CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL WARMING

Causes and Effects of Climate Change

Glaciers are melting , sea levels are rising, cloud forests are dying , and wildlife is
scrambling to keep pace. It has become clear that humans have caused most of the past
century's warming by releasing heat-trapping gases as we power our modern lives. Called
greenhouse gases, their levels are higher now than at any time in the last 800,000 years .

We often call the result global warming, but it is causing a set of changes to the Earth's
climate, or long-term weather patterns, that varies from place to place. While many people
think of global warming and climate change as synonyms , scientists use “climate change”
when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems
—in part because some areas actually get cooler in the short term .

Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather
events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas, and a range of other impacts.
All of those changes are emerging as humans continue to add heat-trapping greenhouse
gases to the atmosphere, changing the rhythms of climate that all living things have come to
rely on.

What will we do—what can we do—to slow this human-caused warming? How will we
cope with the changes we've already set into motion? While we struggle to figure it all out,
the fate of the Earth as we know it—coasts, forests, farms, and snow-capped mountains—
hangs in the balance.

Global Warming Impact

An iceberg melts in the waters off Antarctica. Climate change has accelerated the rate of ice
loss across the continent.

As sea levels rise, salty ocean waters encroach into Florida’s Everglades. Native plants and
animals struggle to adapt to the changing conditions.
The western U.S. has been locked in a drought for years. The dry, hot weather has increased
the intensity and destructiveness of forest fires.
in mainland Malaysia, where they are processed. Ancient forests around the tropics are being
cut down to
In the high plains of Bolivia, a man surveys the baked remains of what was the country’s
second largest lake, Lake Poopó. Drought and management issues have caused the lake to dry
up.
Climate change is impacting flora and fauna across the Arctic. Although scientists don't know
specifically what killed this individual polar bear, experts warn that many of the bears are
having trouble finding food as the sea ice they historically relied on thins and melts earlier.
Lake Urmia, in Iran, is a critical bird habitat and used to be a popular tourist destination. It is
drying up because of climate change and management issues.

The Scherer power plant in Juliet, Georgia, is the largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S. It
burns 34,000 tons of coal daily, pumping over 25 million tons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere each year.
Ice melts on a mountain lake. Lakes around the world are freezing less and less over time,
and in a few decades, thousands of lakes around the world may lose their winter ice cover
entirely.
The Amazon is losing the equivalent of nearly one million soccer fields of forest cover each
year, much of which is cut down to make way for agriculture. When forest is lost, the carbon
it sequestered ends up in the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.
In Glacier National Park, forests are feeling the effects of early snowmelt and long, dry
summers. The stresses on the park's flora are exacterbated by climate change.

Understanding the greenhouse effect

The "greenhouse effect" is the warming that happens when certain gases in Earth's
atmosphere trap heat . These gases let in light but keep heat from escaping, like the glass
walls of a greenhouse, hence the name.

Sunlight shines onto the Earth's surface, where the energy is absorbed and then radiate back
into the atmosphere as heat. In the atmosphere, greenhouse gas molecules trap some of the
heat, and the rest escapes into space. The more greenhouse gases concentrate in the
atmosphere, the more heat gets locked up in the molecules.

Scientists have known about the greenhouse effect since 1824, when Joseph
Fourier calculated that the Earth would be much colder if it had no atmosphere. This natural
greenhouse effect is what keeps the Earth's climate livable. Without it, the Earth's surface
would be an average of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) cooler.

In 1895, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius  discovered that humans could enhance the
greenhouse effect by making carbon dioxide , a greenhouse gas. He kicked off 100 years of
climate research that has given us a sophisticated understanding of global warming.

Levels of greenhouse gases have gone up and down over the Earth's history, but they had
been fairly constant for the past few thousand years. Global average temperatures had also
stayed fairly constant over that time—until the past 150 years . Through the burning of
fossil fuels and other activities that have emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases,
particularly over the past few decades, humans are now enhancing the greenhouse effect
and warming Earth significantly, and in ways that promise many effcts , scientists warn.
Aren't temperature changes natural?
Human activity isn't the only factor that affects Earth's climate. Volcanic eruptions and
variations in solar radiation from sunspots, solar wind, and the Earth's position relative to
the sun also play a role. So do large-scale weather patterns such as El Niño .

But climate models that scientists use to monitor Earth’s temperatures take those factors
into account. Changes in solar radiation levels as well as minute particles suspended in the
atmosphere from volcanic eruptions , for example, have contributed only about two percent
to the recent warming effect. The balance comes from greenhouse gases and other human-
caused factors, such as land use change .

The short timescale of this recent warming is singular as well. Volcanic eruptions , for
example, emit particles that temporarily cool the Earth's surface. But their effect lasts just a
few years. Events like El Niño also work on fairly short and predictable cycles. On the
other hand, the types of global temperature fluctuations that have contributed to ice ages
occur on a cycle of hundreds of thousands of years.

For thousands of years now, emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere have been
balanced out by greenhouse gases that are naturally absorbed. As a result, greenhouse gas
concentrations and temperatures have been fairly stable, which has allowed human
civilization to flourish within a consistent climate.

Now, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than
a third since the Industrial Revolution. Changes that have historically taken thousands of
years are now happening over the course of decades .

Why does this matter?

Historically, Earth's climate has regularly shifted between temperatures like those we see
today and temperatures cold enough to cover much of North America and Europe with ice.
The difference between average global temperatures today and during those ice ages is only
about 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), and the swings have tended to happen
slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years.

But with concentrations of greenhouse gases rising, Earth's remaining ice sheets such as
Greenland and Antarctica are starting to melt too . That extra water could raise sea levels
significantly, and quickly. By 2050, sea levels are predicted to rise between one and 2.3
feet as glaciers melt.
As the mercury rises, the climate can change in unexpected ways. In addition to sea levels
rising, weather can become more extreme . This means more intense major storms, more
rain followed by longer and drier droughts—a challenge for growing crops—changes in the
ranges in which plants and animals can live, and loss of water supplies that have
historically come from glaciers.

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