how to solve climate change problem essay brainly

November 26, 2007

10 Solutions for Climate Change

Ten possibilities for staving off catastrophic climate change

By David Biello

Mark Garlick Getty Images

The enormity of global warming can be daunting and dispiriting. What can one person, or even one nation, do on their own to slow and reverse climate change ? But just as ecologist Stephen Pacala and physicist Robert Socolow, both at Princeton University, came up with 15 so-called " wedges " for nations to utilize toward this goal—each of which is challenging but feasible and, in some combination, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions to safer levels —there are personal lifestyle changes that you can make too that, in some combination, can help reduce your carbon impact. Not all are right for everybody. Some you may already be doing or absolutely abhor. But implementing just a few of them could make a difference.

Forego Fossil Fuels —The first challenge is eliminating the burning of coal , oil and, eventually, natural gas. This is perhaps the most daunting challenge as denizens of richer nations literally eat, wear, work, play and even sleep on the products made from such fossilized sunshine. And citizens of developing nations want and arguably deserve the same comforts, which are largely thanks to the energy stored in such fuels.

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Oil is the lubricant of the global economy, hidden inside such ubiquitous items as plastic and corn, and fundamental to the transportation of both consumers and goods. Coal is the substrate, supplying roughly half of the electricity used in the U.S. and nearly that much worldwide—a percentage that is likely to grow, according to the International Energy Agency. There are no perfect solutions for reducing dependence on fossil fuels (for example, carbon neutral biofuels can drive up the price of food and lead to forest destruction, and while nuclear power does not emit greenhouse gases, it does produce radioactive waste), but every bit counts.

So try to employ alternatives when possible—plant-derived plastics, biodiesel, wind power—and to invest in the change, be it by divesting from oil stocks or investing in companies practicing carbon capture and storage.

Infrastructure Upgrade —Buildings worldwide contribute around one third of all greenhouse gas emissions (43 percent in the U.S. alone), even though investing in thicker insulation and other cost-effective, temperature-regulating steps can save money in the long run. Electric grids are at capacity or overloaded, but power demands continue to rise. And bad roads can lower the fuel economy of even the most efficient vehicle. Investing in new infrastructure, or radically upgrading existing highways and transmission lines, would help cut greenhouse gas emissions and drive economic growth in developing countries.

Of course, it takes a lot of cement, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, to construct new buildings and roads. The U.S. alone contributed 50.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2005 from cement production, which requires heating limestone and other ingredients to 1,450 degrees Celsius (2,642 degrees Fahrenheit). Mining copper and other elements needed for electrical wiring and transmission also causes globe-warming pollution.

But energy-efficient buildings and improved cement-making processes (such as using alternative fuels to fire up the kiln) could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world and prevent them in the developing world.

Move Closer to Work —Transportation is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. (burning a single gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO 2 ). But it doesn't have to be that way.

One way to dramatically curtail transportation fuel needs is to move closer to work, use mass transit, or switch to walking, cycling or some other mode of transport that does not require anything other than human energy. There is also the option of working from home and telecommuting several days a week.

Cutting down on long-distance travel would also help, most notably airplane flights, which are one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and a source that arguably releases such emissions in the worst possible spot (higher in the atmosphere). Flights are also one of the few sources of globe-warming pollution for which there isn't already a viable alternative: jets rely on kerosene, because it packs the most energy per pound, allowing them to travel far and fast, yet it takes roughly 10 gallons of oil to make one gallon of JetA fuel. Restricting flying to only critical, long-distance trips—in many parts of the world, trains can replace planes for short- to medium-distance trips—would help curb airplane emissions.

Consume Less —The easiest way to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions is simply to buy less stuff. Whether by forgoing an automobile or employing a reusable grocery sack, cutting back on consumption results in fewer fossil fuels being burned to extract, produce and ship products around the globe.

Think green when making purchases. For instance, if you are in the market for a new car, buy one that will last the longest and have the least impact on the environment. Thus, a used vehicle with a hybrid engine offers superior fuel efficiency over the long haul while saving the environmental impact of new car manufacture.

Paradoxically, when purchasing essentials, such as groceries, buying in bulk can reduce the amount of packaging—plastic wrapping, cardboard boxes and other unnecessary materials. Sometimes buying more means consuming less.

Be Efficient —A potentially simpler and even bigger impact can be made by doing more with less. Citizens of many developed countries are profligate wasters of energy, whether by speeding in a gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle or leaving the lights on when not in a room.

Good driving—and good car maintenance, such as making sure tires are properly inflated—can limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from a vehicle and, perhaps more importantly, lower the frequency of payment at the pump.

Similarly, employing more efficient refrigerators, air conditioners and other appliances, such as those rated highly under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program, can cut electric bills while something as simple as weatherproofing the windows of a home can reduce heating and cooling bills. Such efforts can also be usefully employed at work, whether that means installing more efficient turbines at the power plant or turning the lights off when you leave the office .

Eat Smart, Go Vegetarian? —Corn grown in the U.S. requires barrels of oil for the fertilizer to grow it and the diesel fuel to harvest and transport it. Some grocery stores stock organic produce that do not require such fertilizers, but it is often shipped from halfway across the globe. And meat, whether beef, chicken or pork, requires pounds of feed to produce a pound of protein.

Choosing food items that balance nutrition, taste and ecological impact is no easy task. Foodstuffs often bear some nutritional information, but there is little to reveal how far a head of lettuce, for example, has traveled.

University of Chicago researchers estimate that each meat-eating American produces 1.5 tons more greenhouse gases through their food choice than do their vegetarian peers. It would also take far less land to grow the crops necessary to feed humans than livestock, allowing more room for planting trees.

Stop Cutting Down Trees —Every year, 33 million acres of forests are cut down . Timber harvesting in the tropics alone contributes 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. That represents 20 percent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions and a source that could be avoided relatively easily.

Improved agricultural practices along with paper recycling and forest management—balancing the amount of wood taken out with the amount of new trees growing—could quickly eliminate this significant chunk of emissions.

And when purchasing wood products, such as furniture or flooring, buy used goods or, failing that, wood certified to have been sustainably harvested. The Amazon and other forests are not just the lungs of the earth, they may also be humanity's best short-term hope for limiting climate change.

Unplug —Believe it or not, U.S. citizens spend more money on electricity to power devices when off than when on. Televisions, stereo equipment, computers, battery chargers and a host of other gadgets and appliances consume more energy when seemingly switched off, so unplug them instead.

Purchasing energy-efficient gadgets can also save both energy and money—and thus prevent more greenhouse gas emissions. To take but one example, efficient battery chargers could save more than one billion kilowatt-hours of electricity—$100 million at today's electricity prices—and thus prevent the release of more than one million metric tons of greenhouse gases.

Swapping old incandescent lightbulbs for more efficient replacements, such as compact fluorescents (warning: these lightbulbs contain mercury and must be properly disposed of at the end of their long life), would save billions of kilowatt-hours. In fact, according to the EPA, replacing just one incandescent lightbulb in every American home would save enough energy to provide electricity to three million American homes.

One Child —There are at least 6.6 billion people living today, a number that is predicted by the United Nations to grow to at least nine billion by mid-century. The U.N. Environmental Program estimates that it requires 54 acres to sustain an average human being today—food, clothing and other resources extracted from the planet. Continuing such population growth seems unsustainable.

Falling birth rates in some developed and developing countries (a significant portion of which are due to government-imposed limits on the number of children a couple can have) have begun to reduce or reverse the population explosion. It remains unclear how many people the planet can comfortably sustain, but it is clear that per capita energy consumption must go down if climate change is to be controlled.

Ultimately, a one child per couple rule is not sustainable either and there is no perfect number for human population. But it is clear that more humans means more greenhouse gas emissions.

Future Fuels —Replacing fossil fuels may prove the great challenge of the 21st century. Many contenders exist, ranging from ethanol derived from crops to hydrogen electrolyzed out of water, but all of them have some drawbacks, too, and none are immediately available at the scale needed.

Biofuels can have a host of negative impacts, from driving up food prices to sucking up more energy than they produce. Hydrogen must be created, requiring either reforming natural gas or electricity to crack water molecules. Biodiesel hybrid electric vehicles (that can plug into the grid overnight) may offer the best transportation solution in the short term, given the energy density of diesel and the carbon neutral ramifications of fuel from plants as well as the emissions of electric engines. A recent study found that the present amount of electricity generation in the U.S. could provide enough energy for the country's entire fleet of automobiles to switch to plug-in hybrids , reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

But plug-in hybrids would still rely on electricity, now predominantly generated by burning dirty coal. Massive investment in low-emission energy generation, whether solar-thermal power or nuclear fission , would be required to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And even more speculative energy sources—hyperefficient photovoltaic cells, solar energy stations in orbit or even fusion—may ultimately be required.

The solutions above offer the outline of a plan to personally avoid contributing to global warming. But should such individual and national efforts fail, there is another, potentially desperate solution:

Experiment Earth —Climate change represents humanity's first planetwide experiment. But, if all else fails, it may not be the last. So-called geoengineering , radical interventions to either block sunlight or reduce greenhouse gases, is a potential last resort for addressing the challenge of climate change.

