discussing how to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. This process started with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 , which resulted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Annual U.N. meetings to tackle climate change led to the first international commitments to reduce emissions, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 . Under it, developed countries committed to reduce emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases. By 2007, the IPCC declared the reality of climate warming is “unequivocal.” The group received the Nobel Peace Prize that year, along with Al Gore, for their work on climate change.

The IPCC process ensured that policy makers had the best science at hand when they came to the table to discuss cutting emissions. Of course, nations did not have to abide by that science — and they often didn’t. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, international climate meetings discussed less hard-core science and more issues of equity. Countries such as China and India pointed out that they needed energy to develop their economies and that nations responsible for the bulk of emissions through history, such as the United States, needed to lead the way in cutting greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, residents of some of the most vulnerable nations, such as low-lying islands that are threatened by sea level rise, gained visibility and clout at international negotiating forums. “The issues around equity have always been very uniquely challenging in this collective action problem,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass.

By 2015, the world’s nations had made some progress on the emissions cuts laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, but it was still not enough to achieve substantial global reductions. That year, a key U.N. climate conference in Paris produced an international agreement to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees C, and preferably 1.5 degrees C , above preindustrial levels.

Every country has its own approach to the challenge of addressing climate change. In the United States, which gets approximately 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, sophisticated efforts to downplay and critique the science led to major delays in climate action. For decades, U.S. fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil worked to influence politicians to take as little action on emissions reductions as possible.

Biggest footprint

These 20 nations have emitted the largest cumulative amounts of carbon dioxide since 1850. Emissions are shown in billions of metric tons and are broken down into subtotals from fossil fuel use and cement manufacturing (blue) and land use and forestry (green).

Total carbon dioxide emissions by country, 1850–2021

bar chart of total carbon dioxide emissions by country from 1850 to 2021 broken down by land use and fossil fuels for the top 20 countries

Such tactics undoubtedly succeeded in feeding politicians’ delay on climate action in the United States, most of it from Republicans. President George W. Bush withdrew the country from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 ; Donald Trump similarly rejected the Paris accord in 2017 . As late as 2015, the chair of the Senate’s environment committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, brought a snowball into Congress on a cold winter’s day to argue that human-caused global warming is a “hoax.”

In Australia, a similar mix of right-wing denialism and fossil fuel interests has kept climate change commitments in flux, as prime ministers are voted in and out over fierce debates about how the nation should act on climate.

Yet other nations have moved forward. Some European countries such as Germany aggressively pursued renewable energies, including wind and solar, while activists such as Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg — the vanguard of a youth-action movement — pressured their governments for more.

In recent years, the developing economies of China and India have taken center stage in discussions about climate action. China, which is now the world’s largest carbon emitter, declared several moderate steps in 2021 to reduce emissions, including that it would stop building coal-burning power plants overseas. India announced it would aim for net-zero emissions by 2070, the first time it has set a date for this goal.

Yet such pledges continue to be criticized. At the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, India was globally criticized for not committing to a complete phaseout of coal — although the two top emitters, China and the United States, have not themselves committed to phasing out coal. “There is no equity in this,” says Aayushi Awasthy, an energy economist at the University of East Anglia in England.

Past and future

Various scenarios for how greenhouse gas emissions might change going forward help scientists predict future climate change. This graph shows the simulated historical temperature trend along with future projections of rising temperatures based on five scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

Historical and projected global temperature change

line graph showing future temperature change from the 1850–1900 average under various IPCC scenarios

Facing the future

In many cases, changes are coming faster than scientists had envisioned a few decades ago. The oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb CO 2 , harming tiny marine organisms that build protective calcium carbonate shells and are the base of the marine food web. Warmer waters are bleaching coral reefs. Higher temperatures are driving animal and plant species into areas in which they previously did not live, increasing the risk of extinction for many.

No place on the planet is unaffected. In many areas, higher temperatures have led to major droughts, which dry out vegetation and provide additional fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years.

Then there’s the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average and communities are at the forefront of change. Permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. Caribou and reindeer herders worry about the increased risk of parasites for the health of their animals. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea . It will need to move from its sand-barrier island to the mainland.

photo of people lining up for water amid tents in a makeshift camp for families displaced by drought

“We know these changes are happening and that the Titanic is sinking,” says Louise Farquharson, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who monitors permafrost and coastal change around Alaska. All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first.

“We are going to warm,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “There is no question about it. The only thing that we can hope to do is to warm a little more slowly.”

That’s one reason why the IPCC report released in 2021 focuses on anticipated levels of global warming . There is a big difference between the planet warming 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees or 2.5 degrees. Each fraction of a degree of warming increases the risk of extreme events such as heat waves and heavy rains, leading to greater global devastation.

The future rests on how much nations are willing to commit to cutting emissions and whether they will stick to those commitments. It’s a geopolitical balancing act the likes of which the world has never seen.

photo of young climate activists holding posters that read "Act Now" and "Uproot the system"

Science can and must play a role going forward. Improved climate models will illuminate what changes are expected at the regional scale, helping officials prepare. Governments and industry have crucial parts to play as well. They can invest in technologies, such as carbon sequestration, to help decarbonize the economy and shift society toward more renewable sources of energy.

Huge questions remain. Do voters have the will to demand significant energy transitions from their governments? How can business and military leaders play a bigger role in driving climate action? What should be the role of low-carbon energy sources that come with downsides, such as nuclear energy? How can developing nations achieve a better standard of living for their people while not becoming big greenhouse gas emitters? How can we keep the most vulnerable from being disproportionately harmed during extreme events, and incorporate environmental and social justice into our future?

These questions become more pressing each year, as carbon dioxideaccumulates in our atmosphere. The planet is now at higher levels of CO 2 than at any time in the last 3 million years.

At the U.N. climate meeting in Glasgow in 2021, diplomats from around the world agreed to work more urgently to shift away from using fossil fuels. They did not, however, adopt targets strict enough to keep the world below a warming of 1.5 degrees.

It’s been well over a century since chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized the consequences of putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Yet the world has not pulled together to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

Time is running out.

Summer-like heat is scorching the Southern Hemisphere — in winter

A black and white mosquito sits on the skin of a white person, sucking up a meal. Its abdomen is slightly filled with blood.

Extreme heat and rain are fueling rising cases of mosquito-borne diseases

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Zapping sand to create rock could help curb coastal erosion

In the background, a billboard shows a temperature of 107 degrees Celsius, while cars drive eon a freeway in the foreground.

The world’s record-breaking hot streak has lasted 14 months. When will it end?

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Your medications might make it harder for you to beat the heat

Extraordinary heat waves have readers asking how A/C affects greenhouse gas emissions

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Squall line tornadoes are sneaky, dangerous and difficult to forecast

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Zigzag walls could help buildings beat the heat

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Not a subscriber? Become one now .

Responding to the Climate Threat: Essays on Humanity’s Greatest Challenge

A new book co-authored by MIT Joint Program Founding Co-Director Emeritus Henry Jacoby

From the Back Cover

This book demonstrates how robust and evolving science can be relevant to public discourse about climate policy. Fighting climate change is the ultimate societal challenge, and the difficulty is not just in the wrenching adjustments required to cut greenhouse emissions and to respond to change already under way. A second and equally important difficulty is ensuring widespread public understanding of the natural and social science. This understanding is essential for an effective risk management strategy at a planetary scale. The scientific, economic, and policy aspects of climate change are already a challenge to communicate, without factoring in the distractions and deflections from organized programs of misinformation and denial.

Here, four scholars, each with decades of research on the climate threat, take on the task of explaining our current understanding of the climate threat and what can be done about it, in lay language―importantly, without losing critical aspects of the natural and social science. In a series of essays, published during the 2020 presidential election, the COVID pandemic, and through the fall of 2021, they explain the essential components of the challenge, countering the forces of distrust of the science and opposition to a vigorous national response.

Each of the essays provides an opportunity to learn about a particular aspect of climate science and policy within the complex context of current events. The overall volume is more than the sum of its individual articles. Proceeding each essay is an explanation of the context in which it was written, followed by observation of what has happened since its first publication. In addition to its discussion of topical issues in modern climate science, the book also explores science communication to a broad audience. Its authors are not only scientists – they are also teachers, using current events to teach when people are listening. For preserving Earth’s planetary life support system, science and teaching are essential. Advancing both is an unending task.

About the Authors

Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was vice-chair of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Henry Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, in the MIT Sloan School of Management and former co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is focused on the integration of the natural and social sciences and policy analysis in application to the threat of global climate change.

Richard Richels directed climate change research at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). He served as lead author for multiple chapters of the IPCC in the areas of mitigation, impacts and adaptation from 1992 through 2014. He also served on the National Assessment Synthesis Team for the first U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Ben Santer is a climate scientist and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He contributed to all six IPCC reports. He was the lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC report which concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering.

Access the Book

View the book on the publisher's website here .

Order the book from Amazon here .

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Essay on Climate Change: Check Samples in 100, 250 Words

Updated on
Sep 21, 2023

Writing an essay on climate change is crucial to raise awareness and advocate for action. The world is facing environmental challenges, so in a situation like this such essay topics can serve as s platform to discuss the causes, effects, and solutions to this pressing issue. They offer an opportunity to engage readers in understanding the urgency of mitigating climate change for the sake of our planet’s future.

Must Read: Essay On Environment

Table of Contents

1 What Is Climate Change?
2 What are the Causes of Climate Change?
3 What are the effects of Climate Change?
4 How to fight climate change?
5 Essay On Climate Change in 100 Words
6 Climate Change Sample Essay 250 Words

What Is Climate Change?

Climate change is the significant variation of average weather conditions becoming, for example, warmer, wetter, or drier—over several decades or longer. It may be natural or anthropogenic. However, in recent times, it’s been in the top headlines due to escalations caused by human interference.

What are the Causes of Climate Change?

Obama at the First Session of COP21 rightly quoted “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it.”.Identifying the causes of climate change is the first step to take in our fight against climate change. Below stated are some of the causes of climate change:

Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Mainly from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) for energy and transportation.
Deforestation: The cutting down of trees reduces the planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide.
Industrial Processes: Certain manufacturing activities release potent greenhouse gases.
Agriculture: Livestock and rice cultivation emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

What are the effects of Climate Change?

Climate change poses a huge risk to almost all life forms on Earth. The effects of climate change are listed below:

Global Warming: Increased temperatures due to trapped heat from greenhouse gases.
Melting Ice and Rising Sea Levels: Ice caps and glaciers melt, causing oceans to rise.
Extreme Weather Events: More frequent and severe hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires.
Ocean Acidification: Oceans absorb excess CO2, leading to more acidic waters harming marine life.
Disrupted Ecosystems: Shifting climate patterns disrupt habitats and threaten biodiversity.
Food and Water Scarcity: Altered weather affects crop yields and strains water resources.
Human Health Risks: Heat-related illnesses and the spread of diseases.
Economic Impact: Damage to infrastructure and increased disaster-related costs.
Migration and Conflict: Climate-induced displacement and resource competition.

How to fight climate change?

‘Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority,’ says Bill Gates. The below points highlight key actions to combat climate change effectively.

Energy Efficiency: Improve energy efficiency in all sectors.
Protect Forests: Stop deforestation and promote reforestation.
Sustainable Agriculture: Adopt eco-friendly farming practices.
Advocacy: Raise awareness and advocate for climate-friendly policies.
Innovation: Invest in green technologies and research.
Government Policies: Enforce climate-friendly regulations and targets.
Corporate Responsibility: Encourage sustainable business practices.
Individual Action: Reduce personal carbon footprint and inspire others.

Essay On Climate Change in 100 Words

Climate change refers to long-term alterations in Earth’s climate patterns, primarily driven by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, leading to global warming. The consequences of climate change are widespread and devastating. Rising temperatures cause polar ice caps to melt, contributing to sea level rise and threatening coastal communities. Extreme weather events, like hurricanes and wildfires, become more frequent and severe, endangering lives and livelihoods. Additionally, shifts in weather patterns can disrupt agriculture, leading to food shortages. To combat climate change, global cooperation, renewable energy adoption, and sustainable practices are crucial for a more sustainable future.

Must Read: Essay On Global Warming

Climate Change Sample Essay 250 Words

Climate change represents a pressing global challenge that demands immediate attention and concerted efforts. Human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, have significantly increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This results in a greenhouse effect, trapping heat and leading to a rise in global temperatures, commonly referred to as global warming.

The consequences of climate change are far-reaching and profound. Rising sea levels threaten coastal communities, displacing millions and endangering vital infrastructure. Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires, have become more frequent and severe, causing devastating economic and human losses. Disrupted ecosystems affect biodiversity and the availability of vital resources, from clean water to agricultural yields.

Moreover, climate change has serious implications for food and water security. Changing weather patterns disrupt traditional farming practices and strain freshwater resources, potentially leading to conflicts over access to essential commodities.

Addressing climate change necessitates a multifaceted approach. First, countries must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions through the transition to renewable energy sources, increased energy efficiency, and reforestation efforts. International cooperation is crucial to set emission reduction targets and hold nations accountable for meeting them.

In conclusion, climate change is a global crisis with profound and immediate consequences. Urgent action is needed to mitigate its impacts and secure a sustainable future for our planet. By reducing emissions and implementing adaptation strategies, we can protect vulnerable communities, preserve ecosystems, and ensure a livable planet for future generations. The time to act is now.

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in Earth’s climate patterns, primarily driven by human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation.

Five key causes of climate change include excessive greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, notably burning fossil fuels and deforestation.

We hope this blog gave you an idea about how to write and present an essay on climate change that puts forth your opinions. The skill of writing an essay comes in handy when appearing for standardized language tests. Thinking of taking one soon? Leverage Edu provides the best online test prep for the same via Leverage Live . Register today to know more!

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The Center for Global Studies

Climate change argumentation.

Carmen Vanderhoof, Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, Penn State

Carmen Vanderhoof is a doctoral candidate in Science Education at Penn State. Her research employs multimodal discourse analysis of elementary students engaged in a collaborative engineering design challenge in order to examine students’ decision-making practices. Prior to resuming graduate studies, she was a secondary science teacher and conducted molecular biology research.

Subject(s): Earth Science
Topic: Climate Change and Sustainability
Grade/Level: 9-12 (can be adapted to grades 6-8)
Objectives: Students will be able to write a scientific argument using evidence and reasoning to support claims. Students will also be able to reflect on the weaknesses in their own arguments in order to improve their argument and then respond to other arguments.
Suggested Time Allotment: 4-5 hours (extra time for extension)

This lesson is derived from Dr. Peter Buckland’s sustainability presentation for the Center for Global Studies . Dr. Peter Buckland, a Penn State alumnus, is a postdoctoral fellow for the Sustainability Institute. He has drawn together many resources for teaching about climate change, sustainability, and other environmental issues.

While there are many resources for teaching about climate change and sustainability, it may be tough to figure out where to start. There are massive amounts of data available to the general public and students need help searching for good sources of evidence. Prior to launching into a search, it would be worthwhile figuring out what the students already know about climate change, where they learned it, and how they feel about efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. There are many options for eliciting prior knowledge, including taking online quizzes, whole-class discussion, or drawing concept maps. For this initial step, it is important that students feel comfortable to share, without engaging in disagreements. The main idea is to increase students’ understanding about global warming, rather than focus on the potential controversial nature of this topic.

A major goal of this unit is to engage students in co-constructing evidence-based explanations through individual writing, sharing, re-writing, group discussion, and whole group reflection. The argumentation format presented here contains claims supported by evidence and reasoning (Claims Evidence Reasoning – CER). Argumentation in this sense is different from how the word “argument” is used in everyday language. Argumentation is a collaborative process towards an end goal, rather than a competition to win (Duschl & Osborne, 2002). Scientific argumentation is the process of negotiating and communicating findings through a series of claims supported by evidence from various sources along with a rationale or reasoning linking the claim with the evidence. For students, making the link between claim and evidence can be the most difficult part of the process.

Where does the evidence come from?

Evidence and data are often used synonymously, but there is a difference. Evidence is “the representation of data in a form that undergirds an argument that works to answer the original question” (Hand et al., 2009, p. 129). This explains why even though scientists may use the same data to draw explanations from, the final product may take different forms depending on which parts of the data were used and how. For example, in a court case experts from opposing sides may use the same data to persuade the jury to reach different conclusions. Another way to explain this distinction to students is “the story built from the data that leads to a claim is the evidence” (Hand et al., 2009, p. 129). Evidence can come from many sources – results from controlled experiments, measurements, books, articles, websites, personal observations, etc. It is important to discuss with students the issue of the source’s reliability and accuracy. When using data freely available online, ask yourself: Who conducted the study? Who funded the research? Where was it published or presented?

What is a claim and how do I find it?

A scientific claim is a statement that answers a question or an inference based on information, rather than just personal opinion.

How can I connect the claim(s) with the evidence?

That’s where the justification or reasoning comes in. This portion of the argument explains why the evidence is relevant to the claim or how the evidence supports the claim.