Among the ideas: releasing sulfate particles in the air to mimic the cooling effects of a massive volcanic eruption; placing millions of small mirrors or lenses in space to deflect sunlight; covering portions of the planet with reflective films to bounce sunlight back into space; fertilizing the oceans with iron or other nutrients to enable plankton to absorb more carbon; and increasing cloud cover or the reflectivity of clouds that already form.

All may have unintended consequences, making the solution worse than the original problem. But it is clear that at least some form of geoengineering will likely be required: capturing carbon dioxide before it is released and storing it in some fashion, either deep beneath the earth, at the bottom of the ocean or in carbonate minerals. Such carbon capture and storage is critical to any serious effort to combat climate change.

Additional reporting by Larry Greenemeier and Nikhil Swaminathan .

Russell Millner/Alamy

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How You Can Stop Global Warming

Healing the planet starts in your garage, in your kitchen, and at your dining room table.

Weatherizing doors and windows by sealing drafts can make your home more energy efficient.

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Rising sea levels. Raging storms. Searing heat. Ferocious fires. Severe drought. Punishing floods. The effects of climate change are already threatening our health, our communities, our economy, our security, and our children’s future.

What can you do? A whole lot, as it turns out. Americans, on average, produce 21 tons of carbon a year, about four times the global average. Personal action is, of course, no substitute for meaningful government policies. We still must limit carbon pollution and aggressively move away from dirty fossil fuels toward cleaner power.

But it’s important to remember the equally vital contributions that can be made by private citizens—which is to say, by you. “Change only happens when individuals take action,” says clean energy advocate Aliya Haq. “There’s no other way, if it doesn’t start with people.”

Here are a dozen easy, effective ways each one of us can make a difference.

1. Speak up!

What’s the single biggest way you can make an impact on global climate change? “Talk to your friends and family, and make sure your representatives are making good decisions,” Haq says. By voicing your concerns—via social media or, better yet, directly to your elected officials —you send a message that you care about the warming world. Encourage Congress to enact new laws that limit carbon emissions and require polluters to pay for the emissions they produce. “The main reason elected officials do anything difficult is because their constituents make them,” Haq says. You can help protect public lands, stop offshore drilling, and more here .

2. Power your home with renewable energy.

Choose a utility company that generates at least half its power from wind or solar and has been certified by Green-e Energy , an organization that vets renewable energy options. If that isn’t possible for you, take a look at your electric bill; many utilities now list other ways to support renewable sources on their monthly statements and websites.

3. Weatherize, weatherize, weatherize.

“Building heating and cooling are among the biggest uses of energy,” Haq says. Indeed, heating and air-conditioning account for almost half of home energy use. You can make your space more energy efficient by sealing drafts and ensuring it’s adequately insulated. You can also claim federal tax credits for many energy efficiency home improvements. To help you figure out where to start, you could also get a home energy audit, which some utilities offer free of charge. (Alternatively, you can hire a professional to come to your home and perform one; the Inflation Reduction Act offers a partial tax credit for this.) The EPA’s Home Energy Yardstick gives you a simple assessment of your home’s annual energy use compared with similar homes.

4. Invest in energy-efficient appliances.

Since they were first implemented nationally in 1987, efficiency standards for dozens of appliances and products have kept 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air. That’s about the same amount as the annual carbon pollution coughed up by nearly 440 million cars. “Energy efficiency is the lowest-cost way to reduce emissions,” Haq says. When shopping for refrigerators, washing machines, heat pump water heaters , and other appliances, look for the Energy Star label. It will tell you which are the most efficient. (There may also be rebates to earn from your purchase of Energy Star–certified products.)

And when you’re ready to swap out your old machines, don’t just put them on the curb: Recycling an old refrigerator through the EPA’s Responsible Appliance Disposal Program can prevent an additional 10,000 pounds of carbon pollution because the global-warming pollutants in the refrigerants and foam would be properly captured rather than vented to the air.

5. Reduce water waste.

Saving water reduces carbon pollution, too. That's because it takes a lot of energy to pump, heat, and treat your water. So take shorter showers, turn off the tap while brushing your teeth, and switch to WaterSense -labeled fixtures and appliances. The EPA estimates that if just one out of every 100 American homes were retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, about 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year would be saved—avoiding 80,000 tons of global warming pollution .

6. Actually eat the food you buy—and compost what you can’t.

Approximately 10 percent of U.S. energy use goes into growing, processing, packaging, and shipping food—about 40 percent of which winds up in the landfill. “If you’re wasting less food, you’re likely cutting down on energy consumption,” Haq says. As for the scraps you can’t eat or the leftovers you don’t get to, collect them in a compost bin instead of sending them to the landfill where they release methane. Recycling food and other organic waste into compost provides a range of environmental benefits, including improving soil health, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, recycling nutrients, and mitigating the impact of droughts.

7. Buy better bulbs.

LED light bulbs use one-sixth the amount of energy to deliver the same amount of light as conventional incandescents and last at least 10 times longer. They’re also cheaper in the long run: A 10-watt LED that replaces your traditional 60-watt bulb will save you $125 over the light bulb’s life. And because the average American home has around 40 to 50 light bulbs, this is a simple swap that will reap huge rewards. If every household in the United States replaced just one incandescent with an Energy Star–labeled LED, we would prevent seven billion pounds of carbon pollution per year. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 648,000 cars.

8. Pull the plug(s).

Taken together, the outlets in your home are likely powering about 65 devices—an average load for a home in the United States. Audio and video devices, cordless vacuums and power tools, and other electronics use energy even when they're not charging. This "idle load" across all U.S. households adds up to the output of 50 large power plants in the country . So don't leave fully charged devices plugged into your home's outlets, unplug rarely used devices or plug them into power strips and timers, and adjust your computers and monitors to automatically power down to the lowest power mode when not in use.

9. Drive a fuel-efficient vehicle.

Gas-smart cars, such as hybrids and fully electric vehicles, save fuel and money . And once all cars and light trucks meet 2025’s clean car standards, which means averaging 54.5 miles per gallon, they’ll be a mainstay. For good reason: Relative to a national fleet of vehicles that averaged only 28.3 miles per gallon in 2011, Americans will spend $80 billion less at the pump each year and cut their automotive emissions by half. Before you buy a new set of wheels, compare fuel-economy performance here .

10. Maintain your ride.

If all Americans kept their tires properly inflated, we could save 1.2 billion gallons of gas each year. A simple tune-up can boost miles per gallon anywhere from 4 percent to 40 percent, and a new air filter can get you a 10 percent boost. Also, remove unnecessary accessories from your car roof. Roof racks and clamshell storage containers can reduce fuel efficiency by as much as 5 percent.

11. Rethink planes, trains, and automobiles.

Choosing to live in walkable smart-growth cities and towns with quality public transportation leads to less driving, less money spent on fuel, and less pollution in the air . Less frequent flying can make a big difference, too. “Air transport is a major source of climate pollution,” Haq says. “If you can take a train instead, do that.” If you must fly, consider purchasing carbon offsets to counterbalance the hefty carbon pollution associated with flying. But not all carbon offset companies are alike. Do your homework to find the best supplier.

12. Reduce, reuse, and recycle.

In the United States, the average person generates 4.5 pounds of trash every day. Fortunately, not all the items we discard end up in landfills; we recycle or compost more than one-third of our trash. In 2014 this saved carbon emissions equivalent to the yearly output of 38 million passenger cars . But we could be doing so much more. “ Reduce should always be the number-one priority,” says NRDC senior resource specialist Darby Hoover . And to reap the environmental benefits of “recyclable” goods, you must recycle according to the rules of your municipality, since systems vary widely by location . Search your municipality’s sanitation department (or equivalent) webpage to learn exactly what you can place in the recycling bin, as counties and cities often differ in what they accept.

This story was originally published on April 20, 2022 and has been updated with new information and links.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can’t resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can’t republish our material wholesale or automatically—you need to select stories individually; you can’t republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should drop us a note to let us know when you’ve used one of our stories.

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A sunset lights a glacier in New Zealand's Fiordland National Park. Around the world, many glaciers are melting quickly as the planet warms.

• ENVIRONMENT

Are there real ways to fight climate change? Yes.

Humans have the solutions to fight a global environmental crisis. Do we have the will?

The evidence that humans are causing climate change, with drastic consequences for life on the planet, is overwhelming .

Experts began raising the alarm about global warming in 1979 , a change now referred to under the broader term climate change , preferred by scientists to describe the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems. 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.  

Over 200 countries—193 countries plus the 27 members of the European Union—have signed the Paris Climate Agreement , a treaty created in 2015 to fight climate change on a global scale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which synthesizes the scientific consensus on the issue, has set a goal of keeping warming under 2°C (3.6°F) and pursuing an even lower warming cap of 1.5 °C (2.7° F).

But no country has created policies that will keep the world below 1.5 °C, according to the Climate Action Tracker . Current emissions have the world on track to warm 2.8°C by the end of this century.  

Addressing climate change will require many solutions —there's no magic bullet. Yet nearly all of these solutions exist today. They range from worldwide changes to where we source our electricity to protecting forests from deforestation.  

The promise of new technology

Better technology will help reduce emissions from activities like manufacturing and driving.  

Scientists are working on ways to sustainably produce hydrogen, most of which is currently derived from natural gas, to feed zero-emission fuel cells for transportation and electricity.  

Renewable energy is growing, and in the U.S., a combination of wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable sources provide 20 percen t of the nation’s electricity.  

New technological developments promise to build better batteries to store that renewable energy, engineer a smarter electric grid, and capture carbon dioxide from power plants and store it underground or turn it into valuable products such as gasoline . Some argue that nuclear power—despite concerns over safety, water use, and toxic waste—should also be part of the solution, because nuclear plants don't contribute any direct air pollution while operating.

Should we turn to geoengineering?

While halting new greenhouse gas emissions is critical, scientists say we need to extract existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, effectively sucking it out of the sky.  

Pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is a type of geoengineering , a science that interferes with the Earth’s natural systems, and it’s a controversial approach to fighting climate change.

Other types of geoengineering involve spraying sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the air or blocking the sun with a giant space mirror. Studies suggest we don’t know enough about the potential dangers of geoengineering to deploy it.

Restoring nature to protect the planet  

Planting trees, restoring seagrasses, and boosting the use of agricultural cover crops could help clean up significant amounts of carbon dioxide .  

The Amazon rainforest is an important reservoir of the Earth’s carbon, but a study published in 2021, showed deforestation was transforming this reservoir into a source of pollution.  

Restoring and protecting nature may provide as much as   37 percent of the climate mitigation needed to reach the Paris Agreement’s 203o targets. Protecting these ecosystems can also benefit biodiversity, providing a win-win for nature .

Adapt—or else

Communities around the world are already recognizing that adaptation must also be part of the response to climate change . From flood-prone coastal towns to regions facing increased droughts and fires, a new wave of initiatives focuses on boosting resilience . Those include managing or preventing land erosion, building microgrids and other energy systems built to withstand disruptions, and designing buildings with rising sea levels in mind.

Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law and was a historic investment in fighting and adapting to climate change.

( Read more about how the bill will dramatically reduce emissions. )

Recent books such as Drawdown and Designing Climate Solutions have proposed bold yet simple plans for reversing our current course. The ideas vary, but the message is consistent: We already have many of the tools needed to address climate change. Some of the concepts are broad ones that governments and businesses must implement, but many other ideas involve changes that anyone can make— eating less   meat , for example, or rethinking your modes of transport .

"We have the technology today to rapidly move to a clean energy system," write the authors of Designing Climate Solutions . "And the price of that future, without counting environmental benefits, is about the same as that of a carbon-intensive future."

Sarah Gibbens contributed reporting to this article.

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Lesson of the Day

Explore 7 Climate Change Solutions

In this lesson, students will use a jigsaw activity to learn about some of the most effective strategies and technologies that can help head off the worst effects of global warming.

By Natalie Proulx

Lesson Overview

Earlier this summer, a report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , a body of scientists convened by the United Nations, found that some devastating impacts of global warming were unavoidable. But there is still a short window to stop things from getting even worse.

This report will be central at COP26 , the international climate summit where about 20,000 heads of state, diplomats and activists are meeting in person this week to set new targets for cutting emissions from coal, oil and gas that are heating the planet.

In this lesson, you will learn about seven ways we can slow down climate change and head off some of its most catastrophic consequences while we still have time. Using a jigsaw activity , you’ll become an expert in one of these strategies or technologies and share what you learn with your classmates. Then, you will develop your own climate plan and consider ways you can make a difference based on your new knowledge.

What do you know about the ways the world can slow climate change? Start by making a list of strategies, technologies or policies that could help solve the climate crisis.

Which of your ideas do you think could have the biggest impact on climate change? Circle what you think might be the top three.

Now, test your knowledge by taking this 2017 interactive quiz:

How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming?

A new book presents 100 potential solutions. Can you figure out which ones are top ranked?

After you’ve finished, reflect on your own in writing or in discussion with a partner:

What solutions to climate change did you learn about that you didn’t know before?

Were you surprised by any of the answers in the quiz? If so, which ones and why?

What questions do you still have about solving climate change?

Jigsaw Activity

As you learned in the warm-up, there are many possible ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Below we’ve rounded up seven of the most effective solutions, many of which you may have been introduced to in the quiz above.

In this jigsaw activity, you’ll become an expert in one of the climate solutions listed below and then present what you learned to your classmates. Teachers may assign a student or small group to each topic, or allow them to choose. Students, read at least one of the linked articles on your topic; you can also use that article as a jumping-off point for more research.

Climate Change Solutions

Renewable energy: Scientists agree that to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, countries must immediately move away from dirty energy sources like coal, oil and gas, and instead turn to renewable energy sources like wind, solar or nuclear power. Read about the potent possibilities of one of these producers, offshore wind farms , and see how they operate .

Refrigerants: It’s not the most exciting solution to climate change, but it is one of the most effective. Read about how making refrigerants, like air-conditioners, more efficient could eliminate a full degree Celsius of warming by 2100.

Transportation: Across the globe, governments are focused on limiting one of the world’s biggest sources of pollution: gasoline-powered cars. Read about the promises and challenges of electric vehicles or about how countries are rethinking their transit systems .

Methane emissions: You hear a lot about the need to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what about its dangerous cousin, methane? Read about ideas to halt methane emissions and why doing so could be powerful in the short-term fight against climate change.

Agriculture: Efforts to limit global warming often target fossil fuels, but cutting greenhouse gases from food production is urgent, too, research says. Read about four fixes to earth’s food supply that could go a long way.

Nature conservation: Scientists agree that reversing biodiversity loss is a crucial way to slow climate change. Read about how protecting and restoring nature can help cool the planet or about how Indigenous communities could lead the way .

Carbon capture: Eliminating emissions alone may not be enough to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, so some companies are investing in technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. Learn more about so-called engineered carbon removal .

Questions to Consider

As you read about your climate solution, respond to the questions below. You can record your answers in this graphic organizer (PDF).

1. What is the solution? How does it work?

2. What problem related to climate change does this strategy address?

3. What effect could it have on global warming?

4. Compared with other ways to mitigate climate change, how effective is this one? Why?

5. What are the limitations of this solution?

6. What are some of the challenges or risks (political, social, economic or technical) of this idea?

7. What further questions do you have about this strategy?

When you’ve finished, you’ll meet in “teaching groups” with at least one expert in each of the other climate solutions. Share what you know about your topic with your classmates and record what you learn from them in your graphic organizer .

Going Further

Option 1: Develop a climate plan.

Scientists say that in order to prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold beyond which the dangers of global warming grow immensely, we will need to enact all of the solutions you learned about — and more. However, the reality is that countries won’t be able to right away. They will have to consider which can have the biggest or fastest impact on climate change, which are the most cost-effective and which are the most politically and socially feasible.

Imagine you have been asked to come up with a plan to address climate change. If you were in charge, which of these seven solutions would you prioritize and why? You might start by ranking the solutions you learned about from the most effective or urgent to the least.

Then, write a proposal for your plan that responds to the following questions:

What top three solutions are priorities? That is, which do you think are the most urgent to tackle right away and the most effective at slowing global warming?

Explain your decisions. According to your research — the articles you read and the quiz you took in the beginning of the lesson — why should these solutions take precedence?

How might you incentivize companies and citizens to embrace these changes? For some ideas, you might read more about the climate policies countries around the world have adopted to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Option 2: Take action.

Thinking about climate change solutions on such a big scale can be overwhelming, but there are things you can do in your own life and in your community to make a difference. Choose one of the activities below to take action on, or come up with one of your own:

Share climate solutions via media. Often, the news media focuses more on climate change problems than solutions. Counteract this narrative by creating something for publication related to one or more of the solutions you learned about. For example, you could submit a letter to the editor , write an article for your school newspaper, enter a piece in one of our upcoming student contests or create an infographic to share on social media .

Make changes in your own life. How can you make good climate choices related to one or more of the topics you learned about? For example, you could eat less meat, take public transportation or turn off your air-conditioner. Write a plan, explaining what you will do (or what you are already doing) and how it could help mitigate climate change, according to the research.

Join a movement. This guest essay urges people to focus on systems, not themselves. What groups could you get involved with that are working toward some of the solutions you learned about? Identify at least one group, either local, national or international, and one way you could support it. Or, if you’re old enough to vote, consider a local, state or federal politician you would like to support based on his or her climate policies.

Want more Lessons of the Day? You can find them all here .

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

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Climate Change

The 5 greatest challenges to fighting climate change

Kara Baskin

Dec 27, 2019

Climate change: Most of the world agrees it’s a danger, but how do we conquer it? What’s holding us back? Christopher Knittel, professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, laid out five of the biggest challenges in a recent interview.

CO2 is a global pollutant that can’t be locally contained

“The first key feature of climate change that puts it at odds with past environmental issues is that it’s a global pollutant, rather than a local pollutant. [Whether] I release a ton of CO2 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in London, it does the same damage to the globe,” Knittel said. “Contrast that with local pollutants, where if I release a ton of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide in Cambridge, the majority of the damage stays near Cambridge.”

Thus, CO2 is far harder to manage and regulate.