Implementation

Learning context and connecting to state standards.

This interdisciplinary unit can be used in an earth science class or adapted to environmental science, chemistry, or physics. The key to adapting the lesson is guiding students to sources of data that fit the discipline they are studying.

For earth science , students can explain the difference between climate and weather, describe the factors associated with global climate change, and explore a variety of data sources to draw their evidence from. Pennsylvania Academic Standards for earth and space science (secondary): 3.3.12.A1, 3.3.12.A6, 3.3.10.A7.

For environmental science , students can analyze the costs and benefits of pollution control measures. Pennsylvania Academic Standards for Environment and Ecology (secondary): 4.5.12.C.

For chemistry and physics , students can explain the function of greenhouse gases, construct a model of the greenhouse effect, and model energy flow through the atmosphere. Pennsylvania Academic Standards for Physical Sciences (secondary): 3.2.10.B6.

New Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Connections

Human impacts and global climate change are directly addressed in the NGSS. Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI): HS-ESS3-3, HS-ESS3-4, HS-ESS3-5, HS-ESS3-6.

Lesson 1: Introduction to climate change

What are greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect? (sample answer: greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane contribute to overall heating of the atmosphere; these gases trap heat just like the glass in a greenhouse or in a car)
What is the difference between weather and climate? (sample answer: weather is the daily temperature and precipitation measurements, while climate is a much longer pattern over multiple years)

Drawing of the greenhouse effect – as individuals or in pairs, have students look up the greenhouse effect and draw a diagram to represent it; share out with the class

Optional: figure out students’ beliefs about global warming using the Yale Six Americas Survey (students answer a series of questions and at the end they are given one of the following categories: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, dismissive).

Lesson 2: Searching for and evaluating evidence

Compare different data sources and assess their credibility
Temperature
Precipitation
Storm surge
Ask the students to think about what types of claims they can make about climate change using the data they found (Sample claims: human activity is causing global warming or sea-level rise in the next fifty years will affect coastal cities like Amsterdam, Hong Kong, or New Orleans).

Lesson 3: Writing an argument using evidence

Claim – an inference or a statement that answers a question
Evidence – an outside source of information that supports the claim, often drawn from selected data
Reasoning – the justification/support for the claim; what connects the evidence with the claim
Extending arguments – have students exchange papers and notice the strengths of the other arguments they are reading (can do multiple cycles of reading); ask students to go back to their original argument and expand it with more evidence and/or more justification for why the evidence supports the claim
Anticipate Rebuttals – ask students to think and write about any weaknesses in their own argument

Lesson 4: Argumentation discussion

rebuttal – challenges a component of someone’s argument – for example, a challenge to the evidence used in the original argument
counterargument – a whole new argument that challenges the original argument
respect group members and their ideas
wait for group members to finish their turns before speaking
be mindful of your own contributions to the discussion (try not to take over the whole discussion so others can contribute too; conversely, if you didn’t already talk, find a way to bring in a new argument, expand on an existing argument, or challenge another argument)
Debate/discussion – In table groups have students share their arguments and practice rebuttals and counterarguments
Whole-group reflection – ask students to share key points from their discussion

Lesson 5: Argumentation in action case study

Mumbai, india case study.

Rishi is a thirteen year old boy who attends the Gayak Rafi Nagar Urdu Municipal school in Mumbai. There is a massive landfill called Deonar right across from his school. Every day 4,000 tons of waste are piled on top of the existing garbage spanning 132 hectares (roughly half a square mile). Rishi ventures out to the landfill after school to look for materials that he can later trade for a little bit of extra money to help his family. He feels lucky that he gets to go to school during the day; others are not so lucky. One of his friends, Aamir, had to stop going to school and work full time after his dad got injured. They often meet to chat while they dig through the garbage with sticks. Occasionally, they find books in okay shape, which aren’t worth anything in trade, but to them they are valuable.

One day Rishi was out to the market with his mom and saw the sky darken with a heavy smoke that blocked out the sun. They both hurried home and found out there was a state of emergency and the schools closed for two days. It took many days to put out the fire at Deonar. He heard his dad say that the fire was so bad that it could be seen from space. He wonders what it would be like to see Mumbai from up there. Some days he wishes the government would close down Deonar and clean it up. Other days he wonders what would happen to all the people that depend on it to live if the city shuts down Deonar.

Mumbai is one of the coastal cities that are considered vulnerable with increasing global temperature and sea level rise. The urban poor are most affected by climate change. Their shelter could be wiped out by a tropical storm and rebuilding would be very difficult.

Write a letter to a public official who may be able to influence policy in Mumbai.

What would you recommend they do? Should they close Deonar? What can they do to reduce air pollution in the city and prepare for possible storms? Remember to use evidence in your argument.

If students want to read the articles that inspired the case study direct them to: http://unhabitat.org/urban-themes/climate-change/

http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2012-07-06/top-20-cities-with-billions-at-risk-from-climate-change.html#slide16

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-26/smelly-dumps-drive-away-affordable-homes-in-land-starved-mumbai

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/asia/mumbai-giant-garbage-dump-fire/

Resources:

Lines of Evidence video from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/videos-multimedia/climate-change-lines-of-evidence-videos/
Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN)
Climate maps from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Sources of data from NASA
Explore the original source of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) study

Differentiated Instruction

For visual learners – use diagrams, encourage students to map out their arguments prior to writing them
For auditory learners – use the lines of evidence video
For ESL students – provide them with a variety of greenhouse gases diagrams, allow for a more flexible argument format and focus on general meaning-making – ex. using arrows to connect their sources of evidence to claims
For advanced learners – ask them to search through larger data sets and make comparisons between data from different sources; they can also research environmental policies and why they stalled out in congress
For learners that need more support – print out excerpts from articles; pinpoint the main ideas to help with the research; help students connect their evidence with their claims; consider allowing students to work in pairs to accomplish the writing task

Argument write-up – check that students’ arguments contain claims supported by evidence and reasoning and that they thought about possible weaknesses in their own arguments.

Case study letter – check that students included evidence in their letter.

References:

Duschl, R. A., & Osborne, J. (2002). Supporting and promoting argumentation discourse in science education.

Hand, B. et al. (2009) Negotiating Science: The Critical Role of Argumentation in Student Inquiry. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

McNeill, K. L., & Krajcik, J. (2012). Claim, evidence and reasoning: Supporting grade 5 – 8 students in constructing scientiﬁc explanations. New York, NY: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.

Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/basics/today/greenhouse-gases.html

http://unhabitat.org/urban-themes/climate-change/

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Got Climate Doom? Here’s What You Can Do to Actually Make a Difference

Genevieve guenther and david wallace-wells on what matters and doesn’t in your personal fight against climate change..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today on “The Argument,” in the fight against climate change, what actions actually matter?

Climate change is are our doing. And the way we humans are occupying the planet isn’t just unsustainable, it is actively causing present and future harm. Clearly, large scale changes are urgently immediately needed at the country and corporate level for everybody everywhere. But what’s an individual like you or me to do? Should we stop flying on planes, eating meat, using straws, having children? Should we get better at composting? Does recycling matter? Not to get all existential, though I guess this is existential, but does any of it matter?

I’m Jane Coaston. And today I’m talking to two people who think really deeply about this question. My guests are author David Wallace-Wells, who wrote the book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and Genevieve Guenther, climate communication activist and founder of the organization, End Climate Silence.

David, Genevieve, could you give me a one-sentence nutshell as to where you stand on the issue of personal responsibility on climate change?

My basic feeling is that the changes that we need are all systemic. And so the things that individuals can do to make that change are primarily through the political realm, not through their individual behavior. If we want to really halt this problem and get a handle on it, it means large, large scale changes that are beyond the capacity of individuals to enact on their own.

I actually agree with David. This is a systemic problem that is only going to be solved by governments and large corporations leading the transformation of our economies to zero-emission economies. That said, rich people across the globe have a responsibility, a personal responsibility, to reduce their discretionary emissions, to reduce their consumption, both for climate justice reasons and also simply because we need them to do it if we’re going to meet our emissions targets and halt global heating.

Could you explain what climate justice means to an audience that is me?

Basically, it means that the global north historically has been responsible for the vast majority of carbon pollution. And the global south has been responsible for almost none of it. Since 1990, for example, the top 10 percent of earners have been responsible for 52 percent of the growth of global emissions. And the poorest, 50 percent, who largely live in the global south, have been responsible for about 7 percent of global emissions. But that hasn’t grown at all. Historically, they have contributed nothing to the exponential growth of emissions and the increased and accelerating global heating that we’re already seeing. So the idea of climate justice is that global north nations have a moral responsibility to reduce their emissions first and faster so that there is some room left in whatever carbon budget we still have for the global south to pull themselves out of poverty.

It’s really, really stark, as Genevieve lays out, that it is the wealthy countries of the world and the wealthy people of the world who have engineered this crisis. So whenever we hear about the problem of India, the problem of electrifying sub-Saharan Africa, these are problems. We need to figure them out and do them clean in a way that doesn’t imperil the future of the planet. But those are only problems that we have to deal with now because of the development patterns that countries like ours and across northern Europe went through over the last few decades and centuries.

A lot of this has to do with differences in income and class and countries that are politically and culturally marginalized or politically and culturally powerful, which makes climate responsibility a very interestingly tricky issue.

Can I just jump in for one second?

And just say that the word “responsibility” has two different definitions, right? There’s the sense of responsibility as guilt. Who is responsible for this crime? Who has to pay the price? But then there’s responsibility as duty. Who’s going to take responsibility for cleaning up this mess? Most of the people who are listening to this podcast and nobody in this room, for sure, is responsible for causing the climate crisis. But we’re all responsible for now solving it to the best way that we can.

So let’s get into that. And I love that definitional split because me feeling bad about climate change doesn’t really help. So, I live in one of the wealthy countries that helped to cause this and caused this long before I was born. So, David, I’d like to start the conversation with you. Do my personal actions, be they avoiding plastic straws or composting or calculating my personal carbon footprint, as oil companies seem to really want me to do, or switching light bulbs or becoming a vegetarian, in the scheme of averting climate change or mitigating climate change, do those actions really matter?

Well, some of them can matter in limiting your carbon footprint. So if you don’t eat beef, if you don’t take airplanes, if you drive an electric car, you’re probably pretty far along in reducing your own carbon footprint. And that is one measure of climate responsibility, carbon responsibility. But ultimately, the things that we need to do to really get a hold of this are way bigger than cutting your food emissions by 10 percent or 50 percent or whatever. It’s like, the three of us in this room, we can’t build an electric grid, a solar farm. We can’t make sure that there are Tesla charging stations all across the country. We can’t re-imagine land use policy or agricultural policy. We can’t put an honest price on carbon so that when you’re buying gas, you’re actually paying for the environmental damage that’s being caused or when you’re buying an airplane ticket. Those are just things that are well outside of our capacity to control. And some of the actions that you’re talking about, the individual actions, I think can be useful in terms of generating small scale political energy that can eventually sort of trickle up into politics. Leaders see that we’re making changes. They see that we’re demanding changes. They may feel more comfortable making those changes themselves. But it’s only through policy that we’re really going to get where we are hoping to go. And some of the changes that you’re talking about, people are compelled to do because they don’t want to feel a part of the ugliness of the destruction of the planet, more than because they’re making a rational calculation about how best to use their time and what they can do that has the highest impact. And for me, that answer is really exclusively through a political engagement and political activism because we really need to shake the whole infrastructure of the world. And the only people who are capable of doing that are the people who are in corridors of power in politics and the corporate world. They just need to hear our voices screaming at them.

My same question goes for you, Genevieve. If we know that about 100 companies that are responsible for around 70 percent of emissions in the last few decades and so much of their actions have been aimed at rhetorically shifting the responsibility of climate change onto consumers, instead of doing anything about climate change, does individual action actually make a difference? You mentioned that wealthy individuals can make a difference, but what does that mean?

Well, let me contextualize this for a moment. The concept of the carbon footprint is actually a legitimate concept in sustainability research. It was developed by two researchers in the 1990s. But BP extracted this concept from academia and created a multimillion dollar campaign, trying to change the discourse of the climate crisis and make, as you said, Jane, everybody feel responsible for causing the climate crisis, but also feeling responsible for solving it by doing things like no longer driving or no longer flying or no longer eating beef or turning off lights or using plastic straws. And as David said, this is impossible. Even if every single one of us brought our personal carbon emissions down to zero, we would not halt global heating. But the fossil fuel industry, as part of their disinformation campaign, wants to make everyone feel helpless, feel overwhelmed, and wants to shift our attention away from the political action that has a chance of resolving the climate crisis to what can’t possibly work, which is focusing on our carbon footprint. That said, reducing the discretionary emissions of the top 1 percent is actually a piece of the decarbonization puzzle. So, if the top 10 percent reduced their carbon emissions down to the level of the average European, which is still quite significant — eight tons a year — we would be about one-third of the way to decarbonizing our systems. So we emit as a globe about 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year. And this reduction in luxury consumption would reduce emissions by about 10 gigatons a year. So that is just a staggering number. That shows how for some people this idea of reducing the carbon footprint is actually key to decarbonization.

Yeah, I think the carbon footprint story is interesting for a number of reasons. But one of them is that the implicit message is not just that the responsibility is yours, but also that you have to live like a monk to make this work. That may have been, to some degree, true 25, 30 years ago when the alternative systems that we now see right around the corner were much farther away in the distance and much more expensive. But it just isn’t the case now that to green our economy will require an enormous burden. It will require an investment, but that will sort of pay for itself in the relatively short term. And so we’re now in a situation where a lot of people often think that moving into a sustainable future is going to make their lives suck. And the truth is that just isn’t the case, but that is what the companies that are profiting from the status quo would like you to think because nobody wants their lives to suck.

Right. Genevieve, you were talking about the 1 percent, and you were mentioning bringing down their carbon emissions. What would that look like? What definite actions would that look like? I’m assuming it’s not flying Leonardo DiCaprio to climate conferences on very expensive planes and then having the cars that wait outside the climate conference just idle for hours. But what other actions should they be taking?

Well, you bring up a really important issue. And so by way of answering your question, I’m just going to stop and say that I personally think the high consumption, and particularly the flying of people who are in the public eye, trying to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis, is incredibly destructive to building a political movement. They’re actually doing something extremely counterproductive in my interpretation. They’re reinforcing everybody’s cognitive dissonance with their behavior, which is also a form of speech. They’re communicating that they’re not willing to make transformative changes and not willing to support transformative policies, and that, in fact, you need to use fossil fuels even to do climate work. And so, for me, I feel like the people who need to worry about their carbon footprints insofar as anybody does are the 1 percent and people in the climate movement. Now, the 1 percent. What is the 1 percent? In the United States, I would define the 1% as people making $450,000 a year and above. So it’s hard to imagine how much consumption is normalized among these people. It is not at all considered wasteful to buy a new SUV every two or three years as new models come out. It is not all considered extravagant to fly up to 20 times a year. It is not at all horrific to buy an entirely new wardrobe two or three times a year and throw it all away. In fact, this is considered a signal that you are in the rich group and that you are living your best life.

And there’s a way that a lot of aspects of that life are processed by our culture as actually clean. When we think about rich people and the way that they live, we think about whatever, their pilates and their juice cleanses. [LAUGHTER] And we think about how good their skin looks. It’s like we think of it as clean, and therefore, healthy. And we have a way of thinking about poverty as though it’s dirty. But when it comes to the climate, the opposite is really the reverse, that it’s wealth that’s dirty and poverty that’s clean. And I think culturally, we have a really hard time processing that properly.

Well, that goes back to the climate justice point, is that a lot of the dirt that is created by this clean consumption, this luxury consumption of the rich, is outsourced to communities of color, to the global south, to places where it’s not visible to white people in power. And so, the dirt is put onto poor people.

When you say outsourced, what do you mean?

I mean, quite literally, fossil fuel plants are very often sited in communities of color —

— in the United States and around the world. Already today, there are communities and territories in the global south that are being completely destroyed by climate change, even just at 1 degree Celsius of heating to date. I mean, to the point where people are losing their homes, their communities are flooded, or they’re not able to grow food because their ground has been completely desiccated by drought. The climate crisis has begun in the United States, too. But the real violence of it is in the global south. And I would argue that the global north doesn’t see it because the news media isn’t reporting on it and because the kind of white supremacy prevents people in this country from really recognizing that this is a violence that would feel unimaginable if it happened to their children.

It’s interesting thinking about this as also being a class issue. The people who are working in oil refineries, or in coal — on my mom’s side, we come from West Virginia, from towns that were largely built by the coal industry, supplied by the coal industry. Everything was paid for by the coal industry. When we’re talking about the 1 percent, the 1 percent is the most performatively green while not being green, whereas the people who are working in these industries, their perception is that this is my livelihood, which is true. It is a class issue in many respects in how we’re thinking about this. And that’s something I do want to make clear. But David, I know that you wanted to bring in some numbers here.

Yeah, I mean, Genevieve mentioned that this is — we’re sort of siting these polluting facilities in poor communities, communities of color, marginalized communities. To think about the concrete impacts, 350,000 Americans, it’s estimated, die every single year from the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. That is a death toll literally equal to the 2020 death toll from COVID. And it is borne disproportionately by Black and Brown and poor people. And the dynamic is even more horrifying elsewhere in the world where other countries have much dirtier air than we do. Estimates are as high as 10 million people globally dying of air pollution every single year, 8.7 million of them from the burning of fossil fuels. I mean, that is an absolutely mind-bendingly large impact and well beyond those who die. There are huge, huge health consequences from this pollution. It may be the case that air pollution may even be a bigger crisis than climate change. That is how dramatic these impacts are. They happen to be caused largely by the same thing so we can solve them at the same time, but we’re talking about rising rates of respiratory disease and coronary disease and cancers of all kinds and Alzheimer’s and dementia and ADHD and criminality and premature birth and low birth weight. And just every aspect of human flourishing is damaged by the pollution that is produced by the burning of fossil fuels. And when we think of it simply in terms of, is the economy going to grow faster or is it going to go slower, I think we really, really miss the huge, huge public health consequences of continuing running the systems as we are running them today, and also the huge benefits we would get from getting off those systems. So famously last year, Drew Shindell, who’s an air pollution expert at Duke, testified before U.S. Congress saying that a green transition of the American energy system would entirely pay for itself through the public health benefits of cleaner air. You could put aside all of the climate impacts. You could put aside all the benefits of cheaper electricity. And just because we would be healthier as a result, even in the U.S. where air is already clean, the dollars and cents would add up and make that a very, very clear win for all of us. While there is a sort of transition bump and we should have public policy that addresses it, especially for communities who are already suffering, it’s also the case that the obvious economic logic is also the obvious environmental logic here. These are no longer in tension. [MUSIC PLAYING]

My name is Haley. I live in Washington, D.C. And the thing I have been arguing about is having children with how the world is projected to be in the time that they would be growing up and if we want to subject more people to that. Lyman Stone, on one of your previous episodes about the falling birthrate, mentioned that a lot of women aren’t concerned about having children related to climate change. I would strongly disagree. I’m 23. I’m the age that my mom had me. And every person that I talked to about this in my kind of age group demographic feels the same way.

What are you arguing about with your family, your friends, your frenemies? Tell me about the big debate you’re having in a voicemail by calling 347-915-4324. And we might play an excerpt of it on a future episode.

I read an interesting piece in the Sierra Club magazine — Sierra, my mother is a subscriber — by Jason Mark called “Yes, actually, individual responsibility is essential to solving the climate crisis.” And he argued that a fixation on systemic change can lead to kind of a cynical self absolution. But when it comes to climate, and you’re like, OK, I’m interested in this, what is this going to require of me? Their first thought is, you should not have kids, or veganism is your only choice. I want to have explicit takeaways for listeners because I think what listeners get a lot is — pardon my language, but we’re all [BLEEP]. [LAUGHTER] We’re going to die tomorrow. And if you’re an older person, you’re like, wait, weren’t we going to die in, like, 1975? What are explicit takeaways for people to have that are real and would make real difference?

All right, well, let me talk about this point that you shouldn’t have kids or you should have one fewer kid to lower your carbon footprint because it’s misanthropic and it’s just wrong. So there was one study that came up with the top personal carbon footprint actions, and one of them was have one fewer kid. But if you dig down into that study you see that they assume that the consumption of parenthood would remain the same with each subsequent kid. People in the global south generally have large families. And it hasn’t increased their carbon emissions at all. It’s not the kids, it’s the consumption.

If we get to a place where we have decarbonized much of our economy, which is technologically and politically possible now, then you’re talking about multiplying invisible carbon footprints.

Mm-hmm, totally.

In 2070, we’re in a net zero world. Nobody has a carbon footprint. So having more kids is not going to make one difference in either direction. And I think we’re still in a place where we can keep that goal in mind and fight to make that possible so that we don’t have to do things like reduce family size. We can solve our problems more holistically and allow each of us to live the lives that we want to live on the planet throughout the modern world, where especially in the wealthy nations of the west, we think about poverty and famine in other parts of the world not just as acceptable, but almost as comforting, because they remind us of how secure and comfortable we are today. And I had this interaction just before the pandemic at an event I did. I keep thinking about it. I think about it maybe every week, maybe every day, where I gave a talk about looking at how dire some of these situations could be. And afterwards, somebody came up to me who assured me that he was not a climate denier. And then he said, so really, how bad is it going to get? And I said, well, at two degrees, we’re talking about 150 million people dying of air pollution. And he said, but that’s out of 8 billion. And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I’m not talking about the total extinction of the human race here, but 150 million is 150 million. That’s 25 Holocausts. And he said, but out of 8 billion. And I think that there is this danger —

I think you were talking to Hannibal Lecter? [LAUGHTER] That’s the most terrifying question I’ve ever heard.

Honestly, the person I was talking to was the United States. I mean, that is the perspective that we have as a country. And as guilty as I feel as responsible as I feel, as I’m sure, Genevieve, and to some extent, Jane, you feel, all of us are actually behaving in ways that are imposing that kind of suffering on people elsewhere in the world. It’s almost unavoidable, given the systems that we live in today. And that is really horrifying. But I think the more clearly that we can see that, the more likely we are to be demanding real change of our leaders and the systems in which we live, which is, to your point, about takeaways, Jane, really, to me, the most important thing, which is that we really need to get our house in order and to help the rest of the world get their house in order.

How do we get our house in order? What do I as an individual or the people listening to this podcast, how do I make this happen on my level? Knowing all of that, what do I do? What do I personally need to do? Give me a thing to do, Genevieve!

OK, I have a whole list of things to do.

Oh, great, thank God.

Pick one. Do it once a week, and things will change. First thing is vote. You can’t do that once a week, but vote in every election. Vote for climate candidates, and then once they’re in office, keep pressuring them. Call their D.C. offices. Call their local offices. Send them emails regularly. OK, number two, join a campaign or an activist group. There are local chapters of groups called the Sunrise Movement and 350.org in many communities. If you’re really hardcore, you can join Extinction Rebellion. They do direct actions, which is a really good way of moving the Overton window over and getting people awake. If you don’t have the time to do that, donate money. Donate money to organizations that are putting their bodies on the line. Here are some of them— Sunrise, Fridays for Future, which is the youth organization that is organizing the climate strikes that Greta Thunberg started, Greenpeace. And here are some social justice organizations — UPROSE and WE ACT. There are also two new organizations who are writing climate policy in a new way and lobbying on the Hill to get them passed. They are Climate Power and Evergreen Action. Donate to them. Or you can donate to groups that are working on electoral politics directly, like the Environmental Voter Project or Stacey Abrams’s Verified Action. The ability to put your preferred candidates in office is a huge part of the climate fight. Or here’s another thing you can do. You can organize your workplace to ask your company to make greener business decisions or to lobby Congress for climate policies. And then finally, one of the most impactful things that you can do is simply talk about climate change in your social networks, especially when it feels most socially awkward and embarrassing. Because unless we continue to break the kind of conspiracy of climate silence that allows people to look away, we’re not actually going to have the kind of pressure internally and psychologically in people that will help them join the climate movement. We as a culture need to normalize that it’s actually healthy not to be happy in the face of climate change and that it doesn’t mean we’re failed Americans. It means that we’re actually human beings who are having an appropriate and ethical moral response to the suffering that is coming in the pipe for everybody, also our own children. So that is my big list of things to do. Pick one, and go for it.

David, I want to hear it from you, what you think we should do.

I would say, if what Genevieve laid out feels like pie in the sky, climate strike groups were launched in parts of the world by people with very little access to political or social power. They are often teenagers who don’t have the vote, even when they’re living in democracies. Many of them aren’t living in democracies. They are overwhelmingly girls. They are often trans and queer. These are people who are on the most distant margins of global political power. And within the space of a few years, by simply refusing to accept their own impotence, they have literally remade the entire landscape of global climate politics. Like in the U.S., when we have Joe Biden who Sunrise gave an F to in the primary, talking about this as an existential threat, that is because the protests worked. And they worked in an incredibly short amount of time. When I started writing about climate five years ago, I would not have thought that this kind of political change was at all possible. We are living through what is a genuinely unprecedented global climate awakening, which has totally changed the landscape of what is possible. And it really has made the world and the future look sunnier. So it’s not nearly bright enough. It still involves an enormous amount of preventable suffering. And it’s on all of us to make that future better. But the true, are we going to make humans extinct, kind of futures that we were talking about as slim but real possibilities a few years ago, I think are much, much less likely today. And that is in large part the result of climate protests by people who started their activism within the last few years.

I was going to push back against David’s more hopeful note [WALLACE-WELLS LAUGHS] that we’re not in danger of extinction. I don’t think that extinction is off the table until emissions start to bend down. But I do agree with him that the fact that nations across the globe have made significant climate pledges to reach net zero emissions, corporations, banks have made these kinds of pledges, is entirely due to the political activity that has arisen since 2018.

I would say even more importantly, we can’t set our standard at extinction. It’s not like if we survive and avoid extinction, that that’s a success. There is huge suffering between here and there. And every degree of temperature rise is going to create more suffering. And every degree we avoid can help us avoid that.

Genevieve, you brought up some of the larger powers and corporations. And yes, they have responded to pressure with regard to investing in reducing emissions and renewable energy. But we’ve seen in 2020 that fewer than 5 percent of offsets went to removing CO2 from the atmosphere. That doesn’t mean that preserving virgin forests isn’t awesome. But how much of those actions is just performative? How much of those actions is greenwashing?

OK, well, that’s a really good point. So even Shell has come up with a net zero plan. But if you dig into it, you see that it mostly relies on a level of offsets, which is completely implausible, and on technologies that are unproven that are promising to draw carbon out of the air. So, yes, many of these net zero pledges are greenwashing. And there’s a disclaimer in the back of the Shell plan that says, readers should not make future projections based on what’s written in this report. [LAUGHTER] I mean, they really are covering their proverbial butts But what is hopeful about these net zero pledges, even as they are greenwashing, is the fact that these companies feel pressure to make them at all, right? This is a sea change in politics. If they can’t actually transform, they’re going to be pushed out, and new incumbents are going to come in. And the question is, can we do this fast enough to halt global warming in time to preserve much of the habitable world? Or is it going to take so long that, in fact, things are going to spiral out of control?

But that brings us, actually, to a point of some disagreement. The dynamic that you’re describing illustrates the power of individuals over companies, and as a result, also, I think illustrates, in a backward-looking way, our responsibility. Half of all emissions in the entire history of humanity have come in the last 30 years. Now since Al Gore published his first book on warming, you know I often joke it’s since the premiere of “Friends,” which means that, actually, the people who have done the lion’s share of the damage to the planet are alive today. And it is true, of course, that the people who have been running Shell and Chevron and ExxonMobil have much more responsibility than I do or Genevieve does or Jane does. But it is also the case that all of us have benefited in significant ways from economic activity that has been powered by fossil fuels and to which we could have raised louder objections earlier.

I want to contest the claim that we’ve all benefited from the fossil fuel system, because if you look at charts that show the rise of income inequality over the past 25 and 30 years, I mean, most of that wealth has been concentrated at the top. It’s not like we’ve all seen those gains at all. So I don’t know that we have to all take on a feeling of guilt for the rise of G.D.P. under neoliberalism, because I don’t know that most of us have actually even seen that money. And as you said earlier, David, our way of life is no longer dependent on fossil fuels. We can transition to a clean energy system, to clean systems, and maintain largely our quality of life. So I’m not going to accept that responsibility. People need to hear a lot of things more than once to really absorb it. I learned that as a parent. I only started getting worried about the climate crisis after my son was born. And I didn’t even realize how bad it was going to be, I would say, until about mid-2017 or 2018, reading your article and going down the rabbit hole from there. So I think we need to really tell the climate story as a story of good and evil because these people have known for decades what their products were going to do. And not only did they keep producing and selling fossil fuels, they lied about it. They lied about what they knew. And they tried to do everything they could to capture our political system just to sustain their own wealth and power. I think that’s pretty bad. It’s criminal. It’s absolutely criminal.

David, what do you make of what Genevieve said about the messaging about good and evil there?

I think that this story is one about our responsibility towards other humans, in which collectively, human behavior has imperiled the future of the planet. I think as a result, we have to talk about it in terms of good and evil, that there are very obvious sides. And I think that there are certain actors who have played hugely disproportionate, often toxic, roles in that story, namely the fossil fuel industry and their allies in political power, not just in the U.S. but all around the world. I just don’t think that that’s the end all, be all of it, because I do think that many people, even today, think, OK, I want the future to be stable and green and prosperous. But I don’t want to pay $1 more at the pump for a gallon of gas and may actually vote in an election on that basis. And that’s not to say that that person is as culpable as the CEOs of ExxonMobil. Obviously, there’s a huge spectrum of culpability, but I think that a huge majority of Americans are understandably viewed by people elsewhere in the world as contributing to the problem as opposed to contributing to the solution, and that we should not dismiss that judgment because we happen to think, well, I was just doing it for myself, or I was just acting in the system in which I live. We should take seriously that judgment and try to think about what we can do to sort of make it right, so to speak.

I think it’s worthwhile to point out that the vast majority of Americans are literally going to be richer once we have decarbonized, because their electricity, their heating, their transportation, and their health care costs are going to go down significantly. I mean, Vice President Harris would often say during the presidential campaign that most Americans didn’t even have $400 in their wallets to help cover an emergency. So, people’s real incomes are going to rise significantly once we’ve decarbonized. And that means that decarbonization is not a cost, but a benefit. It is going to be a benefit to most Americans.

If we manage it right.

Yeah, but and a benefit when? Because I think a lot of this messaging relies on something that, in general, people do not like, which is, you may need to do a thing or change a thing about your life for a future that we have not yet defined. From a messaging perspective, how do we message the urgency? How do we talk about what needs to change? But how do we do that, one, effectively, and two, to everyone?

OK, so the first part is understanding why we have to do this. And I would argue that most Americans still don’t know enough about global heating and the climate crisis. So, in our polling at End Climate Silence, it shows that most Americans learn everything we know about the climate crisis from the news media. And this is absolutely chilling [LAUGHTER] because the news media is still not reporting on the crisis accurately or with the urgency that it deserves. The second piece is a kind of climate communication that shows people how this is going to affect them. Most people think of this as a crisis that’s for the global south or for the distant future or for our grandchildren’s grandchildren or whatever. And it’s up to every single communicator, as far as I’m concerned, to make it clear in really concrete embodied terms what this crisis is going to mean for the children who are alive today. What I think we need to do is take everyone who already thinks they know something about the climate crisis and thinks they’re concerned about it and activate them by giving them the information they need, showing them how it’s personal, and converting fear into a kind of outrage that allows them to take up this fight. And then the third piece of that is really showing how making these changes that are required would be such a benefit to them. It’s just really important to remember that it actually has to be done right now. We don’t get another shot at this.

David, do you want to have the final word here on the messaging?

Well, I think the last point that Genevieve mentioned is maybe the most important, which is just to say that the benefits are really vivid, they are really clear. Everybody agrees that the world will be better off the faster we move. And that really wasn’t the case five or 10 years ago. There was much more muddled analysis and messaging then. And I think we have to take advantage of the new unanimity and not let people fall back on the logic of status quo bias and incumbency and just think that change is expensive and difficult. What I worry about is that the political dynamics are not entirely governed, especially in the US, by public opinion. If they were, we probably would already be moving much faster than we are. There are obstacles in the way laid by incumbent entrenched interests. And we need to figure out ways to uproot them. That doesn’t mean that everybody who cares about climate needs to be going to an Extinction Rebellion protest. It doesn’t even mean that they need to be calling their representative. There is a very small ask that can be made, which is just to support the people who support aggressive climate action. We’re talking about massive, immediate, or quasi immediate payback for all of the investments we’re making.

David Wallace-Wells and Genevieve Guenther, thank you both so much for joining me today.

Thanks, Jane. It’s been great.

Thanks, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]

David Wallace-Wells is an editor at large at New York Magazine and the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Genevieve Guenther is the founder and director of End Climate Silence and the author of the forthcoming book, “The Language of Climate Politics.” If you want to learn more about personal responsibility, I recommend Jason Marks’s article in the Sierra Club magazine, “Yes, actually, individual responsibility is essential to solving the climate crisis,” and the New York Times guest essay by Auden Schendler, “Worrying About Your Carbon Footprint is Exactly What Big Oil Wants You to Do.” You can find links to these in our episode notes. Finally, I really appreciate the time that both of my guests spent explaining this issue to me. If we want real solutions, we’re going to have to get folks involved across the political and societal spectrum. Climate change can’t just be an issue that only the 1 percent gets involved in by telling the 99 percent what to do. It’s a complicated issue, but it’s one we have to face together. And it’s one that — let’s not lie to ourselves — a lot of corporations would really rather they not take any responsibility on either. So this is hard. It’s hard for me to understand. It’s hard to explain. And it’s really hard for us not to all get our own biases in the way. But I hope that today’s episode is a start of a different conversation about climate change because as fun as doomerism is, doomerism doesn’t do anything.