For now, climate change is still hypothetical

The damage caused by most climate change pollutants will happen in the future. Which means most of us won’t truly be affected by climate change — it’s a hypothetical scenario conveyed in charts and graphs. While we’d like politicians and voters to be moved by altruism, this isn’t always the case. In general, policymakers have little incentive to act.

“People [who stand to be] most harmed by climate change aren’t even born yet. Going back to the policymaker’s perspective, she has much less of an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because those reductions are going to benefit voters in the future and not her current voters,” Knittel said.

There’s no direct link to a smoking gun

Despite the global threat from climate-altering pollutants, it’s hard for scientists to link them to a specific environmental disaster, Knittel said. Without a definitive culprit, it’s easier for skeptics to ignore or explain away climate change effects.

Developing countries contribute to a large share of pollution

Simply put, this isn’t their top priority.

“We’re asking very poor countries that are worried about where their next meal is coming from, or whether they can send their kids to school, to incur costs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to benefit the world. And that’s a tough ask for a policymaker inside of a developing country,” he said.

Modern living is part of the problem

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but modern conveniences like electricity, transportation, and air conditioning contribute to climate change, and remedies potentially involve significant sacrifice and lifestyle change.

“Although we’ve seen great strides in reductions in solar costs and batteries for electric vehicles, these are still expensive alternatives. There is no free lunch when it comes to overcoming climate change,” Knittel warned.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times  recently, Knittel said, “If an evil genius had set out to design the perfect environmental crisis … those five factors would have made climate change a brilliant choice. But we didn’t need an evil genius. We stumbled into it on our own.”

Read next — Climate experts: Clean tech is here, now we need people power

Related Articles

How Do We Reduce Greenhouse Gases?

To stop climate change , we need to stop the amount of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, from increasing. For the past 150 years, burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, which naturally pull carbon dioxide out of the air, has caused greenhouse gas levels to increase. There are two main ways to stop the amount of greenhouse gases from increasing: we can stop adding them to the air, and we can increase the Earth’s ability to pull them out of the air.

This is called climate mitigation . There is not one single way to mitigate climate change. Instead, we will have to piece together many different solutions to stop the climate from warming. Below are descriptions of the main methods that we can use.

Many of these solutions are already being implemented in places around the world. Some can be tackled by individuals, such as using less energy, riding a bike instead of driving, driving an electric car, and switching to renewable energy. Other actions to mitigate climate change involve communities, regions, or nations working together to make changes, such as switching power plants from burning coal or gas to renewable energy and growing public transit.

Use less electricity.

Taking steps to use less electricity, especially when it comes from burning coal or gas, can take a big bite out of greenhouse gas emissions. Worldwide, electricity use is responsible for a quarter of all emissions. 

Some steps that you can take to use less electricity are simple and save money, like replacing incandescent light bulbs with LED bulbs that use less electricity, adding insulation to your home, and setting the thermostat lower in the winter and higher in the summer, especially when no one is home. There are also new technologies that help keep buildings energy efficient, such as glass that reflects heat, low-flow water fixtures, smart thermostats, and new air conditioning technology with refrigerants that don’t cause warming. In urban and suburban environments, green or cool roofs can limit the amount of heat that gets into buildings during hot days and help decrease the urban heat island effect .

Green roof on the Walter Reed Community Center in Arlington, VA, US Credit: Arlington County on Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

Generate electricity without emissions.

Renewable energy sources include solar energy, geothermal energy, wind turbines, ocean wave and tidal energy, waste and biomass energy, and hydropower. Because they do not burn fossil fuels, these renewable energy sources do not release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as they generate electricity. Nuclear energy also creates no greenhouse gas emissions, so it can be thought of as a solution to climate change. However, it does generate radioactive waste that needs long-term, secure storage.

Today, the amount of electricity that comes from renewable energy is growing. A few countries, such as Iceland and Costa Rica, now get nearly all of their electricity from renewable energy. In many other countries, the percentage of electricity from renewable sources is currently small (5 - 10%) but growing.

Wind turbines can be on land or in the ocean, where high winds are common. Credit: Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash

Shrink the footprint of food.

Today, about a fifth of global carbon emissions come from raising farm animals for meat. For example, as cattle digest food they burp, releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and their manure releases the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. And forests, which take carbon dioxide out of the air, are often cut down so that cattle have space to graze.

Eating a diet that is mostly or entirely plant-based (such as vegetables, bread, rice, and beans) lowers emissions. According to the Drawdown Project , if half the population worldwide adopts a plant-rich diet by 2050, 65 gigatons of carbon dioxide would be kept out of the atmosphere over about 30 years. (For a sense of scale, 65 gigatons of carbon dioxide is nearly two-years-worth of recent emissions from fossil fuels and industry.) Reducing food waste can make an even larger impact, saving about 90 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over 30 years.

Eating a plant-rich diet lowers greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Victoria Shes on Unsplash

Travel without making greenhouse gases.

Most of the ways we have to get from place to place currently rely on fossil fuels: gasoline for vehicles and jet fuel for planes. Burning fossil fuels for transportation adds up to 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. We can reduce emissions by shifting to alternative technologies that either don’t need gasoline (like bicycles and electric cars) or don’t need as much (like hybrid cars). Using public transportation, carpooling, biking, and walking leads to fewer vehicles on the road and less greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Cities and towns can make it easier for people to lower greenhouse gas emissions by adding bus routes, bike paths, and sidewalks.

Electric bicycles can be a way to get around without burning gasoline. Credit: Karlis Dambrans/CC BY 2.0

Reduce household waste.

Waste we put in landfills releases greenhouse gases. Almost half the gas released by landfill waste is methane, which is an especially potent greenhouse gas. Landfills are, in fact, the third largest source of methane emissions in the U.S., behind natural gas/petroleum use and animals raised for food production (and their manure). In the U.S., each member of a household produces an average of 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of trash per day. That's 726 kg (1660 lbs) of trash per person per year! Conscious choices, including avoiding unnecessary purchases, buying secondhand, eliminating reliance on single-use containers, switching to reusable bags, bottles, and beverage cups, reducing paper subscriptions and mail in favor of digital options, recycling, and composting, can all help reduce household waste.     

Reduce emissions from industry.

Manufacturing, mining for raw materials, and dealing with the waste all take energy. Most of the products that we buy — everything from phones and TVs to clothing and shoes — are created in factories, which produce up to about 20% of the greenhouse gases emitted worldwide.

There are ways to decrease emissions from manufacturing. Using materials that aren’t made from fossil fuels and don’t release greenhouse gases is a good start. For example, cement releases carbon dioxide as it hardens, but there are alternative products that don’t create greenhouse gases. Similarly, bioplastics made from plants are an alternative to plastics that come from fossil fuels. Companies can also use renewable energy sources to power factories and ship the products that they create in fuel-saving cargo ships.

Take carbon dioxide out of the air.

Along with reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that we add to the air, we can also take action to increase the amount of carbon dioxide we take out of the air. The places where carbon dioxide is pulled out of the air are called carbon sinks. For example, planting trees, bamboo, and other plants increases the number of carbon sinks. Conserving forests, grasslands, peatlands, and wetlands, where carbon is held in plants and soils, protects existing carbon sinks. Farming methods such as planting cover crops and crop rotation keep soils healthy so that they are effective carbon sinks. There are also carbon dioxide removal technologies, which may be able to pull large amounts of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

As the trees and other plants in a forest use sunlight to create the food they need, they are also pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. Credit: B NW on Unsplash

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What Is Climate Change and How Do We Solve It?

Some of the biggest questions of our time, summarized concisely.

Explainer • Climate • Environment

Words by Seth Millstein

With global temperatures continuing to rise unabated, the impacts of climate change are becoming more frequent, more intense, more dangerous and more widespread. Sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting, temperatures are increasing and extreme weather events are becoming increasingly commonplace. But it’s not all dire news. Despite the uptick in anxiety about the future of the planet , we do know what to do — there are plenty of science-backed steps to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change .

Perhaps the first step is to make sure we understand what climate change is , and (in addition to the systemic change that’s desperately needed) how we can all play a role in the effort to combat global warming .

What Is Climate Change?

At the most basic level, climate change is when the earth’s climate system undergoes a significant adjustment and exhibits new weather patterns. Changes in climate can be as “brief” as a few decades or as long-lasting as millions of years. For example, CO2 can stay in the atmosphere 300 to 1000 years , while methane stays in the atmosphere around 12 years (though methane is also more potent and damaging).

There’s a difference between weather patterns and climate change . Temperatures fluctuate organically over the course of the Earth’s life. But the amount of climate change we’re seeing now is largely the result of human activity — specifically, human activity that produces greenhouse gasses, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (NH4) and nitrous oxide (NO2).

The problem with greenhouse gasses is that they trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, which also increases the planet’s overall temperature. Over time, these higher temperatures destabilize existing weather patterns and ecosystems, and this destabilization has a ripple effect that impacts everything from crop production and biodiversity to city planning, air travel and birth rates . Perhaps most pressingly, global warming is imperiling our ability to grow food for the nearly 10 billion people who will populate the earth by the year 2050.

What turns climate change into a climate emergency is the speed at which the climate is changing , and the potentially catastrophic consequences if we don’t dramatically change course. Many of these changes require policymakers and regulators to intervene, but others can make at least some difference at an individual level, and these include simple dietary changes that could significantly reduce the impact of agriculture and deforestation on global emissions levels.