The Argument is a production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Phoebe Lett, Eliza Gutierrez, and Vishakha Darbha; edited by Sarah Geis; with original music and sound design by Isaac Jones and engineering by Carole Sabouraud; fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker; and audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks this week to Kristen Lin and the good people at Switch and Board Podcast Studio here in Washington, D.C.

I don’t know about you, but any time I’ve been to Europe, I feel like they live beautifully and I’m actually jealous of the societies they’ve managed to construct.

Yeah, but their dishwashers do not work. [LAUGHTER] Not one device works.

That sounded very Trumpy. What about their toilets? [LAUGHTER]

Have you ever tried to roast a chicken in England? Nothing works. [LAUGHTER]

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It’s no wonder so many people feel helpless about averting climate catastrophe. This is the era of dire warnings from many scientists and increasing natural disasters, record-breaking temperatures and rising tides. Fossil-fuel executives testify before Congress while politicians waver on whether they’ll support urgently needed changes to make American infrastructure sustainable. Thousands of youth activists at the Glasgow climate talks this week demonstrated for action from world leaders whose words convey the seriousness of the emergency but whose actions against major carbon contributors are lacking.

But, as host Jane Coaston says, “as fun as doomerism is, doomerism doesn’t do anything.” So what is an individual to do?

Recycle? Compost? Give up meat or flying or plastic straws? Protest in the streets?

To parse which personal actions matter and which don’t, Jane is joined by the climate activist and author Genevieve Guenther, who argues that for the wealthier citizens of the world, there are real steps that can be taken right away to help fight the current and impending climate catastrophes. Guenther lists them according to one’s ability, time and resources.

Also joining the debate is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells, who argues that while individual behavior is a good start, it won’t bring the change needed; only large-scale political action will save us. In this episode, Guenther and Wallace-Wells disagree about extinction and blame, but they agree that when individual political pressure builds into an unignorable movement, once-impossible-to-imagine solutions will be the key to saving our future.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple , Spotify or Google or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Mentioned in this episode:

David Wallace-Wells for New York magazine, “ The Uninhabitable Earth ”

Auden Schendler’s guest essay “ Worrying About Your Carbon Footprint Is Exactly What Big Oil Wants You to Do ”

Jason Mark for Sierra, “ Yes, Actually, Individual Responsibility Is Essential to Solving the Climate Crisis ”

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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Why Some Americans Do Not See Urgency on Climate Change

In-depth interviews find some americans consider crisis language overblown, leading to added skepticism of claims, table of contents.

How do people who feel less urgency on climate change explain the Earth’s climate?
How do people who see less urgency on climate change interpret calls to action?
How do people less concerned about climate change view information from climate scientists and news media?
Views of government efforts to promote renewable energy and electric vehicles
What role should government play in environmental protection?
Acknowledgments
Interview recruitment
Interviews and analysis

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand the perspectives of Americans who put lower priority on taking action to address climate change and who see a limited role for human activity as a reason for the Earth warming.

The Center completed in-depth interviews with 32 U.S. adults to discuss their views about climate change, extreme weather and environmental problems. The interviews were conducted online by Sago, a market research firm, between May 15 and 26, 2023.

Interviews were conducted with people who said that addressing climate change is not a top priority for the country and who did not see human activity as the primary reason the Earth is getting warmer, including some who said there was no evidence that the Earth is warming. Interviews included adults living in five geographic regions in the United States: the Midwest, Mountain West, Southwest, South and Coastal Florida.

Here is the interviewer guide used for the in-depth interviews, and more on its methodology . Quotations featured in this report have been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

A companion report, “ Majorities of Americans Prioritize Renewable Energy, Back Steps to Address Climate Change ,” analyzed public opinion on climate, energy and environmental issues based on a survey of 10,329 U.S. adults from May 30 to June 4, 2023.

As the Earth’s temperature continues to rise, fueling more intense storms and extreme weather, scientists are calling for immediate action to address climate change . However, climate change remains a lower priority for some Americans, and a subset of the public rejects that it’s happening at all.

To better understand the perspectives of those who see less urgency to address climate change, Pew Research Center conducted in-depth interviews with 32 U.S. adults who hold this view, including some who do not believe there’s evidence that the Earth is warming. Unlike much of our work on climate change, these interviews are not representative of all U.S. adults; rather, they are designed to provide deeper insight into the motivations and views of those most skeptical about climate change.

The interviews revealed that language describing climate change as a crisis and an urgent threat was met with suspicion by many participants. The disconnect between crisis rhetoric and the participants’ own beliefs and experiences drove doubt about the motivations of the people making these claims, sowing suspicion and deeper mistrust.

Interviewees widely rejected the national news media as a credible source for climate information. They see these outlets as presenting information that suits their own agendas. Interviewees generally expressed greater openness toward hearing from scientists on climate change because of their subject matter expertise. Still, participants stressed the importance of hearing factual statements from scientists rather than beliefs that may be shaped by their own political leanings or their research funders.

On policy, interviewees were open to government efforts to improve environmental quality, including air and water quality – especially when these efforts were at the local level. The conversations underscore areas of common ground around environmental protection, regardless of Americans’ level of concern about climate change.

When it comes to measures aimed at transitioning the country toward renewable energy, interviewees stressed the importance of respecting individual freedoms – and individual choice – in any energy transition. This theme was underscored by criticism of policies like ending the production of new gas-powered vehicles.

Chart shows 14% of Americans say there is no solid evidence that climate change is happening

Nationally representative Pew Research Center surveys show that fewer than half of all Americans reject that humans are major contributors to climate change or say addressing the issue is not too important for the country. Even smaller shares take the most skeptical views and say the Earth is not warming at all and that no action should be taken.

Overall, 46% of Americans say human activity is the primary reason why the Earth is warming. By contrast, 26% say warming is mostly caused by natural patterns in the environment and another 14% do not believe there’s evidence the Earth is warming at all.

When it comes to policy action, 37% of Americans think addressing climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress , and another 34% say it is an important but lower priority. By contrast, about three-in-ten say action on climate change is not too important (17%) or should not be done (11%). Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to prioritize climate action, though individuals who are skeptical about addressing climate change are seen within both party coalitions and across demographic groups. ( Read this post for a roundup of survey data on how Americans feel about climate change.)

In-depth interviews with adults who view climate change as a lower priority and do not think the Earth is getting warmer primarily due to human activity were conducted virtually in May 2023 across five geographic areas: the Midwest, Mountain West, South, Southwest and Coastal Florida. Participants were selected based on their views on climate change and to ensure a broad mix of interviewees across characteristics including party, ideology, gender and education.

The analysis of these 32 interviews is designed to highlight common themes that emerged across conversations. The analysis and quotations are meant to offer a deeper exploration of the “why” behind the views and beliefs of those who see climate action as a lower priority.

The major themes across these interviews include:

Perceptions of climate change as part of the Earth’s natural cycles and strong skepticism toward claims of crisis

Explanations for climate change and extreme weather as natural patterns over time.

“I do believe [the climate] is changing, but I believe it is changing in a natural cycle that happens all the time. What I don’t believe is that humans are 100% responsible for climate change.” –Man, 50s, Mountain West

“I think that [extreme weather events] are not happening more. I think people know about them more. We know about a tsunami that happened across the world, whereas 50 years ago we never even heard of it. It may seem like things are happening more and more, but I think that just that’s the cycle of life, the cycle of Earth. And if they are happening a little more, then that is just the cyclical part of what’s going on with the planet.” –Man, 50s, Coastal Florida

A common explanation across interviews was that any changes to Earth’s climate are a natural part of the planet’s cycles that humans cannot control. Extreme weather was explained in a similar way, with many saying these events are natural occurrences that have not become more frequent and severe because of climate change.

Most of the 32 interviewees perceived claims of a climate crisis as exaggerated, and they connected this sense of overblown rhetoric with a need for increased scrutiny toward such claims.

Climate change is seen as part of Earth’s natural cycles and humans play a small role. Most of the 32 interviewees were in agreement that the Earth’s climate is changing, but they typically explained these changes as part of natural patterns over time, with humans described as having little control over these changes. Two interviewees expressed extreme skepticism, calling climate change a “hoax.”
Extreme weather is seen as a part of life and not happening more often . Many interviewees said that extreme weather events are natural occurrences and did not draw a connection between their intensity or frequency and climate change. Some participants added that people are just hearing more about these events than in the past because of the availability of information, but they are not becoming more common.

Suspicion around claims that action on climate change is urgent

One of the most common frustrations participants raised is the way that people talk about climate change as a crisis that requires immediate action. Many said that when they hear these arguments, they react with disbelief and increased scrutiny of the motives behind such statements.

As one participant put it: “ People who are alarmist tend to want really drastic policies that seem to not make sense, so it kind of makes me disbelieve the other things they’re saying.” –Man, 20s, Midwest

Another said: “From a personal standpoint, whether it’s the climate or anything else, when the statements are too large … like when the statements are, ‘The world is getting warmer and Earth is going to be ended in five years because we’re all terrible humans and we throw trash on the ground.’ Those things cause me to be, instead of causing me to be concerned, it causes me to be more skeptical about where the information is coming from and why it’s being presented in such a grandiose term, for lack of a better word.” –Woman, 30s, Midwest

Climate scientists are valued for their expertise, but also seen as potentially having an agenda; media outlets are not trusted sources of climate information

Participants expressed trust in climate scientists while also considering that some might have personal biases. The openness to hearing from scientists on this issue was in contrast to their views of media outlets. Most interviewees said that the news media cannot be trusted for information about climate change.

Open to information from climate scientists . Many participants wanted to hear more from climate scientists because of their expertise. Yet some of the same participants also said they don’t have full trust in scientists because of uncertainty about their financial motivations and personal biases.

“I think that scientists, if they worked hard for their degree, it’s good to listen to them. I do always wonder, with anybody – anybody – if they have an agenda. It’s looking into maybe where their education is, what groups or environmental groups are they a part of. What is their main focus? And then, is there an agenda behind what they’re saying?” –Woman, 40s, Mountain West

Widespread distrust in traditional media outlets. Most of the 32 interviewees were reluctant to put full faith in information from national media outlets. Many said that media sources each have their own agenda and thus cannot be trusted.

“Networks and radio and newspapers and television, they’re all getting paid to tell me something. And if they don’t have my attention then they’re not getting paid. So they’ll do whatever they need to get my attention. So they will stretch things. I’m sure that in the past, they’ve made up stories or, or, you know, make you try to feel something that’s not necessarily important or whatnot. It’s all about ratings and, you know, getting people to watch.” –Man, 40s, South

Views of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles

Interviewees expressed some support for using more renewable energy, alongside concerns about the pace and practicality of this transition.

As one participant explained: “I think we’re so reliant on carbon-based fuels for our economy and the way we live. We have to cripple ourselves to switch over. It would have to take 40, 50 years reasonably to do that, so if we’re going to ban gas cars by 2035, I think it [is] too excessive.” –Man, 20s, Midwest

Participants shared hesitations about increased use of electric vehicles (EVs) as part of a renewable energy transition. Some questioned whether EVs harmed the environment: “I think that with everything that’s in place over the last five years – and there’s good and bad, so all these people again, no one’s addressing the electric car in the energy and the minerals it depletes from the Earth. That’s an environmental issue.” –Man, 50s, Southwest

And some saw logistical challenges with EVs, such as many people lacking space at home to charge: “It’s not practical for everyone to purchase a Tesla or be able to have the ability to plug in a car at their home or to, quite frankly, pay to charge up a car and have an additional expense or additional changes to their lifestyle that is always productive or applicable.” –Woman, 30s, Midwest

Support for governmental policies as long as they don’t infringe on individual rights; personal efforts to protect the environment through recycling, reuse

While interviewees saw less urgency on climate change action, they expressed an openness to government efforts to help the environment and preserve natural lands and waterways, especially when these actions were at the state and local level. They also supported individual action in areas such as recycling and limiting waste.

Government’s role is to help protect the environment without restricting individual freedoms . While there was little support among participants for government action connected explicitly with climate change, some were open to efforts in related areas, such as encouraging renewable energy use and environmental protection. But participants stressed that any government action should not limit individuals’ freedoms and people should not be forced to change. More broadly, interviewees stated that a transition away from fossil fuels must be gradual, citing concerns about economic problems if such a transition happened too quickly.

“I think the best way to protect the environment is just educating people on what steps we can take that aren’t extreme, meaning don’t ban gas combustion vehicles. Don’t ban gas stoves. Give people the information. Let them decide what they want to do. But when you start to force things upon people, that’s when people become skeptical. It’s like, why are they forcing something on to us? Why are they changing laws?” –Man, 40s, Southwest

The role of ordinary citizens is to recycle and not be wasteful. With doubts about the urgency of climate change, few participants saw a need for direct personal action on the issue. However, many saw value in individual efforts to help protect the environment.

“And it is so very important that we take care of our planet. Let’s not litter. Let’s have good clean water. Let’s not do anything that’s going to hurt our planet that we live in. And so that’s what I feel about everybody’s duty, to take care of – everybody takes care of their own little piece, and I think it’s going to be fine.” –Man, 50s, Coastal Florida

When we talked with people about their views of climate change, most of the 32 interviewees explained that the Earth is warming mostly because of natural cycles of the environment, not human activity. Participants often supported their view by pointing to the planet’s history of warming and cooling as evidence of these natural cycles happening now.

The emphasis on natural cycles was cited as a reason why humans have a limited role in affecting climate change. A few interviewees were skeptical of whether climate change is happening at all, with the two most skeptical interviewees saying that climate change is a hoax used only for political gains.

Interviewees offered similar explanations for extreme weather as they did for climate change. These events were often seen as a natural part of the Earth’s climate system and not something that has become more frequent or more severe because of climate change.

Belief that climate change is due to Earth’s natural cycles, with limited effects from human activity and development

A common view among interviewees was that changes in the Earth’s climate are due to natural patterns that the Earth has always experienced. Those with this view often said that the climate is changing but pointed to evidence of planetary cycles as proof that any current climate change is natural.

“It’s my opinion, based on the science that I’ve seen generated, if you go through and look at the studies of Earth, we go through these peaks and valleys of climate. We have since the Earth was created. Why are we not going through one of those peaks as we speak now? I haven’t seen enough proof to deter me otherwise.” –Man, 50s, Mountain West

“I believe it’s cyclical. And the reason why I believe this is because there were record high temperatures more than 100 years ago that are higher than what we are having now. And this is going to come and go as time goes on – a.k.a. cyclical.” –Woman, 50s, Coastal Florida

A few interviewees pointed to their own experiences with weather as evidence of the Earth’s natural cycles. As one woman put it:

“I just don’t think that there’s any evidence. I mean I don’t see where anything has changed throughout my life. The summers aren’t hotter. It’s just not any different. … Show me where the changes are. I think that the planet goes through a continual cycle anyways. I don’t think it’s more drastic than any other change the planet’s gone through.” –Woman, 40s, Mountain West

A common theme in these responses was that humans have played a small role, if any, in contributing to climate change. And because these changes are seen as natural, humans cannot prevent climate change. These explanations downplayed the role humans have on the climate and emphasized the patterns of warming and cooling that have happened throughout the planet’s history.

“What I’m skeptical on is what the source of the change is. I do believe it is changing, but I believe it is changing in a natural cycle that happens all the time. What I don’t believe is that humans are 100% responsible for climate change and thus, humans are 100% able to fix the problem.” –Man, 50s, Mountain West

“I think that there’s climate change but I think this planet is, I don’t know, how many millions if not billions of years old and that’s just probably a cycle that it goes through. I think humans probably have a very, very minor part of it but it is also just things out of our control.” –Man, 40s, Southwest

When asked whether society should take steps to address climate change, one interviewee emphasized that this issue is out of humans’ control, saying:

“Take steps? No, because I don’t really know what step they could take. I don’t see anything that people, society can do to change the weather and change how the climate is going to react. I feel like that’s all earthly and there’s nothing that us, humans and society, can do to change that.” –Woman, 30s, Coastal Florida

Extreme weather seen as part of natural patterns

The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are linked to climate change . Our past research has found that large majorities of Americans who have experienced extreme weather say that climate change contributed at least a little .

In contrast to national opinion, most interviewees in these discussions did not see extreme weather as connected to climate change. Instead, participants explained extreme weather events in a similar way as climate change: These are natural events the Earth has always experienced. One man pointed to the history of extreme weather events happening as proof that they are not happening more frequently now.

“I think we do have spikes where we have just a ridiculous number of hurricanes or drought or snowstorms. But I think if you look back through history, we’ve had significant weather events since the dawn of time. So do they happen? Yes. Are we causing [them] to happen more frequently? No.” –Man, 50s, Mountain West

Another man expressed a similar idea, explaining that because these events have always happened, he doesn’t believe they are becoming more intense.