Climate change that’s caused by greenhouse gasses is called “ anthropogenic climate change ” because it’s the result of human activity, not the Earth’s natural development. Vehicles, power and energy generation, and industrial processes and agriculture (primarily the production of beef and dairy ), are the main sources of these gasses .

Why Is Climate Change Happening?

Though some climate change is normal, the extreme changes we’ve seen over the last several decades are primarily the result of human activity. The biggest drivers of this change are greenhouse gasses , which are released into the environment as the result of various everyday human activities.

How it works is explained by the greenhouse effect, a natural process by which the Earth’s lower atmosphere traps heat from the sun, like a blanket. This process isn’t inherently bad; in fact, it’s necessary to maintain life on Earth , as it keeps the planet’s temperature within a livable range. However, greenhouse gasses amplify the greenhouse effect beyond its natural levels, causing the Earth to grow warmer.

The majority of greenhouse gasses — about 73 percent — are the result of energy consumption by industries, buildings, vehicles, machinery and other sources. But the food sector as a whole, including deforestation to make room for more livestock, is responsible for around a quarter of emissions — and while a small share includes energy use, most food-related emissions are driven by beef and dairy farming. Most climate experts say we need to be curbing emissions from all sectors, and that includes what’s on our plate .

What Does Climate Change Look Like?

There is a wealth of evidence showing the consequences of anthropogenic climate change , and according to countless studies by climate scientists , we need to take urgent action to reverse these effects in order to avoid making the planet far less hospitable to humans. Here are some of those effects, many of which feed back into and influence one another.

Rising Temperatures

Rising temperatures are a central component of global warming. Scientists have been tracking global temperatures since 1850, and the last 10 years — that is, the period between 2014 and 2023 — were the 10 hottest years on record, with 2023 itself being the hottest year on record. Worse, 2024 seems to have a one-in-three chance of being even hotter than 2023. In addition to higher temperatures, climate change has also increased the severity, frequency and length of deadly heat waves around the globe .

Hotter Oceans

The ocean absorbs much of the heat caused by greenhouse gasses, but that can also make the ocean hotter as well. The temperature of the ocean, much like the temperature of the air, was hotter in 2023 than any other year , and it’s estimated that the ocean has absorbed over 90 percent of the Earth’s warming since 1971 . The temperature of the ocean has a huge influence on weather patterns, marine biology, sea levels and a number of other important ecological processes.

Less Snow Cover

Snow plays an important role in regulating Earth’s temperatures due to the albedo effect — that is, the fact that light-colored surfaces reflect the sun’s rays rather than absorbing them. This makes snow a cooling agent, and yet climate change has caused significant decreases in snow cover around the world.

Over the last century or so, the average snow cover in April in the U.S . has declined by more than 20 percent, and from 1972 to 2020, the average area covered by snow has decreased by about 1,870 square miles per year . It’s a vicious cycle: hotter temperatures cause snow to melt, and less snow results in hotter temperatures.

Shrinking Ice Sheets and Glaciers

Ice sheets contain vast amounts of frozen fresh water, and they cover so much surface area that they influence global weather patterns. But for decades, the world’s ice sheets have been shrinking. The surface area of the Greenland ice sheet — the biggest in the world — has decreased by around 11,000 square miles in the last three decades, and it lost 270 billion metric tons of mass every year , on average, between 2002 and 2023. As the ice sheet melts, global sea levels will rise, which would put Miami, Amsterdam and many other coastal cities underwater .

Glaciers around the world are also on the decline. The Tibetan Plateau and surrounding areas, including the Himalayas, have the densest concentration of glaciers outside the polar regions, but they’re melting so quickly that according to researchers, the majority of glaciers in the central and Eastern Himalayas may disappear completely by 2035. These findings are especially concerning given that these glaciers feed into major rivers, such as the Indus, which provide vital water for millions of people downstream, and are likely to run out of water by mid-century if glacial melt continues.

Rising Sea Levels

Climate change causes sea levels to rise in two ways. First, as ice sheets and glaciers melt, they pour extra water into the oceans. Secondly, higher temperatures cause ocean water to expand.

Since 1880, sea levels have already risen by about 8-9 inches , and they won’t stop there. Ocean levels are currently rising at a rate of 3.3 millimeters per year , and scientists predict that between 2020 and 2050, they’ll increase by an additional 10-12 inches . Some scientists predict that Jakarta, a city that’s home to over 10 million people, will be entirely underwater by 2050 .

Ocean Acidification

When oceans absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, they become more acidic. Acidified ocean water inhibits calcification, a process that animals such as snails, oysters and crabs rely on to build their shells and skeletons. The world’s oceans have become about 30 percent more acidic over the last two centuries, and as a result, some animals are essentially dissolving in the water as low pH causes shells and skeletons to dissolve. Even more worrisome, these changes are occurring at faster rates now than at any time in the last 300 million years.

Extreme Weather Events

In the last 50 years, the number of weather-related disasters has increased fivefold , due in no small part to climate change. California has experienced a series of wildfires in recent years; the 2018 wildfires burned more land in the state than any other fire since 1889, and the 2020 fires burned even more land than that. In 2020, an unprecedented plague of locusts descended upon East Africa and the Middle East, devouring crops and threatening the region’s food supply. In the Bay of Bengal, super-cyclone Amphan killed hundreds of people and caused widespread flooding in 2020. Heat waves are also becoming increasingly common; in 2022, people died of heat-related deaths at the highest rate in over two decades.

What Is the Solution to Climate Change?

While there’s no single solution for tackling anthropogenic climate change, climate scientists have recommended a wide range of policies and social changes that, if implemented, would help reverse the worst effects. Some of these recommendations take place at the individual level, while others require large-scale or government action.

• Investing in green alternatives to fossil fuels. This is perhaps the biggest step needed to avert climate disaster. Fossil fuels release massive amounts of greenhouse gasses and are finite in supply, while alternatives like wind and solar release no greenhouse gasses and are infinitely renewable. Incentivizing the use of clean energy, especially by corporations and in high-income countries, is one of the biggest ways to bring down humanity’s carbon emissions.
• Rewilding Conserving wild animal species, called trophic rewilding , has tremendous potential for climate mitigation. When species are allowed to return to their functional roles in ecosystems, the ecosystem functions better and more carbon can be naturally stored. The movement and behavior of animals can help spread seeds and plant them across wide regions which helps plants grow.
• Reducing our consumption of meat and dairy. Producing animal products for human consumption emits far more greenhouse gasses than the production of plant-based alternatives like legumes. Worse, when land is deforested to make way for livestock to graze , the absence of trees means that less carbon is captured from the atmosphere. As such, shifting to a more plant-forward diet is an excellent way to help bring down greenhouse emissions.

A couple of things are worth noting here. First, although individual action against climate change is great, the amount of progress needed to curb emissions will realistically require the efforts of corporations and governments. The vast majority of greenhouse emissions are industrial, and only governments have the force of law to compel industries to institute more climate-friendly policies.

Second, because high-income countries in the global north are responsible for a disproportionate share of carbon emissions , those countries should share more of the burden in reducing climate change, including eating less beef and dairy.

What Is Being Done Now To Solve Climate Change?

In 2016, 195 countries and the European Union signed the Paris Climate Accords , the first legally-binding international treaty on climate change. The goal of the accords is to limit global temperature increase to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 — though it encourages countries to aim for the more ambitious limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — and each signatory is required to develop and present its own plan for reducing emissions within its borders.

Many have argued that this goal isn’t ambitious enough , as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that anything beyond a 1.5° increase will likely result in extreme weather and sea level rises. It’s too soon to say whether the accords will accomplish their long-term goal, but in 2021, a court ordered Royal Dutch Shell oil company to reduce its carbon emissions to be in accordance with the accords, so the agreement has already had a tangible, legal impact on emissions.

The Bottom Line

It is clear that wide-scale systemic change is needed to address the human-made causes of climate change. Everyone has a role to play and knowledge is the first step towards action. From the food we choose to eat to the energy sources we use, it all counts towards reducing our environmental impact.

Independent Journalism Needs You

Seth Millstein is a writer and musician living in the Bay Area. He has helped launch several early-stage journalism startups, including Bustle and Timeline, and his work has been published in Bustle, Huffington Post, The Daily Dot and elsewhere.

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Century of Science: Theme

Our climate change crisis

The climate change emergency.

Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver, Portland and Seattle baked in record temperatures that killed hundreds of people. On June 29 Lytton, a village in British Columbia, set an all-time heat record for Canada, at 121° Fahrenheit (49.6° Celsius); the next day, the village was incinerated by a wildfire.

Within a week, an international group of scientists had analyzed this extreme heat and concluded it would have been virtually impossible without climate change caused by humans. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900 — because people are loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and from cutting down forests.

A little over 1 degree of warming may not sound like a lot. But it has already been enough to fundamentally transform how energy flows around the planet. The pace of change is accelerating, and the consequences are everywhere. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting .

The roots of understanding this climate emergency trace back more than a century and a half. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began the detailed measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide that would prove how much carbon is pouring from human activities. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers began developing comprehensive computer models that now illuminate the severity of the changes ahead.