“I think there’s been extreme weather events since the beginning of time. … There’s been hurricanes, tornados, all that. I just don’t buy into the fact that they’re getting worse” –Man, 50s, Coastal Florida

Interviewees tended to say that extreme weather events have not become more common due to climate change. Some said these events might seem like they are happening more frequently because of the availability of information, but that they are not actually more common.

“I think it’s about the same. I think people are a little bit more aware of things happening. If there’s a freeze in Dallas, Texas, as an example, I can know about it within seconds. I just log into my anything and I can see breaking news. I just think it’s been happening for so long that people now think that if it happens it’s something rare.” –Man, 40s, Southwest

One man said that extreme weather is not becoming more frequent, pointing to the consistency of some events, like hurricanes, happening during certain seasons each year.

“I’m thinking with hurricanes, they always happen in the same kind of interval. I don’t think it’s gotten any quicker, and I haven’t read any articles or information that convinces me that they’re more common or it’s linked to human-caused climate change.” –Man, 20s, Midwest

A handful see no evidence the Earth is warming and consider climate change a hoax

The most skeptical interviewees (two out of 32) dismissed climate change as entirely false and explained the discussion of climate change as rooted in political motivations.

“Climate change is a hoax. It’s what politicians want people to believe. And if they want to do anything about it, in educating people, then truly put statistical, actual data together, and show how climate change and environmental changes have affected us as human beings.” –Woman, 50s, Coastal Florida

“I think it’s a hoax. I think it’s a joke. I mean, I just think like I said, it’s been politicized through the roof. I don’t know. It’s kind of funny when you think about it, that people are so ignorant and so gullible.” –Woman, 40s, Mountain West

Many interviewees explained that hearing other people state the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change caused them to be skeptical of whether climate change is actually something to be concerned about. For example, claims that climate change threatens human lives were often labeled as alarmist and seen as pushing an agenda. Participants were especially skeptical of the ways politicians could benefit if they frame climate change as a topic that must be addressed.

One approach aimed at motiving people to take action on climate change – describing it as a crisis and emphasizing its potentially catastrophic impacts – appears to be having the opposite effect on at least some parts of the population. Several interviewees said messages emphasizing the dire outcomes of climate change make them feel even more skeptical about the issue. Instead of motivating action, it sowed deeper distrust.

The interviewees who expressed frustration with the way those urging action on climate change discuss the issue felt there are people who talk about climate change with a level of concern unsupported by evidence. One woman emphasized the uncertainty around future impacts of climate change.

“We don’t know that there’s going to be major climate change in the next few years or the next few months. It’s kind of more of a guess, a hypothetical thing, so I feel like people are making a big deal out of it when really in all actuality no one knows what’s going to happen long term. It’s kind of just guessing and theories, but no one knows.” –Woman, 30s, Coastal Florida

Others said their perception of hyperbole or exaggeration around climate claims lead them to take a more skeptical view.

“ People who are alarmist tend to want really drastic policies that seem to not make sense, so it kind of makes me disbelieve the other things they’re saying.” –Man, 20s, Midwest

“From a personal standpoint, whether it’s the climate or anything else, when the statements are too large … like when the statements are, ‘The world is getting warmer and Earth is going to be ended in five years because we’re all terrible humans and we throw trash on the ground.’ Those things cause me to be, instead of causing me to be concerned, it causes me to be more skeptical about where the information is coming from and why it’s being presented in such a grandiose term, for lack of a better word.” –Woman, 30s, Midwest

Some acknowledged the Earth is warming, but still viewed the urgency and severity of some climate change messages as extreme.

“Are we gradually getting warmer? Yes, but I don’t think we’re all going to die in 30 years. And also, some of the policies that we’re trying to change within the next 10-15 years, it’s not that drastic, I don’t believe.” –Man, 30s, South

One man saw politicians pushing alarmist views and described a specific example of what he saw as an extreme view being untrue.

“I just was watching old footage from 2009 of John Kerry and other senators. They stated by 2014, which is 10 years ago – [by] 2013, 2014 that there would not be one polar icecap left in the world. Well, that’s a lie and so I think that that’s been forced down our throat. … I mean, the American people over time have been lied to.” –Man, 50s, Southwest

Some suspect elected officials’ advocacy on climate change is motivated by political or financial gain

Some interviewees said elected officials push climate change as an important topic for their own political and financial benefits.

“I think for political reasons it’s probably made into a bigger reason than it isn’t. … And then I also know that there’s billions, if not more, of money to be made in that industry in those sectors when it comes to solar and energy efficiency and emissions and all of these different control factors. It makes sense to fight for something if you have the possibility to have your pocket in something that’s a billion dollar industry, if not more.” –Man, 40s, Southwest

Another man expressed a similar idea and gave an example of climate change being used as a talking point to help candidates get elected.

“I think that [politicians] have said that they have those extreme views to get popularity or financial gain from such things. … Next year we have a presidential election. I think that is going to be one key speaking point. Now, do I agree that it should be top two or three? No, but it is going to be pushed and that next selection is going to have a major role in what we do as a country to limit our contributions to global warming.” –Man, 30s, South

Climate scientists have been at the center of discussions over evidence that the Earth is warming and projections about the future effects climate change could cause.

Interviewees expressed respect for the expertise of climate scientists while also raising the need to scrutinize their motivations. Overall, participants were more open to hearing from climate scientists than news media – who they see as largely biased and untrustworthy.

Those who saw climate scientists as trustworthy sources for climate change information mentioned their expertise and subject knowledge as reasons to trust them as a source. When asked how she would feel about scientists presenting information about climate change, one woman said:

“I would feel positive because I know they’re specialists in it. They specialize in that, so, I would listen to them over just a normal person telling me something.” –Woman, 40s, South

However, for many, trust in scientists was not absolute. One man said that he would listen to scientists about climate change as long as they were unbiased, emphasizing their value as experts.

“I’d like to see reputable scientists or a group of scientists that are nonpolitical come out and be the sole voice of whatever it is. I’ll take the good. I’ll take the bad. I just don’t want to hear people talk about it that are not experts in the field.” –Man, 50s, Mountain West

Others also expressed limits to their trust in climate scientists raising questions about their motivations. These questions focused on scientists’ financial or political biases as reasons they do not fully trust them for information on climate change.

“I have a lot of confidence in a lot of scientists. My concern is when science is met with ideology. If you’ve got somebody who is ideological one way or the other. Statistics can be changed. Science can be written to have the results you want because of your ideology. I have great confidence in science. I have less confidence in people who are driven by ideology. … It’s just when people are trying to push an agenda. That’s when I’m skeptical.” –Man, 50s, Coastal Florida

When asked how much confidence he has in scientists, one man said:

“A fair amount of confidence. Absolute confidence? Probably not. A fair amount of confidence? Yes, because they are studying it. They are in the field. They know the data. But at the same point, they are human … they’re going to be biased to whoever [is] funding their research. They don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them and provide data that is going to contradict what the agency’s trying to push out. I would say they have a fair amount of confidence, but you have to be, still, skeptical.” –Man, 30s, Coastal Florida

Analyses of scientific publications show widespread agreement among climate scientists that human activity is the primary cause of climate change . Yet some interviewees said they wanted to hear from a variety of scientists to be able to get a balanced view of multiple opinions within the scientific community.

“I also like to hear what the other [scientists] say as well because scientists have different approaches at things. They have different ways of thinking.” –Man, 50s, Coastal Florida

For another man, multiple voices in the scientific community caused him confusion about the truth.

“There’s scientists that are so far apart from each other – there’s a group that are like, ‘Oh the world’s going to burn up. The core temperature is rising,’ and then there’s another side that says, ‘We’ve already started being on the downside of cooling off.’ It couldn’t be more polar opposite, so who do you believe?” –Man, 50s, Southwest

Trust in climate scientists among all U.S adults

A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that 23% of Americans say they have little or no trust in climate scientists to provide full and accurate information on climate change. Another 22% say they have some trust in climate scientists. At the other end of the spectrum, 54% of Americans say they have either a great deal or quite a bit of trust in information from climate scientists.

Chart shows 67% of Americans who see no evidence of climate change have little or no trust in climate scientists

Distrust in information from climate scientists is most widespread among those who do not see a strong link between human activity and climate change. For example, 43% of those who say the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of natural patterns in the environment say they have a little or no trust in climate scientists to give full and accurate information. And 67% of those who say there is no evidence that the Earth is warming hold the lowest level of trust in climate scientists.

Participants express deep misgivings about the accuracy of information from traditional news media

The openness to hearing from scientists was in stark contrast to how interviewees talked about the news media. Participants were much more dismissive of information from media organizations. Most of the 32 participants described climate information from the media as biased and untrustworthy. Some said the media outlets are motivated more by profit than a goal to accurately report information. As one man put it:

“Networks and radio and newspapers and television, they’re all getting paid to tell me something. And if they don’t have my attention then they’re not getting paid. So they’ll do whatever they need to get my attention. So they will stretch things. I’m sure that in the past, they’ve made up stories or, you know, make you try to feel something that’s not necessarily important or whatnot. It’s all about ratings and getting people to watch.” –Man, 40s, South

Another felt that the information news media publish is selected to appeal to their audience and is therefore untrustworthy.

“Any mainstream news organization, they’re going to have their bias … they all have their narrative that they’re pushing for their own, quote unquote, customer base where they can market to. I don’t necessarily trust anything that they post.” –Man, 30s, Coastal Florida

Interviewees pointed out that they don’t trust news sources regardless of the outlet’s political leaning. For them, news sources are not trusted authorities on the topic of climate change. One man drew on his own work experience of analyzing data as a reason to be skeptical of these sources.

“When it comes from media sources, it’s just hard to believe when they post things because a lot of times they post it as factual when it’s opinion pieces. … It’s just journalists who [are] not experts in that field of work, and they’re just kind of giving their ‘this is what we think.’ And we all know that, at least in my line of business that we can look at statistics. We can look at data. We can kind of give a story around particular data points even if they’re not the right ones. So I definitely don’t trust media sources from either side.” –Man, 40s, Southwest

Another man said media outlets have a bias one way or the other and feature viewpoints he considers extreme, which causes him to be disengaged.

“There aren’t very many media [outlets] that [are] really truly in the middle anymore. So you have to listen, and the turnoff is, you get the extreme people, and that turns you off from wanting to really listen to the whole story.” –Man, 50s, Coastal Florida

The interviews explored views of government policies meant to limit the effects of climate change by encouraging a renewable energy transition and the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

The Biden administration has invested in developing more renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power as a path to address climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act passed last August also included incentives for Americans to make their homes more energy efficient and to purchase electric vehicles.

Some interviewees were open to the idea of a renewable energy transition but called for a slower pace of change. Others expressed outright opposition to a move away from fossil fuels, saying that renewable energy is not reliable.

Concerns with electric vehicles (EVs) were front of mind for many interviewees when discussing renewable energy. Interviewees saw potential problems ranging from environmental damage due to EV manufacturing to practical challenges involved in owning an EV. A recent Center survey found that the share of the public interested in an EV purchase has fallen slightly over the past year, and many Americans lack confidence that the U.S. will build the charging infrastructure needed to support large numbers of EVs. For more on these findings, see our recent post “How Americans view electric vehicles.”

Concerns over an energy transition toward renewable energy sources

Many interviewees emphasized that a transition toward a greater reliance on renewable energy sources must unfold gradually. Economic decline was a common concern with a fast-paced transition.

“I’m fine with the change. What I’m not fine with are the demands and the urgency to change, which then has a major impact on the economy.” – Man, 50s, Mountain West

“I think we’re so reliant on carbon-based fuels for our economy and the way we live. We have to cripple ourselves to switch over. It would have to take 40, 50 years reasonably to do that, so if we’re going to ban gas cars by 2035, I think it [is] too excessive.” –Man, 20s, Midwest

“I have nothing whatsoever against renewable energies. I’m just, I would be, my concern is the pace. The pace at which we’re going.” –Man, 30s, Southwest

Other interviewees were more strongly opposed to renewable energy sources, raising concerns about the functionality of renewables. These interviewees commonly expressed strong support for the continued – or expanded – use of fossil fuels.

“We don’t have all the batteries to make the electric cars. Things like that. I don’t see where that’s an improvement. I think that fossil fuels have gotten us this far, and I think that they’re fine.” –Woman, 40s, Mountain West

One man living in Florida expressed his skepticism about relying too heavily on electricity, particularly in the aftermath of natural disasters.

“I think to try to switch from one to the next is way too much of a burden, too unfeasible, and would be too costly for the average-day person that it’s just not realistic to say, in 10 years, let’s just have all electric everything. That’s a terrible idea, especially here in Florida with hurricanes. The power goes out. If everything’s electricity, then what are you going to do?” –Man, 30s, Coastal Florida

Concerns about electric vehicles range from environmental downsides to practicalities of charging

Interviewees often used electric vehicles as an example to express their concerns with or opposition to renewable energy. Interviewees with concerns about electric vehicles mentioned environmental harm from EV batteries and the practical challenges of owning an EV.

“I think that with everything that’s in place over the last five years – and there’s good and bad, so all these people again, no one’s addressing the electric car in the energy and the minerals it depletes from the Earth. That’s an environmental issue.” –Man, 50s, Southwest

Relatedly, many said EVs are no better for the environment than gas-powered vehicles or were unsure whether EVs are an improvement.

“If you talk to people about switching to electric cars versus diesel- or gas-powered cars, you’re going to hear a lot of talking about how electric powered vehicles still produce a lot of waste, that they’re not as reliable, that they’re more expensive. Those are the questions that we’ve got and I think they’re valid questions because sometimes alternatives are not always better, and we know that producing electricity is probably going to produce waste no matter what unless we switch to a wind-powered society or something.” –Woman, 20s, Southwest

Many pointed to the lack of infrastructure and challenges with home charging as barriers to owning EVs.

“It’s not practical for everyone to purchase a Tesla or be able to have the ability to plug in a car at their home or to, quite frankly, pay to charge up a car and have an additional expense or additional changes to their lifestyle that is always productive or applicable.” –Woman, 30s, Midwest

“The infrastructure isn’t there quite yet, just because I’ve also heard that there’s not a lot of places to recharge your car or the amount of time that it takes to recharge your car takes longer than expected – of course, much longer than just going to a local gas station and filling up your gas. I think having – creating that infrastructure, not just saying we need more vehicles, but OK, what does that mean, how do we get there so that also we want to have an electric vehicle?” –Woman, 30s, Midwest

Views of electric vehicles among all U.S. adults

Chart shows 45% of Americans would feel upset if production of new gas-powered vehicles is phased out

Overall, 38% of Americans say they would be very or somewhat likely to consider an electric vehicle the next time they purchase a car or truck; 50% say they would be unlikely to consider an EV. On balance, Americans have doubts that the country is likely to build the infrastructure needed to support large numbers of electric vehicles – though adults who are most optimistic about the infrastructure are among the most likely to say they’d consider buying an EV.

Americans are cool to the idea of ending the production of gas-powered vehicles. About six-in-ten say they oppose phasing out the production of new gasoline cars and trucks by 2035. In addition, more say they would feel upset (45%) than excited (21%) if new gas-powered vehicles were phased out.

For more on Americans’ views of electric vehicles, read this post .

While the participants in this study all placed lower importance on taking action to address climate change, they shared an openness to some types of government action on the environment, particularly at the local level. Specifically, support for efforts to protect natural lands and waterways came up in multiple conversations.

However, interviewees commonly raised caution that government regulations should not limit people’s freedoms, restrict individual choice or burden people financially.

(For views on these issues among all U.S. adults, read our companion report: “Majorities of Americans Prioritize Renewable Energy, Back Steps to Address Climate Change.” )

Enthusiasm for local government efforts to help citizens live in ways that support the environment

One interviewee said government programs should provide a way for individuals to help the environment on their own.

“I think they should provide the ability to help. Recycle, reuse. We’re fortunate here. Our government does – multiple times a year, they give out trees. So you can plant a new tree in your yard, and help with the CO2 in the air … that does help our environment as we plant trees.” –Woman, 50s, Coastal Florida

Another expressed a similar sentiment about the government providing individuals with incentives to protect the environment.

“I feel like maybe government, if they put an incentive on recycling, like say you recycle this much a month or something, if they give an incentive to things, like maybe get a discount on your electricity bill or something like that, I think that would give people more motive and give them an enticement to do better in regards to protecting their environment.” –Woman, 30s, Coastal Florida

A common call across interviews was for actions to protect natural lands and waterways. Some of these pertained to specific regional issues such as preserving water in Arizona and protecting waterways around Florida.