Global average temperature change, 1850–2021

Long-term climate datasets show that Earth’s average surface temperature (combined land and ocean) has increased by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

Today we know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. The emissions that people have been putting into the air for centuries — the emissions that made long-distance travel, economic growth and our material lives possible — have put us squarely on a warming trajectory . Only drastic cuts in carbon emissions, backed by collective global will, can make a significant difference.

“What’s happening to the planet is not routine,” says Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “We’re in a planetary crisis.” — Alexandra Witze

Tracking a Greenland glacier

The calving front of Greenland’s Helheim Glacier, which flows toward the sea where it crumbles into icebergs, held roughly the same position from the 1970s until 2001 (left, the calving front is to the far right of the image). But by 2005 (right), it had retreated 7.5 kilometers toward its source. 

The first climate scientists

One day in the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and 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 CO 2 . Both had thermometers in them. As the sun’s rays beat down, Foote observed that the jar of CO 2 alone heated more quickly, and was slower to cool, 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 .

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. “As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface,” he wrote in 1862.

Today Tyndall is widely credited with the discovery of how what are now called 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.

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. In the decades since, fossil fuels including oil and natural gas have been harnessed to drive a global economy. All these activities belch gases into the air.

Yet Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist, 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 CO 2 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. Today, estimates for how much the planet will warm through a doubling of CO 2 — a measure known as climate sensitivity — range between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees Celsius. (The range remains broad in part because scientists now incorporate their understanding of many more planetary feedbacks than were recognized in Arrhenius’ day.)  

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? And other laboratory experiments — later shown to be flawed — appeared to indicate that changing levels of CO 2 would have little impact on heat absorption in the atmosphere. Most scientists aware of the work came to believe that Arrhenius had been proved wrong.

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 1938, in a 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 and climate change

One major postwar effort was the International Geophysical Year, 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 in La Jolla, 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 . 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.  

Monthly average CO 2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory

Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements collected continuously since 1958 at Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii show the rise 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.

“The graph got flashed all over the place — it was just such a striking image,” says Ralph Keeling, who is Charles David 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. In 2021, the annual minimum was 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. “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.

“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.”

Here was the insight underlying modern climate science: Atmosheric CO 2 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.

Environmental awareness grows

As this scientific picture began to emerge in the late 1950s, Science News was on the story. A March 1, 1958 article in Science News Letter , “Weather May Be Warming,” described a warm winter month in the Northern Hemisphere. It posits three theories, including that “carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere by a booming industrial civilization could have caused the increase. By burning up about 100 billion tons of coal and oil since 1900, man himself may be changing the climate.” By 1972, the magazine was reporting on efforts to expand global atmospheric greenhouse gas monitoring beyond Keeling’s work; two years later, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched its own CO 2 monitoring network, now the biggest in the world.

Environmental awareness on other issues grew in the 1960s and 1970s. Rachel Carson catalyzed the modern U.S. environmental movement in 1962 when she published a magazine series and then a book, Silent Spring , condemning the pesticide DDT for its ecological impacts. 1970 saw the celebration of the first Earth Day , in the United States and elsewhere, and in India in 1973 a group of women led a series of widely publicized protests against deforestation. This Chipko movement explicitly linked environmental protection with protecting human communities, and helped seed other environmental movements.

The fragility of global energy supplies was also becoming more obvious through the 1970s. The United States, heavily dependent on other countries for oil imports, entered a gas shortage in 1973–74 when Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cut off oil supplies because of U.S. government support for Israel. The shortage prompted more people to think about the finiteness of natural resources and the possibility of overtaxing the planet. — Alexandra Witze

Climate change 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. “It was a sort of slow accretion of evidence and concern,” says historian Joshua Howe of Reed College.

Environmental records from the past, such as tree rings and ice cores, established that the current changes in climate are unusual compared with the recent past. Yet such paleoclimatology data also showed that climate has changed quickly in the deep past — driven by triggers other than human activity, but with lessons for how abrupt planetary transformations can be.

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.

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 Celsius 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 steady 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.

What’s more, extreme weather is hammering the planet more and more frequently. That 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, is just a harbinger of what’s to come. — Alexandra Witze

Worrisome predictions from climate models

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. Such models of the climate system have been crucial to developing projections for what we can expect from greenhouse warming.

A first step in building climate models was to connect everyday observations of weather to the concept of forecasting future climate. During World War I, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson imagined tens of thousands of meteorologists working to forecast the weather, each calculating conditions for a small part of the atmosphere but collectively piecing together a global forecast. Richardson published his work in 1922, to reviews that called the idea “of almost quixotic boldness.”

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 general-purpose, 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. With the obscure title “Numerical integration of the barotropic vorticity equation,” the paper reporting the results 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. Phillips ran the calculations on a computer with just 5 kilobytes of memory, yet it was able to reproduce monthly and seasonal patterns in the lower atmosphere. That meant scientists could begin developing more realistic models of how the planet responds to factors such as increasing levels of greenhouse gases. 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. “People thought that it was stupid to try to study this greenhouse-warming issue by three-dimensional model[s], because it cost so much computer time,” meteorologist Syukuro Manabe told physics historian Spencer Weart in a 1989 oral history .

Climate models have predicted how much ice the Ilulissat region of the Greenland ice sheet might lose by 2300 based on different scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions. The models are compared to 2008 (first image). In a best-case scenario, in which emissions peak by mid-century, the speed at which the glacier is sending ice out into the ocean is much lower (second image) than with a worst-case scenario, in which emissions rise at a high rate (third image).

An important breakthrough came in 1967, when 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 carbon dioxide 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. (Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on climate modeling; Wetherald died in 2011.)

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. They analyzed climate models from Manabe and from James Hansen of NASA. The resulting “Charney report” concluded that rising CO 2 in the atmosphere would lead to additional and significant climate change. The ocean might take up much of that heat, the scientists wrote — but “it appears that the warming will eventually occur, and the associated regional climatic changes so important to the assessment of socioeconomic consequence may well be significant.”

In the decades since, climate modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated . Scientists have drawn up a variety of scenarios for how carbon emissions might change in the future, depending on the stringency of emissions cuts. Modelers use those scenarios to project how climate and weather will change around the globe, from hotter croplands in China to melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Climate simulations have also allowed researchers to identify the fingerprints of human impacts on extreme weather that is already happening, by comparing scenarios that include the influence of human activities with those that do not.

And as climate science firmed up and the most dramatic consequences became clear, the political battles raged. — Alexandra Witze

Climate science meets politics

With the development of climate science tracing back to the early Cold War, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the science of global warming became enmeshed in broader societal and political battles. A complex stew of political, national and business interests mired society in debates about the reality of climate change, and what to do about it, decades after the science became clear that humans are fundamentally altering the planet’s atmosphere.

Society has pulled itself together before to deal with global environmental problems, such as the Antarctic ozone hole. In 1974 chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, both 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 ultimately 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 would prove to be far more challenging. Chlorofluorocarbons were a suite of chemicals with relatively limited use and for which replacements could be found without too much trouble. But the greenhouse gases that cause global warming stem from a wide variety of human activities, from energy development to deforestation. And 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. There, experts met under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, the International Council of Scientific Unions and the United Nations Environment Program to discuss 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 1985, a second conference was held at Villach to highlight the urgency, and in 1988, 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. Successive IPCC reports showed more and more confidence in the link between greenhouse emissions and rising global temperatures — and explored how society might mitigate and adapt to coming changes.

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 that 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. “If you go back and look at the original U.N. framework on climate change, already you see the core of the science represented there,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. 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 Cleetus.

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. Working with a small group of influential scientists, this well-funded, well-orchestrated campaign took many of its tactics from earlier tobacco-industry efforts to cast doubt on the links between smoking and cancer, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented in their book Merchants of Doubt.

Perhaps the peak of U.S. climate denialism came in the late 1980s and into the 1990s — roughly a century after Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius laid out the consequences of putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 1988 NASA scientist James Hansen testified to lawmakers about the consequences of global warming. “It is already happening now,” Hansen said, summarizing what scientists had long known.

The high-profile nature of Hansen’s testimony, combined with his NASA expertise, vaulted global warming into the public eye in the United States like never before. “It really hit home with a public who could understand that there are reasons that Venus is hot and Mars is cold,” says Joshua Howe, a historian at Reed College. “And that if you use that same reasoning, we have some concerns about what is happening here on Earth.” But Hansen also kicked off a series of bitter public battles about the reality of human-caused climate change that raged for years.        

One common approach of climate skeptics was to attack the environmental data and models that underlie climate science. In 1998, scientist Michael Mann, then at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and colleagues published a detailed temperature record that formed the basis of what came to be known as the “hockey stick” graph, so named because the chart showed a sharp rise in temperatures (the hockey blade) at the end of a long, much flatter period (the hockey stick). Skeptics soon demanded the data and software processing tools Mann used to create the graph. Bloggers and self-proclaimed citizen scientists created a cottage industry of questioning new climate science papers under the guise of “audits.” In 2009 hackers broke into a server at the University of East Anglia, a leading climate-research hub in Norwich, England, and released more than 1,000 e-mails between climate scientists. This “Climategate” scandal purported to reveal misconduct on the part of the researchers, but several reviews largely exonerated the scientists.  