“No, I don’t think enough is being done when it comes to [water scarcity]. I think there’s a bigger focus on trying to control other things. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Phoenix area but there’s a lot of [foreign] companies that are buying out farmlands and drilling for water to take and growing alfalfa to take to other countries. We allow other countries to come into this country and use up a really important resource here in the desert. The government’s doing absolutely nothing about that but they’re trying to tell us what type of cars to drive. It just makes no sense. You can’t survive without water.” –Man, 40s, Southwest

“Off the top of my head, I know that there [are environmental challenges], at Biscayne Bay here in Miami, it’s one of the bigger bays. It is having a lot of environmental issues … I do know that it is a concern for the community because that’s a whole ecosystem where fish and wildlife, they live there. We live there as well, but it’s a big ecosystem. It seems to be being very impacted by pollution and what humans are doing to the area. … Also making sure that the Everglades stays clean. It’s an important aspect to being a Floridian, because the Everglades is a big part of Florida. A local aquifer system where the water pumps down, and we want to make sure that that stays clean, because if we have polluted water, that’s not good for anybody.” –Man, 30s, Coastal Florida

More general concerns were over preserving natural lands. Interviewees mentioned limiting development to ensure that natural habitats could survive.

“I believe in the theory of habitat where your land can only sustain with X amount of people or animals. You can apply it anywhere. If you have too many people in one area, then the habitat cannot sustain it, thus the environment starts to suffer. You can see that in any of the major cities.” –Man, 50s, Mountain West

“I think it’s very important to not overdevelop so there’s still space for natural habitats so animals like foxes and predators don’t start going onto people’s homes and businesses. To have more plants and trees, more biodiversity is very important.” – Man, 20s, Midwest

In interviews, the most widespread support for environmental regulation came on the topic of ensuring that individuals and corporations were not harming the environment. Still, openness to government action was tempered by the preference that it not go too far.

“I think the government likes to get their hands on everything. But obviously if there are things that are illegal, like dumping oil in the ocean or throwing your trash in the rivers, there should be consequences for stuff like that. It’s affecting all of us.” –Woman, 40s, Mountain West

“I think we should conserve where we can. I think we should protect endangered species, do some of the things we are doing, but I don’t think that includes eliminating fossil fuels or anything like that. I don’t think it means regulating people’s homes or anything like that. I do think what big industry puts into the air should be at least monitored and somewhat controlled, but I don’t think it should be completely restricted.” –Woman, 40s, Mountain West

Support for government action that avoids financial burden, respects personal freedoms and stays local

Interviewees wanted to make sure government policies for addressing climate change and protecting the environment are effective and cost taxpayers little.

“I think that [government] should set up guidelines and try and help steer people in the right direction, but as far as what they do … I don’t know about writing a blank check. If there’s going to be a financial burden on people, I would really need to see what the benefit is going to be at the end of that, whether the people are going to, essentially be taxed for it, or how much they’re going to get taxed for it, and what’s the impact going to happen to the environment.” –Man, 30s, Coastal Florida

Interviewees also prioritized ensuring that policies do not limit individuals’ freedoms.

“I don’t think they need to be so heavy-handed. I do like the idea of incentives for sure, I don’t know if people take advantage of them. I’d like to see some incentives, more incentives, less heavy-handed. I’m trying to think of ways they could do it without pissing off people, like business owners like ourselves.” –Woman, 50s, Mountain West

“I think the best way to protect the environment is just educating people on what steps we can take that aren’t extreme, meaning don’t ban gas combustion vehicles. Don’t ban gas stoves. Give people the information. Let them decide what they want to do. But when you start to force things upon people, that’s when people become skeptical, as well. It’s like, why are they forcing something on to us? Why are they changing laws?” –Man, 40s, Southwest

Views of what individuals can do to help the environment

When asked what individuals themselves should do to address climate change and environmental problems, interviewees pointed to recycling and reducing waste as a way to take personal responsibility.

“Best ways to protect the environment I think is to reduce, reuse, recycle.” –Man, 30s, Mountain West

“Whether it be less pollution, more recycling … landfills are full with stuff it shouldn’t be full with. We should learn how to reuse the resources we already have instead of trying to make more harmful resources.” –Woman, 30s, Midwest

“And it is so very important that we take care of our planet. Let’s not litter. Let’s have good clean water. Let’s not do anything that’s going to hurt our planet that we live in.” –Man, 50s, Coastal Florida

Interviewees generally expressed the view that government policies to address climate change and protect the environment are better suited for local and state governments than the federal government. Many viewed these levels of government as being closer to the issues and therefore better equipped to create policy.

“I think the local government would have more effect on the citizens here in Idaho than the federal level. I feel like a lot of people don’t trust the federal level as much here. … We need to be responsible for where we live. So it would be all hands on deck for this region. If it’s national, it’s less personal.” –Woman, 40s, Mountain West

“I think the state government officials, they’re going to be more in tune with the issues of the area. Going federal, I think that’s too far out. I think they just may be too far removed from any possible issues from the community itself to understand the difficulties that that community might face and the issues.” –Man, 30s, Coastal Florida

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The Basics of Climate Change

Greenhouse gases affect Earth’s energy balance and climate

The Sun serves as the primary energy source for Earth’s climate. Some of the incoming sunlight is reflected directly back into space, especially by bright surfaces such as ice and clouds, and the rest is absorbed by the surface and the atmosphere. Much of this absorbed solar energy is re-emitted as heat (longwave or infrared radiation). The atmosphere in turn absorbs and re-radiates heat, some of which escapes to space. Any disturbance to this balance of incoming and outgoing energy will affect the climate. For example, small changes in the output of energy from the Sun will affect this balance directly.

If all heat energy emitted from the surface passed through the atmosphere directly into space, Earth’s average surface temperature would be tens of degrees colder than today. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, act to make the surface much warmer than this because they absorb and emit heat energy in all directions (including downwards), keeping Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere warm [Figure B1]. Without this greenhouse effect, life as we know it could not have evolved on our planet. Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere makes it even more effective at preventing heat from escaping into space. When the energy leaving is less than the energy entering, Earth warms until a new balance is established.

Greenhouse gases emitted by human activities alter Earth’s energy balance and thus its climate. Humans also affect climate by changing the nature of the land surfaces (for example by clearing forests for farming) and through the emission of pollutants that affect the amount and type of particles in the atmosphere.

Scientists have determined that, when all human and natural factors are considered, Earth’s climate balance has been altered towards warming, with the biggest contributor being increases in CO 2 .

Figure b1. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, absorb heat energy and emit it in all directions (including downwards), keeping Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere warm. Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere enhances the effect, making Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere even warmer. Image based on a figure from US EPA.

Human activities have added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere

The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased significantly since the Industrial Revolution began. In the case of carbon dioxide, the average concentration measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has risen from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 (the first full year of data available) to more than 411 ppm in 2019 [Figure B2]. The same rates of increase have since been recorded at numerous other stations worldwide. Since preindustrial times, the atmospheric concentration of CO 2 has increased by over 40%, methane has increased by more than 150%, and nitrous oxide has increased by roughly 20%. More than half of the increase in CO 2 has occurred since 1970. Increases in all three gases contribute to warming of Earth, with the increase in CO 2 playing the largest role. See page B3 to learn about the sources of human emitted greenhouse gases. Learn about the sources of human emitted greenhouse gases.

Scientists have examined greenhouse gases in the context of the past. Analysis of air trapped inside ice that has been accumulating over time in Antarctica shows that the CO 2 concentration began to increase significantly in the 19th century [Figure B3], after staying in the range of 260 to 280 ppm for the previous 10,000 years. Ice core records extending back 800,000 years show that during that time, CO 2 concentrations remained within the range of 170 to 300 ppm throughout many “ice age” cycles - learn about the ice ages - and no concentration above 300 ppm is seen in ice core records until the past 200 years.

Measurements of the forms (isotopes) of carbon in the modern atmosphere show a clear fingerprint of the addition of “old” carbon (depleted in natural radioactive 14 C) coming from the combustion of fossil fuels (as opposed to “newer” carbon coming from living systems). In addition, it is known that human activities (excluding land use changes) currently emit an estimated 10 billion tonnes of carbon each year, mostly by burning fossil fuels, which is more than enough to explain the observed increase in concentration. These and other lines of evidence point conclusively to the fact that the elevated CO 2 concentration in our atmosphere is the result of human activities.

Fig b2. Measurements of atmospheric CO 2 since 1958 from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii (black) and from the South Pole (red) show a steady annual increase in atmospheric CO 2 concentration. The measurements are made at remote places like these because they are not greatly influenced by local processes, so therefore they are representative of the background atmosphere. The small up-and-down saw-tooth pattern reflects seasonal changes in the release and uptake of CO 2 by plants. Source: Scripps CO2 Program

Figure b3. CO 2 variations during the past 1,000 years, obtained from analysis of air trapped in an ice core extracted from Antarctica (red squares), show a sharp rise in atmospheric CO 2 starting in the late 19th century. Modern atmospheric measurements from Mauna Loa are superimposed in gray. Source: figure by Eric Wolff, data from Etheridge et al., 1996; MacFarling Meure et al., 2006; Scripps CO 2 Program.

Climate records show a warming trend

Estimating global average surface air temperature increase requires careful analysis of millions of measurements from around the world, including from land stations, ships, and satellites. Despite the many complications of synthesising such data, multiple independent teams have concluded separately and unanimously that global average surface air temperature has risen by about 1 °C (1.8 °F) since 1900 [Figure B4]. Although the record shows several pauses and accelerations in the increasing trend, each of the last four decades has been warmer than any other decade in the instrumental record since 1850.

Going further back in time before accurate thermometers were widely available, temperatures can be reconstructed using climate-sensitive indicators “proxies” in materials such as tree rings, ice cores, and marine sediments. Comparisons of the thermometer record with these proxy measurements suggest that the time since the early 1980s has been the warmest 40-year period in at least eight centuries, and that global temperature is rising towards peak temperatures last seen 5,000 to 10,000 years ago in the warmest part of our current interglacial period.

Many other impacts associated with the warming trend have become evident in recent years. Arctic summer sea ice cover has shrunk dramatically. The heat content of the ocean has increased. Global average sea level has risen by approximately 16 cm (6 inches) since 1901, due both to the expansion of warmer ocean water and to the addition of melt waters from glaciers and ice sheets on land. Warming and precipitation changes are altering the geographical ranges of many plant and animal species and the timing of their life cycles. In addition to the effects on climate, some of the excess CO 2 in the atmosphere is being taken up by the ocean, changing its chemical composition (causing ocean acidification).

Figure b4. Earth’s global average surface temperature has risen, as shown in this plot of combined land and ocean measurements from 1850 to 2019 derived from three independent analyses of the available data sets. The top panel shows annual average values from the three analyses, and the bottom panel shows decadal average values, including the uncertainty range (grey bars) for the maroon (HadCRUT4) dataset. The temperature changes are relative to the global average surface temperature, averaged from 1961−1990. Source: Based on IPCC AR5, data from the HadCRUT4 dataset (black), NOAA Climate.gov; data from UK Met Office Hadley Centre (maroon), US National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies (red), and US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Centers for Environmental Information (orange).

Many complex processes shape our climate

Based just on the physics of the amount of energy that CO 2 absorbs and emits, a doubling of atmospheric CO 2 concentration from pre-industrial levels (up to about 560 ppm) would by itself cause a global average temperature increase of about 1 °C (1.8 °F). In the overall climate system, however, things are more complex; warming leads to further effects (feedbacks) that either amplify or diminish the initial warming.

The most important feedbacks involve various forms of water. A warmer atmosphere generally contains more water vapour. Water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas, thus causing more warming; its short lifetime in the atmosphere keeps its increase largely in step with warming. Thus, water vapour is treated as an amplifier, and not a driver, of climate change. Higher temperatures in the polar regions melt sea ice and reduce seasonal snow cover, exposing a darker ocean and land surface that can absorb more heat, causing further warming. Another important but uncertain feedback concerns changes in clouds. Warming and increases in water vapour together may cause cloud cover to increase or decrease which can either amplify or dampen temperature change depending on the changes in the horizontal extent, altitude, and properties of clouds. The latest assessment of the science indicates that the overall net global effect of cloud changes is likely to be to amplify warming.

The ocean moderates climate change. The ocean is a huge heat reservoir, but it is difficult to heat its full depth because warm water tends to stay near the surface. The rate at which heat is transferred to the deep ocean is therefore slow; it varies from year to year and from decade to decade, and it helps to determine the pace of warming at the surface. Observations of the sub-surface ocean are limited prior to about 1970, but since then, warming of the upper 700 m (2,300 feet) is readily apparent, and deeper warming is also clearly observed since about 1990.

Surface temperatures and rainfall in most regions vary greatly from the global average because of geographical location, in particular latitude and continental position. Both the average values of temperature, rainfall, and their extremes (which generally have the largest impacts on natural systems and human infrastructure), are also strongly affected by local patterns of winds.

Estimating the effects of feedback processes, the pace of the warming, and regional climate change requires the use of mathematical models of the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice (the cryosphere) built upon established laws of physics and the latest understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes affecting climate, and run on powerful computers. Models vary in their projections of how much additional warming to expect (depending on the type of model and on assumptions used in simulating certain climate processes, particularly cloud formation and ocean mixing), but all such models agree that the overall net effect of feedbacks is to amplify warming.

Human activities are changing the climate

Rigorous analysis of all data and lines of evidence shows that most of the observed global warming over the past 50 years or so cannot be explained by natural causes and instead requires a significant role for the influence of human activities.

In order to discern the human influence on climate, scientists must consider many natural variations that affect temperature, precipitation, and other aspects of climate from local to global scale, on timescales from days to decades and longer. One natural variation is the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), an irregular alternation between warming and cooling (lasting about two to seven years) in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that causes significant year-to-year regional and global shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns. Volcanic eruptions also alter climate, in part increasing the amount of small (aerosol) particles in the stratosphere that reflect or absorb sunlight, leading to a short-term surface cooling lasting typically about two to three years. Over hundreds of thousands of years, slow, recurring variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which alter the distribution of solar energy received by Earth, have been enough to trigger the ice age cycles of the past 800,000 years.

Fingerprinting is a powerful way of studying the causes of climate change. Different influences on climate lead to different patterns seen in climate records. This becomes obvious when scientists probe beyond changes in the average temperature of the planet and look more closely at geographical and temporal patterns of climate change. For example, an increase in the Sun’s energy output will lead to a very different pattern of temperature change (across Earth’s surface and vertically in the atmosphere) compared to that induced by an increase in CO 2 concentration. Observed atmospheric temperature changes show a fingerprint much closer to that of a long-term CO 2 increase than to that of a fluctuating Sun alone. Scientists routinely test whether purely natural changes in the Sun, volcanic activity, or internal climate variability could plausibly explain the patterns of change they have observed in many different aspects of the climate system. These analyses have shown that the observed climate changes of the past several decades cannot be explained just by natural factors.

How will climate change in the future?

Scientists have made major advances in the observations, theory, and modelling of Earth’s climate system, and these advances have enabled them to project future climate change with increasing confidence. Nevertheless, several major issues make it impossible to give precise estimates of how global or regional temperature trends will evolve decade by decade into the future. Firstly, we cannot predict how much CO 2 human activities will emit, as this depends on factors such as how the global economy develops and how society’s production and consumption of energy changes in the coming decades. Secondly, with current understanding of the complexities of how climate feedbacks operate, there is a range of possible outcomes, even for a particular scenario of CO 2 emissions. Finally, over timescales of a decade or so, natural variability can modulate the effects of an underlying trend in temperature. Taken together, all model projections indicate that Earth will continue to warm considerably more over the next few decades to centuries. If there were no technological or policy changes to reduce emission trends from their current trajectory, then further globally-averaged warming of 2.6 to 4.8 °C (4.7 to 8.6 °F) in addition to that which has already occurred would be expected during the 21st century [Figure B5]. Projecting what those ranges will mean for the climate experienced at any particular location is a challenging scientific problem, but estimates are continuing to improve as regional and local-scale models advance.

Figure b5. The amount and rate of warming expected for the 21st century depends on the total amount of greenhouse gases that humankind emits. Models project the temperature increase for a business-as-usual emissions scenario (in red) and aggressive emission reductions, falling close to zero 50 years from now (in blue). Black is the modelled estimate of past warming. Each solid line represents the average of different model runs using the same emissions scenario, and the shaded areas provide a measure of the spread (one standard deviation) between the temperature changes projected by the different models. All data are relative to a reference period (set to zero) of 1986-2005. Source: Based on IPCC AR5

Climate change and biodiversity

Human activities are changing the climate. Science can help us understand what we are doing to habitats and the climate, but also find solutions.

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There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history , the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ), "Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact." 1
Scientific information taken from natural sources (such as ice cores, rocks, and tree rings) and from modern equipment (like satellites and instruments) all show the signs of a changing climate.
From global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds.

The rate of change since the mid-20th century is unprecedented over millennia.

Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000 years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia. 1 It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate all over the world. These data, collected over many years, reveal the signs and patterns of a changing climate.

Scientists demonstrated the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases in the mid-19th century. 2 Many of the science instruments NASA uses to study our climate focus on how these gases affect the movement of infrared radiation through the atmosphere. From the measured impacts of increases in these gases, there is no question that increased greenhouse gas levels warm Earth in response.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of warming after an ice age. Carbon dioxide from human activities is increasing about 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age. 3

The Evidence for Rapid Climate Change Is Compelling:

Global Temperature Is Rising

The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and other human activities. 4 Most of the warming occurred in the past 40 years, with the seven most recent years being the warmest. The years 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year on record. 5 Image credit: Ashwin Kumar, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

Colonies of “blade fire coral” that have lost their symbiotic algae, or “bleached,” on a reef off of Islamorada, Florida.

The Ocean Is Getting Warmer

The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 100 meters (about 328 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.67 degrees Fahrenheit (0.33 degrees Celsius) since 1969. 6 Earth stores 90% of the extra energy in the ocean. Image credit: Kelsey Roberts/USGS

The Ice Sheets Are Shrinking

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost an average of 279 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2019, while Antarctica lost about 148 billion tons of ice per year. 7 Image: The Antarctic Peninsula, Credit: NASA

Glaciers Are Retreating

Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska, and Africa. 8 Image: Miles Glacier, Alaska Image credit: NASA

Snow Cover Is Decreasing

Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and the snow is melting earlier. 9 Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sea Level Is Rising

Global sea level rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century and accelerating slightly every year. 10 Image credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Norfolk District

Arctic Sea Ice Is Declining

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. 11 Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Extreme Events Are Increasing in Frequency

The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events. 12 Image credit: Régine Fabri, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Ocean Acidification Is Increasing

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30%. 13 , 14 This increase is due to humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the ocean. The ocean has absorbed between 20% and 30% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades (7.2 to 10.8 billion metric tons per year). 1 5 , 16 Image credit: NOAA

1. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, WGI, Technical Summary . B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere.” Nature 382 (04 July 1996): 39-46. https://doi.org/10.1038/382039a0. Gabriele C. Hegerl et al., “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method.” Journal of Climate 9 (October 1996): 2281-2306. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(1996)009<2281:DGGICC>2.0.CO;2. V. Ramaswamy, et al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling.” Science 311 (24 February 2006): 1138-1141. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1122587. B.D. Santer et al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes.” Science 301 (25 July 2003): 479-483. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1084123. T. Westerhold et al., "An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years." Science 369 (11 Sept. 2020): 1383-1387. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1094123

2. In 1824, Joseph Fourier calculated that an Earth-sized planet, at our distance from the Sun, ought to be much colder. He suggested something in the atmosphere must be acting like an insulating blanket. In 1856, Eunice Foote discovered that blanket, showing that carbon dioxide and water vapor in Earth's atmosphere trap escaping infrared (heat) radiation. In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming. In 1941, Milutin Milankovic linked ice ages to Earth’s orbital characteristics. Gilbert Plass formulated the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change in 1956.

3. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, WG1, Chapter 2 Vostok ice core data; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record O. Gaffney, W. Steffen, "The Anthropocene Equation." The Anthropocene Review 4, issue 1 (April 2017): 53-61. https://doi.org/abs/10.1177/2053019616688022.

4. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/monitoring https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

5. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20170118/

6. S. Levitus, J. Antonov, T. Boyer, O Baranova, H. Garcia, R. Locarnini, A. Mishonov, J. Reagan, D. Seidov, E. Yarosh, M. Zweng, " NCEI ocean heat content, temperature anomalies, salinity anomalies, thermosteric sea level anomalies, halosteric sea level anomalies, and total steric sea level anomalies from 1955 to present calculated from in situ oceanographic subsurface profile data (NCEI Accession 0164586), Version 4.4. (2017) NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index3.html K. von Schuckmann, L. Cheng, L,. D. Palmer, J. Hansen, C. Tassone, V. Aich, S. Adusumilli, H. Beltrami, H., T. Boyer, F. Cuesta-Valero, D. Desbruyeres, C. Domingues, A. Garcia-Garcia, P. Gentine, J. Gilson, M. Gorfer, L. Haimberger, M. Ishii, M., G. Johnson, R. Killick, B. King, G. Kirchengast, N. Kolodziejczyk, J. Lyman, B. Marzeion, M. Mayer, M. Monier, D. Monselesan, S. Purkey, D. Roemmich, A. Schweiger, S. Seneviratne, A. Shepherd, D. Slater, A. Steiner, F. Straneo, M.L. Timmermans, S. Wijffels. "Heat stored in the Earth system: where does the energy go?" Earth System Science Data 12, Issue 3 (07 September 2020): 2013-2041. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2013-2020.

7. I. Velicogna, Yara Mohajerani, A. Geruo, F. Landerer, J. Mouginot, B. Noel, E. Rignot, T. Sutterly, M. van den Broeke, M. Wessem, D. Wiese, "Continuity of Ice Sheet Mass Loss in Greenland and Antarctica From the GRACE and GRACE Follow-On Missions." Geophysical Research Letters 47, Issue 8 (28 April 2020): e2020GL087291. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL087291.

8. National Snow and Ice Data Center World Glacier Monitoring Service

9. National Snow and Ice Data Center D.A. Robinson, D. K. Hall, and T. L. Mote, "MEaSUREs Northern Hemisphere Terrestrial Snow Cover Extent Daily 25km EASE-Grid 2.0, Version 1 (2017). Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. doi: https://doi.org/10.5067/MEASURES/CRYOSPHERE/nsidc-0530.001 . http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. Data History

10. R.S. Nerem, B.D. Beckley, J. T. Fasullo, B.D. Hamlington, D. Masters, and G.T. Mitchum, "Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era." PNAS 15, no. 9 (12 Feb. 2018): 2022-2025. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717312115.

11. https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_ice.html Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) http://psc.apl.washington.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/ http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/projections-of-an-ice-diminished-arctic-ocean/

12. USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, https://doi.org/10.7930/j0j964j6 .

13. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F

14. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification

15. C.L. Sabine, et al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2.” Science 305 (16 July 2004): 367-371. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1097403.

16. Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate , Technical Summary, Chapter TS.5, Changing Ocean, Marine Ecosystems, and Dependent Communities, Section 5.2.2.3. https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/technical-summary/

Header image shows clouds imitating mountains as the sun sets after midnight as seen from Denali's backcountry Unit 13 on June 14, 2019. Credit: NPS/Emily Mesner Image credit in list of evidence: Ashwin Kumar, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

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Climate Explained: Introductory Essays About Climate Change Topics

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Climate Explained, a part of Yale Climate Connections, is an essay collection that addresses an array of climate change questions and topics, including why it’s cold outside if global warming is real, how we know that humans are responsible for global warming, and the relationship between climate change and national security.

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Table Of Contents

All historical sciences share a problem: As they probe farther back in time, they become more reliant on fragmentary and indirect evidence. Earth system history is no exception. High-quality instrumental records spanning the past century exist for most parts of the world, but the records become sparse in the 19th century, and few records predate the late 18th century. Other historical documents, including ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, and tax rolls, can sometimes be used. Within strict geographic contexts , these sources can provide information on frosts , droughts , floods , sea ice , the dates of monsoons , and other climatic features—in some cases up to several hundred years ago.

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Fortunately, climatic change also leaves a variety of signatures in the natural world. Climate influences the growth of trees and corals , the abundance and geographic distribution of plant and animal species, the chemistry of oceans and lakes , the accumulation of ice in cold regions, and the erosion and deposition of materials on Earth’s surface. Paleoclimatologists study the traces of these effects, devising clever and subtle ways to obtain information about past climates. Most of the evidence of past climatic change is circumstantial, so paleoclimatology involves a great deal of investigative work. Wherever possible, paleoclimatologists try to use multiple lines of evidence to cross-check their conclusions. They are frequently confronted with conflicting evidence, but this, as in other sciences, usually leads to an enhanced understanding of the Earth system and its complex history. New sources of data, analytical tools, and instruments are becoming available, and the field is moving quickly. Revolutionary changes in the understanding of Earth’s climate history have occurred since the 1990s, and coming decades will bring many new insights and interpretations.

Join a climate-change research team collecting samples from the bottom of Greenland's Arctic lakes

Ongoing climatic changes are being monitored by networks of sensors in space, on the land surface, and both on and below the surface of the world’s oceans. Climatic changes of the past 200–300 years, especially since the early 1900s, are documented by instrumental records and other archives. These written documents and records provide information about climate change in some locations for the past few hundred years. Some very rare records date back over 1,000 years. Researchers studying climatic changes predating the instrumental record rely increasingly on natural archives, which are biological or geologic processes that record some aspect of past climate. These natural archives, often referred to as proxy evidence, are extraordinarily diverse; they include, but are not limited to, fossil records of past plant and animal distributions, sedimentary and geochemical indicators of former conditions of oceans and continents, and land surface features characteristic of past climates. Paleoclimatologists study these natural archives by collecting cores, or cylindrical samples, of sediments from lakes, bogs , and oceans; by studying surface features and geological strata; by examining tree ring patterns from cores or sections of living and dead trees; by drilling into marine corals and cave stalagmites ; by drilling into the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland and the high-elevation glaciers of the Plateau of Tibet , the Andes , and other montane regions; and by a wide variety of other means. Techniques for extracting paleoclimatic information are continually being developed and refined, and new kinds of natural archives are being recognized and exploited.

Causes of climate change

It is much easier to document the evidence of climate variability and past climate change than it is to determine their underlying mechanisms. Climate is influenced by a multitude of factors that operate at timescales ranging from hours to hundreds of millions of years. Many of the causes of climate change are external to the Earth system. Others are part of the Earth system but external to the atmosphere . Still others involve interactions between the atmosphere and other components of the Earth system and are collectively described as feedbacks within the Earth system. Feedbacks are among the most recently discovered and challenging causal factors to study. Nevertheless, these factors are increasingly recognized as playing fundamental roles in climate variation. The most important mechanisms are described in this section.

The luminosity, or brightness, of the Sun has been increasing steadily since its formation. This phenomenon is important to Earth’s climate, because the Sun provides the energy to drive atmospheric circulation and constitutes the input for Earth’s heat budget. Low solar luminosity during Precambrian time underlies the faint young Sun paradox , described in the section Climates of early Earth .

Radiative energy from the Sun is variable at very small timescales, owing to solar storms and other disturbances, but variations in solar activity, particularly the frequency of sunspots , are also documented at decadal to millennial timescales and probably occur at longer timescales as well. The “ Maunder minimum ,” a period of drastically reduced sunspot activity between 1645 and 1715, has been suggested as a contributing factor to the Little Ice Age . ( See below Climatic variation and change since the emergence of civilization .)

Volcanic activity can influence climate in a number of ways at different timescales. Individual volcanic eruptions can release large quantities of sulfur dioxide and other aerosols into the stratosphere , reducing atmospheric transparency and thus the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface and troposphere . A recent example is the 1991 eruption in the Philippines of Mount Pinatubo , which had measurable influences on atmospheric circulation and heat budgets. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa had more dramatic consequences, as the spring and summer of the following year (1816, known as “the year without a summer”) were unusually cold over much of the world. New England and Europe experienced snowfalls and frosts throughout the summer of 1816.

Volcanoes and related phenomena, such as ocean rifting and subduction, release carbon dioxide into both the oceans and the atmosphere. Emissions are low; even a massive volcanic eruption such as Mount Pinatubo releases only a fraction of the carbon dioxide emitted by fossil-fuel combustion in a year. At geologic timescales, however, release of this greenhouse gas can have important effects. Variations in carbon dioxide release by volcanoes and ocean rifts over millions of years can alter the chemistry of the atmosphere. Such changeability in carbon dioxide concentrations probably accounts for much of the climatic variation that has taken place during the Phanerozoic Eon . ( See below Phanerozoic climates .)

Watch Earth's continents move, from 650 million years ago to 250 million years in the future

Tectonic movements of Earth’s crust have had profound effects on climate at timescales of millions to tens of millions of years. These movements have changed the shape, size, position, and elevation of the continental masses as well as the bathymetry of the oceans. Topographic and bathymetric changes in turn have had strong effects on the circulation of both the atmosphere and the oceans . For example, the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau during the Cenozoic Era affected atmospheric circulation patterns, creating the South Asian monsoon and influencing climate over much of the rest of Asia and neighbouring regions.

Tectonic activity also influences atmospheric chemistry, particularly carbon dioxide concentrations. Carbon dioxide is emitted from volcanoes and vents in rift zones and subduction zones . Variations in the rate of spreading in rift zones and the degree of volcanic activity near plate margins have influenced atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations throughout Earth’s history. Even the chemical weathering of rock constitutes an important sink for carbon dioxide. (A carbon sink is any process that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the chemical conversion of CO 2 to organic or inorganic carbon compounds.) Carbonic acid, formed from carbon dioxide and water , is a reactant in dissolution of silicates and other minerals. Weathering rates are related to the mass, elevation, and exposure of bedrock . Tectonic uplift can increase all these factors and thus lead to increased weathering and carbon dioxide absorption. For example, the chemical weathering of the rising Tibetan Plateau may have played an important role in depleting the atmosphere of carbon dioxide during a global cooling period in the late Cenozoic Era. ( See below Cenozoic climates .)

Orbital ( Milankovich ) variations

The orbital geometry of Earth is affected in predictable ways by the gravitational influences of other planets in the solar system . Three primary features of Earth’s orbit are affected, each in a cyclic, or regularly recurring, manner. First, the shape of Earth’s orbit around the Sun , varies from nearly circular to elliptical (eccentric), with periodicities of 100,000 and 413,000 years. Second, the tilt of Earth’s axis with respect to the Sun, which is primarily responsible for Earth’s seasonal climates, varies between 22.1° and 24.5° from the plane of Earth’s rotation around the Sun. This variation occurs on a cycle of 41,000 years. In general, the greater the tilt, the greater the solar radiation received by hemispheres in summer and the less received in winter . The third cyclic change to Earth’s orbital geometry results from two combined phenomena: (1) Earth’s axis of rotation wobbles, changing the direction of the axis with respect to the Sun, and (2) the orientation of Earth’s orbital ellipse rotates slowly. These two processes create a 26,000-year cycle, called precession of the equinoxes , in which the position of Earth at the equinoxes and solstices changes. Today Earth is closest to the Sun (perihelion) near the December solstice, whereas 9,000 years ago perihelion occurred near the June solstice.

These orbital variations cause changes in the latitudinal and seasonal distribution of solar radiation, which in turn drive a number of climate variations. Orbital variations play major roles in pacing glacial-interglacial and monsoonal patterns. Their influences have been identified in climatic changes over much of the Phanerozoic. For example, cyclothems —which are interbedded marine, fluvial, and coal beds characteristic of the Pennsylvanian Subperiod (323.2 million to 298.9 million years ago)—appear to represent Milankovitch-driven changes in mean sea level .

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Climate change: a threat to human wellbeing and health of the planet. taking action now can secure our future.

BERLIN, Feb 28 – Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today.

“This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC. “It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet. Our actions today will shape how people adapt and nature responds to increasing climate risks.”

The world faces unavoidable multiple climate hazards over the next two decades with global warming of 1.5°C (2.7°F). Even temporarily exceeding this warming level will result in additional severe impacts, some of which will be irreversible. Risks for society will increase, including to infrastructure and low-lying coastal settlements.

The Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group II report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability was approved on Sunday, February 27 2022, by 195 member governments of the IPCC, through a virtual approval session that was held over two weeks starting on February 14.

Urgent action required to deal with increasing risks

Increased heatwaves, droughts and floods are already exceeding plants’ and animals’ tolerance thresholds, driving mass mortalities in species such as trees and corals. These weather extremes are occurring simultaneously, causing cascading impacts that are increasingly difficult to manage. They have exposed millions of people to acute food and water insecurity, especially in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, on Small Islands and in the Arctic.

To avoid mounting loss of life, biodiversity and infrastructure, ambitious, accelerated action is required to adapt to climate change, at the same time as making rapid, deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. So far, progress on adaptation is uneven and there are increasing gaps between action taken and what is needed to deal with the increasing risks, the new report finds. These gaps are largest among lower-income populations.

The Working Group II report is the second instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which will be completed this year.

“This report recognizes the interdependence of climate, biodiversity and people and integrates natural, social and economic sciences more strongly than earlier IPCC assessments,” said Hoesung Lee. “It emphasizes the urgency of immediate and more ambitious action to address climate risks. Half measures are no longer an option.”

Safeguarding and strengthening nature is key to securing a liveable future

There are options to adapt to a changing climate. This report provides new insights into nature’s potential not only to reduce climate risks but also to improve people’s lives.

“Healthy ecosystems are more resilient to climate change and provide life-critical services such as food and clean water”, said IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair Hans-Otto Pörtner. “By restoring degraded ecosystems and effectively and equitably conserving 30 to 50 per cent of Earth’s land, freshwater and ocean habitats, society can benefit from nature’s capacity to absorb and store carbon, and we can accelerate progress towards sustainable development, but adequate finance and political support are essential.”

Scientists point out that climate change interacts with global trends such as unsustainable use of natural resources, growing urbanization, social inequalities, losses and damages from extreme events and a pandemic, jeopardizing future development.