The graph that launched climate skeptic attacks

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.

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 in order to continue his argument 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, such as wind and solar, while activists such as the 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. Both nations argue that they must be allowed extra time to wean themselves off fossil fuels in order to continue economic growth. They note that historically speaking, the United States is the largest total emitter of carbon by far.

Total carbon dioxide emissions by country, 1850–2021

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

China, whose annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006, 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. — Alexandra Witze

Facing a warmer future

Climate change creeps up gradually on society, except when it doesn’t. The slow increase in sea level, for instance, causes waters to lap incrementally higher at shorelines year after year. But when a big storm comes along — which may be happening more frequently due to climate change — the consequences become much more obvious. Storm surge rapidly swamps communities and wreaks disproportionate havoc. That’s why New York City installed floodgates in its subway and tunnel system in the wake of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy , and why the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has asked Australia and New Zealand to be prepared to take in refugees fleeing from rising sea levels.

The list of climate impacts goes on and on — and in many cases, changes are coming faster than scientists had envisioned a few decades ago. The oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide, 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. “It’s no longer about impacts in the future,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s about what’s happening in the U.S. here and now, and around the world.”

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. The Colorado River , the source of water for tens of millions of people in the western United States , came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history.

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 to 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 .

“We know these changes are happening and that the Titanic is sinking,” says Louise Farquharson, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who monitors permafrost and coastal change around Alaska. Like many Arctic scientists, she is working with Indigenous communities to understand the shifts they’re experiencing and what can be done when buildings start to slump and water supplies start to drain away. “A big part is just listening to community members and understanding what they’re seeing change,” she says.

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. Consider that we are now at least 1.1 degrees above preindustrial levels of CO 2 and are already seeing dramatic shifts in climate. Given that, keeping further global temperature increases as low as possible will make a big difference in the climate impacts the planet faces. “With every fraction of a degree of warming, everything gets a little more intense,” says paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney. “There’s no more time to beat around the bush.”

Historical and projected global temperature change

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 global surface temperature based on five scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

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.

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. “We can solve these problems — most of the tools are already there,” says Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Columbia University. “We just have to do it.”

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 CO 2 accumulates in our atmosphere. The planet is now at higher levels of CO 2 than at any time in the last 3 million years. Yet Ralph Keeling, keeper of the iconic Mauna Loa record tracking the rise in atmospheric CO 2 , is already optimistically thinking about how scientists would be able to detect a slowdown, should the world actually start cutting emissions by a few percent per year. “That’s what the policy makers want to see — that there’s been some large-scale impact of what they did,” he says.

At the 2021 U.N. climate meeting in Glasgow 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 Celsius. It’s been well over a century since Svante Arrhenius recognized the consequences of putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and yet world leaders have yet to pull together to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

Time is running out. — Alexandra Witze

Climate change facts

We know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. Here’s what the science tells us.

How much has the planet warmed over the past century?

The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900.

What is causing climate change?

People are loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and cutting down forests.

What are some of the effects of climate change?

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting.

What is the greenhouse effect?

In the 19th century, Irish physicist John Tyndall found that carbon dioxide 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.

What is the Keeling curve?

One of the most iconic datasets in all of science, the Keeling curve tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 . When geochemist Charles David Keeling began his measurements in 1958 on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. 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. In 2021, the annual minimum was 413 ppm.

Does it get hotter every year?

Average global temperatures fluctuate from year to year, but temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world 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.

What countries emit the most carbon dioxide?

The United States has been the largest total emitter of carbon dioxide by far, followed by China and Russia. China’s annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006.

What places are impacted by climate change?

No place on the planet is unaffected. Higher temperatures have led to major droughts, providing fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years. The Colorado River came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history. In the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average, permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea. 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 .

Editor’s note: This story was published March 10, 2022.

British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson (shown at center) proposes forecasting the weather by piecing together the calculations of tens of thousands of meteorologists working on small parts of the atmosphere.

Geochemist Charles David Keeling (shown in 1988) begins tracking the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The record, which continues through today, has become one of the most iconic datasets in all of science.

Rachel Carson (shown) publishes the book Silent Spring , raising alarm over the ecological impacts of the pesticide DDT. The book helps catalyze the modern U.S. environmental movement.

The first Earth Day, organized by U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson and graduate student Denis Hayes, is celebrated.

The first Landsat satellite launched (shown), opening the door to continuous monitoring of Earth and its features from above.

A powerful eruption from the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo (shown) ejects millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, temporarily cooling the planet.  

World leaders gathered (shown) at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro to address how to pursue economic development while also protecting the Earth. The meeting resulted in an international convention on climate change.

Activist Greta Thunberg initiates the “School Strike for Climate” movement by protesting outside the Swedish parliament. Soon, students around the world join a growing movement demanding action on climate change . (Activists at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference are shown.)

From the archive

Climate change foreseen.

In an early mention of climate change in Science News-Letter , the predecessor of Science News , British meteorologist C.E.P. Brooks warns that present warming trends could lead to “important economic and political effects.”

IGY Brings Many Discoveries

Science News Letter lists the Top 8 accomplishments of the International Geophysical Year.

Chilling possibilities

Science News explores the tentative idea that global temperatures are cooling and that a new ice age could be imminent, which is later shown to be inaccurate.

Long Hot Future: Warmer Earth Appears Inevitable

“The planet earth will be a warmer place in the 21st century, and there is no realistic strategy that can prevent the change,” Science News reports.

Ozone and Global Warming: What to Do?

Policy makers discuss how to solve the dual problems of ozone depletion and global warming.

Looking for Mr. Greenhouse

Science writer Richard Monastersky reports on scientists’ efforts to evaluate how to connect increasing greenhouse gases and a warming climate.

World Climate Panel Charts Path for Action

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that “the fingerprint of man in the past temperature record” is now apparent.

Animals on the Move

A warming climate means shifting ranges and ecosystem disruptions for a lot of species, Nancy Ross-Flanigan reports.

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The Science

Given what we know about the threats that climate change poses to humans, we must take swift action. As a global community, we need to soon level off—and then decrease—the amount of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The faster we do this, the less damage we will cause to our world and our way of life.

Stopping the Rise in CO2

The fastest way to address the buildup of CO 2 in the atmosphere is to stop adding more. Many vital parts of our economy emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases: the way we generate electricity and heat for our buildings and industry; the oil we burn to power our cars, trucks and planes; the refrigerants we use to preserve our food and cool our buildings; and the intensive manufacturing processes for making concrete and steel .

And yet there are many ways to reduce the CO 2 from these sectors. We can replace high-emitting fuels like coal, oil and gas with nearly “carbon-free” alternatives, such as solar power , wind power , or nuclear power . We can capture the CO 2 from fossil fuel power and manufacturing plants and store it underground. We can also update our buildings and infrastructure, so that it takes less energy to build and use them.

We can add to these efforts by trying to remove some of the CO 2 that is already in the atmosphere: for instance, by reforesting the Earth, by changing our farming practices to store more carbon in the soil , or through “direct air capture” technology. However, these methods will likely not be able to remove CO 2 quicker than we are now adding it to the atmosphere. We must begin with stopping our runaway greenhouse gas emissions.

Adapting to Change

Because human activity has already added such a large amount of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the world is now experiencing the early effects of climate change. We need to prepare for and adapt to these changes, so that we can protect human health, water and food supplies, our cities and towns , and natural habitats. A new field of work has emerged to reinforce coastlines to shield them from rising oceans , grow new crops to match regions’ changing climates, protect our infrastructure from wildfires and hurricanes , and plan for shifting supplies of water and food.

Today, these tasks are still manageable. If we get ahead of the regional changes we know are coming, and if we put the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable first, very few parts of the world will be irreparably damaged by the climate change we have already caused.

But unless we also actively cut our greenhouse gas emissions, unchecked climate change could eventually put safe and just adaptation beyond our reach. This possibility has led some scientists to study more extreme and controversial options, like geoengineering; for example, there are proposals that would try to artificially cool the Earth to counter some of the effects of climate change. Urgent action is needed to avoid the need for these riskier options.

Driving Solutions

Great progress can and must be achieved with the low-carbon technologies we have today. And all of us can help speed the pace at which these technologies take root and spread. Individuals can change their behavior and advocate for ambitious new policies. Corporations can drive change across whole industries. Governments can enact laws to make it easier and cheaper to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and to help communities prepare for new challenges. And intergovernmental agreements such as the Paris Agreement have already created a strong framework for international cooperation and aggressive action, if governments around the world step up their commitments .

At the same time, the world does not have a true alternative to fossil fuels that can meet all our current energy needs, let alone meet an increased demand in the future. We severely lack the suite of solutions to address climate change at an economic and social cost that we can agree to bear.

A tremendous amount of work is taking place at MIT and other scientific and engineering institutions around the world to develop these options, in collaboration with the industries and communities that can deploy and scale them. But to quicken the pace of technological breakthroughs, policymakers need to set the stage now for game-changing advances in multiple fields of science, technology, and policy. To take on the hardest challenges in reducing our emissions, in removing CO 2 from the atmosphere, and in adapting to a changing climate, we urgently need new tools.