“Our assessment clearly shows that tackling all these different challenges involves everyone – governments, the private sector, civil society – working together to prioritize risk reduction, as well as equity and justice, in decision-making and investment,” said IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair Debra Roberts.

“In this way, different interests, values and world views can be reconciled. By bringing together scientific and technological know-how as well as Indigenous and local knowledge, solutions will be more effective. Failure to achieve climate resilient and sustainable development will result in a sub-optimal future for people and nature.”

Cities: Hotspots of impacts and risks, but also a crucial part of the solution

This report provides a detailed assessment of climate change impacts, risks and adaptation in cities, where more than half the world’s population lives. People’s health, lives and livelihoods, as well as property and critical infrastructure, including energy and transportation systems, are being increasingly adversely affected by hazards from heatwaves, storms, drought and flooding as well as slow-onset changes, including sea level rise.

“Together, growing urbanization and climate change create complex risks, especially for those cities that already experience poorly planned urban growth, high levels of poverty and unemployment, and a lack of basic services,” Debra Roberts said.

“But cities also provide opportunities for climate action – green buildings, reliable supplies of clean water and renewable energy, and sustainable transport systems that connect urban and rural areas can all lead to a more inclusive, fairer society.”

There is increasing evidence of adaptation that has caused unintended consequences, for example destroying nature, putting peoples’ lives at risk or increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This can be avoided by involving everyone in planning, attention to equity and justice, and drawing on Indigenous and local knowledge.

A narrowing window for action

Climate change is a global challenge that requires local solutions and that’s why the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) provides extensive regional information to enable Climate Resilient Development.

The report clearly states Climate Resilient Development is already challenging at current warming levels. It will become more limited if global warming exceeds 1.5°C (2.7°F). In some regions it will be impossible if global warming exceeds 2°C (3.6°F). This key finding underlines the urgency for climate action, focusing on equity and justice. Adequate funding, technology transfer, political commitment and partnership lead to more effective climate change adaptation and emissions reductions.

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner.

For more information, please contact:

IPCC Press Office, Email: [email protected] IPCC Working Group II: Sina Löschke, Komila Nabiyeva: [email protected]

Notes for Editors

Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Working Group II report examines the impacts of climate change on nature and people around the globe. It explores future impacts at different levels of warming and the resulting risks and offers options to strengthen nature’s and society’s resilience to ongoing climate change, to fight hunger, poverty, and inequality and keep Earth a place worth living on – for current as well as for future generations.

Working Group II introduces several new components in its latest report: One is a special section on climate change impacts, risks and options to act for cities and settlements by the sea, tropical forests, mountains, biodiversity hotspots, dryland and deserts, the Mediterranean as well as the polar regions. Another is an atlas that will present data and findings on observed and projected climate change impacts and risks from global to regional scales, thus offering even more insights for decision makers.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) as well as additional materials and information are available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

Note : Originally scheduled for release in September 2021, the report was delayed for several months by the COVID-19 pandemic, as work in the scientific community including the IPCC shifted online. This is the second time that the IPCC has conducted a virtual approval session for one of its reports.

AR6 Working Group II in numbers

270 authors from 67 countries

47 – coordinating authors
184 – lead authors
39 – review editors
675 – contributing authors

Over 34,000 cited references

A total of 62,418 expert and government review comments

(First Order Draft 16,348; Second Order Draft 40,293; Final Government Distribution: 5,777)

More information about the Sixth Assessment Report can be found here .

Additional media resources

Assets available after the embargo is lifted on Media Essentials website .

Press conference recording, collection of sound bites from WGII authors, link to presentation slides, B-roll of approval session, link to launch Trello board including press release and video trailer in UN languages, a social media pack.

The website includes outreach materials such as videos about the IPCC and video recordings from outreach events conducted as webinars or live-streamed events.

Most videos published by the IPCC can be found on our YouTube channel. Credit for artwork

About the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide political leaders with periodic scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. In the same year the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by the WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC. It has 195 member states.

Thousands of people from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC. For the assessment reports, IPCC scientists volunteer their time to assess the thousands of scientific papers published each year to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks.

The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I , dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II , dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III , dealing with the mitigation of climate change. It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals. As part of the IPCC, a Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) provides guidance to the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) on curation, traceability, stability, availability and transparency of data and scenarios related to the reports of the IPCC.

IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency. An IPCC assessment report consists of the contributions of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. The Synthesis Report integrates the findings of the three working group reports and of any special reports prepared in that assessment cycle.

About the Sixth Assessment Cycle

At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015 it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and the Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle.

Global Warming of 1.5°C , an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty was launched in October 2018.

Climate Change and Land , an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems was launched in August 2019, and the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate was released in September 2019.

In May 2019 the IPCC released the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories , an update to the methodology used by governments to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions and removals.

In August 2021 the IPCC released the Working Group I contribution to the AR6, Climate Change 2021, the Physical Science Basis

The Working Group III contribution to the AR6 is scheduled for early April 2022.

The Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report will be completed in the second half of 2022.

For more information go to www.ipcc.ch

February 2022

Fifty-fifth session of the ipcc (ipcc-55) and twelfth session of working group ii (wgii-12), february 14, 2022, working group report, ar6 climate change 2022: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

What evidence exists that Earth is warming and that humans are the main cause?

We know the world is warming because people have been recording daily high and low temperatures at thousands of weather stations worldwide, over land and ocean, for many decades and, in some locations, for more than a century. When different teams of climate scientists in different agencies (e.g., NOAA and NASA) and in other countries (e.g., the U.K.’s Hadley Centre) average these data together, they all find essentially the same result: Earth’s average surface temperature has risen by about 1.8°F (1.0°C) since 1880.

Bar graph of global temperature anomalies with an overlay of a line graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide from 1850-2023

( bar chart ) Yearly temperature compared to the twentieth-century average from 1850–2023. Red bars mean warmer-than-average years; blue bars mean colder-than-average years. (line graph) Atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts: 1850-1958 from IAC , 1959-2023 from NOAA Global Monitoring Lab . NOAA Climate.gov graph, adapted from original by Dr. Howard Diamond (NOAA ARL).

In addition to our surface station data, we have many different lines of evidence that Earth is warming ( learn more ). Birds are migrating earlier, and their migration patterns are changing. Lobsters and other marine species are moving north. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting worldwide, and snow cover is declining in the Northern Hemisphere (Learn more here and here ). Greenland’s ice sheet—which holds about 8 percent of Earth’s fresh water—is melting at an accelerating rate ( learn more ). Mean global sea level is rising ( learn more ). Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly in both thickness and extent ( learn more ).

Aerial photo of glacier front with a graph overlay of Greenland ice mass over time

The Greenland Ice Sheet lost mass again in 2020, but not as much as it did 2019. Adapted from the 2020 Arctic Report Card, this graph tracks Greenland mass loss measured by NASA's GRACE satellite missions since 2002. The background photo shows a glacier calving front in western Greenland, captured from an airplane during a NASA Operation IceBridge field campaign. Full story.

We know this warming is largely caused by human activities because the key role that carbon dioxide plays in maintaining Earth’s natural greenhouse effect has been understood since the mid-1800s. Unless it is offset by some equally large cooling influence, more atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to warmer surface temperatures. Since 1800, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 parts per million to 410 ppm in 2019. We know from both its rapid increase and its isotopic “fingerprint” that the source of this new carbon dioxide is fossil fuels, and not natural sources like forest fires, volcanoes, or outgassing from the ocean.

DIgital image of a painting of a fire burning in a coal pile in a small village

Philip James de Loutherbourg's 1801 painting, Coalbrookdale by Night , came to symbolize the start of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began to harness the power of fossil fuels—and to contribute significantly to Earth's atmospheric greenhouse gas composition. Image from Wikipedia .

Finally, no other known climate influences have changed enough to account for the observed warming trend. Taken together, these and other lines of evidence point squarely to human activities as the cause of recent global warming.

USGCRP (2017). Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume 1 [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6 .

National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Partnership (2012): National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy . Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Council on Environmental Quality, Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Washington, D.C. DOI: 10.3996/082012-FWSReport-1

IPCC (2019). Summary for Policymakers. In: IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, M. Tignor, E. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Nicolai, A. Okem, J. Petzold, B. Rama, N.M. Weyer (eds.)]. In press.

NASA JPL: "Consensus: 97% of climate scientists agree." Global Climate Change . A website at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus). (Accessed July 2013.)

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Earth's Changing Climate

Climate change is a long-term shift in global or regional climate patterns. Often climate change refers specifically to the rise in global temperatures from the mid 20th century to present.

Earth Science, Geography, Human Geography, Physical Geography

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Climate is the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area. Weather can change from hour to hour, day to day, month to month or even from year to year. For periods of 30 years or more, however, distinct weather patterns occur. A desert might experience a rainy week, but over the long term, the region receives very little rainfall . It has a dry climate .

Because climates are mostly constant, living things can adapt to them. Polar bears have adapted to stay warm in polar climates , while cacti have evolved to hold onto water in dry climates . The enormous variety of life on Earth results in large part from the variety of climates that exist.

Climates do change, however—they just change very slowly, over hundreds or even thousands of years. As climates change, organisms that live in the area must adapt , relocate , or risk going extinct .

Earth’s Changing Climate Earth’s climate has changed many times. For example, fossils from the Cretaceous period (144 to 65 million years ago) show that Earth was much warmer than it is today. Fossilized plants and animals that normally live in warm environments have been found at much higher latitudes than they could survive at today. For instance, breadfruit trees ( Artocarpus altilis ), now found on tropical islands , grew as far north as Greenland.

Earth has also experienced several major ice ages —at least four in the past 500,000 years. During these periods, Earth’s temperature decreased , causing an expansion of ice sheets and glaciers . The most recent Ice Age began about two million years ago and peaked about 20,000 years ago. The ice caps began retreating 18,000 years ago. They have not disappeared completely, however. Their presence in Antarctica and Greenland suggests Earth is still in a sort of ice age. Many scientists believe we are in an interglacial period , when warmer temperatures have caused the ice caps to recede . Many centuries from now, the glaciers may advance again. Climatologists look for evidence of past climate change in many different places. Like clumsy criminals, glaciers leave many clues behind them. They scratch and scour rocks as they move. They deposit sediment known as glacial till. This sediment sometimes forms mounds or ridges called moraines . Glaciers also form elongated oval hills known as drumlins . All of these geographic features on land that currently has no glaciers suggest that glaciers were once there. Scientists also have chemical evidence of ice ages from sediments and sedimentary rocks . Some rocks only form from glacial material. Their presence under the ocean or on land also tells scientists that glaciers were once present in these areas. Scientists also have paleontological evidence—fossils. Fossils show what kinds of animals and plants lived in certain areas. During ice ages, organisms that are adapted to cold weather can increase their range , moving closer to the Equator . Organisms that are adapted to warm weather may lose part of their habitat , or even go extinct.

Climate changes occur over shorter periods, as well. For example, the so-called Little Ice Age lasted only a few hundred years, peaking during the 16th and 17th centuries. During this time, average global temperatures were 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than they are today.

A change of one or two degrees might not seem like a lot, but it was enough to cause some pretty massive effects. For instance, glaciers grew larger and sometimes engulfed whole mountain villages. Winters were longer than usual, limiting the growing seasons of crops . In northern Europe, people deserted farms and villages to avoid starvation .

One way scientists have learned about the Little Ice Age is by studying the rings of trees that are more than 300 years old. The thickness of tree rings is related to the amount of the trees’ annual growth. This in turn is related to climate changes. During times of drought or cold, trees could not grow as much. The rings would be closer together.

Some climate changes are almost predictable . One example of regular climate change results from the warming of the surface waters of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. This warming is called El Niño —The Child—because it tends to begin around Christmas. In normal years, trade winds blow steadily across the ocean from east to west, dragging warm surface water along in the same direction. This produces a shallow layer of warm water in the eastern Pacific and a buildup of warm water in the west. Every few years, normal winds falter and ocean currents reverse. This is El Niño. Warm water deepens in the eastern Pacific. This, in turn, produces dramatic climate changes. Rain decreases in Australia and southern Asia, and freak storms may pound Pacific islands and the west coast of the Americas. Within a year or two, El Niño ends, and climate systems return to normal.

Natural Causes of Climate Change Climate changes happen for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons have to do with Earth’s atmosphere . The climate change brought by El Niño, which relies on winds and ocean currents, is an example of natural atmospheric changes. Natural climate change can also be affected by forces outside Earth’s atmosphere. For instance, the 100,000-year cycles of ice ages are probably related to changes in the tilt of Earth’s axis and the shape of its orbit around the sun. Those planetary factors change slowly over time and affect how much of the sun’s energy reaches different parts of the world in different seasons.

The impact of large meteorites on Earth could also cause climate change . The impact of a meteor would send millions of tons of debris into the atmosphere . This debris would block at least some of the sun’s rays, making it cold and dark. This climate change would severely limit what organisms could survive. Many paleontologists believe the impact of a meteor or comet contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs . Dinosaurs simply could not survive in a cool, dark climate . Their bodies could not adjust to the cold, and the dark limited the growth of plants on which they fed.

Plate tectonics also play a role in climate changes. Earth’s continental plates have moved a great deal over time. More than 200 million years ago, the continents were merged together as one giant landmass called Pangaea . As the continents broke apart and moved, their positions on Earth changed, and so did the movements of ocean currents. Both of these changes had effects on climate. Changes in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere also have an impact on climate change. Gases like carbon dioxide trap the sun’s heat in Earth’s atmosphere, causing temperatures on the surface to rise. Volcanoes —both on land and under the ocean—release greenhouse gases, so if the eruption only reaches the troposphere the additional gases contribute to warming. However, if the eruption is powerful enough to reach the stratosphere particles reflect sunlight back into space causing periods of cooling regionally.

Human Causes of Climate Change Some human activities release greenhouse gases—burning fossil fuels for transportation and electricity , or using technology that increases meat production, for instance. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, so cutting down forests for timber or development contributes to the greenhouse effect . So do factories that emit pollutants into the atmosphere.

Many scientists are worried that these activities are causing dramatic and dangerous changes in Earth’s climate. Average temperatures around the world have risen since about 1880, when scientists began tracking them. The seven warmest years of the 20th century occurred in the 1990s. This warming trend may be a sign that the greenhouse effect is increasing because of human activity. This climate change is often referred to as “ global warming .” Global warming is often linked to the burning of fossil fuels— coal , oil , and natural gas —by industries and cars. Warming is also linked to the destruction of tropical forests. The University of California Riverside and NASA estimate human activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about 30 percent in the past 150 years. The amount of methane , a potent greehouse gas produced by decomposing plant and animal matter, is also increasing. Increased amounts of methane in Earth’s atmosphere are usually linked to agricultural development and industrial technology. As economies grow, populations consume more goods and throw away more materials. Large landfills , filled with decomposing waste, release tons of methane into the atmosphere. Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) , hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC), and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) chemicals are used in refrigeration and aerosol sprays. These chemicals are also greenhouse gases. Many countries are working to phase out their use, and some have laws to prevent companies from manufacturing them.

Global Warming

As the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rises, so does the temperature of Earth. Climatologists worry that the global temperature will increase so much that ice caps will begin melting within the next several decades . This would cause the sea level to rise. Coastal areas, including many low-lying islands, would be flooded. Severe climate change may bring more severe weather patterns—more hurricanes , typhoons , and tornadoes . More precipitation would fall in some places and far less in others. Regions where crops now grow could become deserts. As climates change, so do the habitats for living things. Animals that live in an area may become threatened. Many human societies depend on specific crops for food , clothing, and trade . If the climate of an area changes, the people who live there may no longer be able to grow the crops they depend on for survival. Some scientists worry that as Earth warms, tropical diseases such as malaria , West Nile virus , and yellow fever will expand into more temperate regions. The temperature will continue to rise unless preventive steps are taken. Most climatologists agree that we must reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. There are many ways to do this, including:

Drive less. Use public transportation , carpool , walk, or ride a bike.
Fly less. Airplanes produce huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions .
Reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Plant a tree. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, keeping it out of the atmosphere.
Use less electricity.
Eat less meat. Cows are one of the biggest methane producers.
Support alternative energy sources that don’t burn fossil fuels, such as solar power and wind energy .

The climate has changed many times during Earth’s history, but the changes have occurred slowly, over thousands of years. Only since the Industrial Revolution have human activities begun to influence climate—and scientists are still working to understand what the consequences might be.

Cool Warming Could the current phase of climate change cause another Little Ice Age? As strange as it sounds, some scientists believe it could. If melting glaciers release large amounts of freshwater into the oceans, this could disrupt the ocean conveyor belt, an important circulation system that moves seawater around the globe. Stopping this cycle could possibly cause cooling of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5-9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the ocean and atmosphere.

Early Squirrels The North American red squirrel has started breeding earlier in the year as a result of climate change. Food becomes available to the squirrels earlier because of warmer winters.

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