Seizing the Opportunity

The MIT community fundamentally agrees that climate change presents grave risks that demand society’s urgent attention. The challenge requires an aggressive and pragmatic plan to achieve a net zero carbon global energy system, the sooner the better, for all of humankind.

If academia, business, government, and citizens act together toward this common goal, we can create a pollution-free energy system; form a prosperous, adaptable and resilient society; keep human, animal, and plant life flourishing; and create a better world for ourselves and generations to come.

You may notice that we, the writers on this site, use the word “we” to collectively refer to those who have benefitted in various ways from burning fossil fuels, those who will face the impacts of climate change, and those whose responsibility it is to act. We did this intentionally to create a sense of community in addressing this challenge. However, we acknowledge that people and groups across the globe have not equally benefitted from the use of fossil fuels, and many – including young people and future generations – will disproportionately endure the consequences. We, those who are affiliated with MIT and those who live in developed countries, are often among those whose activities have historically had a disproportionate impact on climate change. Therefore, we see that we have a greater responsibility – as professionals, citizens, community members, and consumers – to act to reverse its course.

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• 05 January 2022

How researchers can help fight climate change in 2022 and beyond

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Devastating floods that hit Germany last July were made more likely by the warming climate. Credit: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty

Late last year, the major climate summit in Glasgow, UK — the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations climate convention (COP26) — injected much-needed momentum into the political and business community in the fight to stop climate change. The year ahead represents an opportunity for scientists of all stripes to offer up expertise and ensure that they have a voice in this monumental effort.

Science is already baked into the UN’s formal climate agenda for 2022. In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is scheduled to release its assessment of the latest research into how climate warming is affecting people and ecosystems; a month later, the panel is set to provide an analysis of the options for curbing emissions and halting global warming. Combined with last year’s report on climate science , the governments of the world will have a solid review of the state-of-the-art of research on climate change. But the research community’s work stretches far beyond the IPCC.

At the top of governments’ climate agenda is innovation. Existing technologies such as wind and solar power, whose price has plummeted over the past decade, and more-efficient lighting, buildings and vehicles will help to reduce emissions. But if green energy is to push out fossil fuels and fulfil the rising demand for reliable power in low-income countries, scientists and engineers will be needed to solve a range of problems. These include finding ways to cut the price of grid-scale electricity storage and to address technical challenges that arise when integrating massive amounts of intermittent renewable energy. Research will also be required to provide a new generation of affordable vehicles powered by electricity and hydrogen, and low-carbon fuels for those that are harder to electrify, such as aircraft.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, such clean-energy deployments are unlikely to be enough to enable countries to keep their climate commitments. More innovation will also be needed — for example, in the form of technologies that can pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These have yet to be tested and demonstrated at any significant scale. Governments and funders also need to support scientists in efforts to understand the safety and efficacy of various controversial geoengineering technologies — methods for artificially cooling the planet, such as the addition of particles to the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space — if only to determine whether there is sense in even contemplating such alternatives.

Give research into solar geoengineering a chance

There are signs of renewed support for research and innovation in helping to address climate change. In Glasgow, 22 countries, as well as the European Commission (EC), announced plans to cooperate on innovation focused on greening cities, curbing industrial emissions, promoting CO 2 capture and developing renewable fuels, chemicals and materials. The EC has also announced efforts to drive new funds into demonstration projects to help commercialize low-carbon technologies. And China, currently the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is creating a vast research infrastructure focused on technologies that will help to eliminate carbon emissions.

China creates vast research infrastructure to support ambitious climate goals

In the United States, under President Joe Biden, the Democrats have also made innovation a linchpin of efforts to address climate change. A bipartisan bill enacted in November will expand green-infrastructure investments, as well as providing nearly US$42 billion for clean-energy research and development at the US Department of Energy over the next 5 years, roughly doubling the current budget, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington DC. Another $550 billion for climate and clean-energy programmes is included in a larger budget bill that Democrats hope to pass this year. Economic modelling suggests that the spending surge could help to lower emissions in the coming decade while teeing up technologies that will be crucial to eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions in the latter half of the century.

In addition to enabling green innovation, scientists have an important part to play in evaluating climate policies and tracking commitments made by governments and businesses. Many of the initiatives that gained traction at COP26 need science to succeed. That includes evaluating how climate finance — money that wealthy nations have committed to help low-income nations to curb emissions and cope with climate change — is spent. Research is also needed to understand the impacts of carbon offsets and carbon trading, for which new rules were agreed at COP26.

COP26 climate pledges: What scientists think so far

Climate science, too, must continue apace, helping governments and the public to understand the impact of climate change. From floods in Germany to fires in Australia, the evolving field of climate attribution has already made it clear that global warming is partly to blame for numerous tragedies. Attribution science will also feed into an ongoing geopolitical debate about who should pay for the rising costs of climate-related natural disasters, as many low-income countries seek compensation from wealthy countries that are responsible for the bulk of the greenhouse-gas emissions so far.

These and other issues will be discussed again in November at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where it will be crucial to make sure that everyone has a voice and that research supports climate monitoring and innovation everywhere, not just in richer nations.

A new agreement made at COP26 that requires governments to report annually on their climate progress should help to maintain pressure on them to act on climate change. But science and innovation will be equally important to driving ever-bolder climate policies.

Nature 601 , 7 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03817-4

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18 Simple Things You Can Do About Climate Change

• by Kat Kerlin
• January 08, 2019

For those of you resolving to do your part to reduce your emissions and engage more sustainably with the planet and those living here, we offer 18 simple, low-budget things that add up. Consider them “re-solutions:”

1) Bring your own bottle or mug.

It’s a teensy thing, but bringing your own reusable cup or coffee mug is easy and feels good. Sometimes you even get drink discounts for using these things.

2) Replace inefficient bulbs .

Inspired by research conducted by the California Lighting Technology Center at UC Davis, the University of California’s  Million LED Challenge  enables UC students, staff and faculty to order high-quality LED bulbs at reduced cost. For everyone else, there are several options on the market. Learn  how to choose the right light .

3) Turn off some lights.

Turn off lights in empty rooms (of course) but also ask yourself, “Do I really even need this light on?” I recently had a meeting in a climate science professor’s office that was only lit by daylighting from the window and it was, well, enlightening.

4) Have a “2 degrees” goal at home.

Set your thermostat a couple of degrees up (A/C) or down (heater) depending on the season to make a difference in your energy use and energy bill. For each degree raised, you can save 3-5 percent on air conditioning costs, for example, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficiency Economy.

5) Walk or bike somewhere you’d normally drive today.

Even parking your car and  riding a bike  the rest of the way to your destination can save fossil fuel emissions and introduce some exercise to your day. A 2015 study by the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis found that a  dramatic global increase in bicycling  could reduce urban transportation emissions up to 10 percent by 2050.

This is super simple and super important. And write or call your government representatives about environmental and other issues important to you. The power of  collective action  can be a force to behold.

7) Plant something .

Physically connecting with the literal earth and caring for what’s grown helps you understand and appreciate it. All the better if what you plant is  native  and attracts pollinators like bees, butterflies and  hummingbirds .

8) Take a hike.

Finding your happy place in the natural environment helps you become personally invested in what’s at stake.

9) Cut food waste.

Eat leftovers, embrace “ugly” or imperfect produce, and learn  other ways to reduce food waste .

10) Slower shipping for shopping.

Online shopping? If you’re not really in a rush, don’t select 1-day shipping. Delivery trucks have to make more trips when consumers select expedited shipping, explained  Miguel Jaller , an assistant professor in the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, in the  New York Times .

Learn how to discern between legitimate news sources and propaganda developed by special interests. This will help you ensure that your understanding of climate change and other hot-button scientific issues is grounded in peer-reviewed science. UC Davis professor Eric Post and colleagues note tips for  how to do that  in a 2017  BioScience  stud y.

12) Get creative .

Climate action isn’t just about energy efficiency and carbon sequestration. Exploring ideas and feelings about the changing world through song,  visual arts , writing and more can be a powerful way to share your unique perspective and help people understand climate change through a different lens.

13) Reduce your use of plastic.

Find  alternatives to plastic  whenever possible, and properly dispose of the plastic you do use to keep it out of our oceans and other waterways.

14)  Don’t be a vampire .

Unplug your computer, toaster, and other appliances when not using them to avoid sucking up needless energy. “Smart” power strips can shut off phantom power to electronics when they’re not in use. If you’re a UC Davis student, staff or faculty member,  calculate your computer’s plug load  using a tool developed by the UC Davis Energy Conservation Office.

15) Take personal care.

Take a second look at your personal care products.  Research  led by NOAA and including UC Davis scientists found that the volatile chemical products in things like shampoo, cleaning products and paint contribute as much to urban air pollution as tailpipe emissions from cars.

16) Cool clothes.

Save energy by washing your clothes in cool water. Most of the energy used in doing a load of laundry comes from warming the water itself.

17) Save water.

It takes energy to produce water, so the more water you save, the more energy you save. The  UC Davis Center for Water and Energy Efficiency found  that between June 2015-April 2016 of California’s drought, water conservation saved 1,830 gigawatt hours of electricity—enough to power 274,000 homes per year, with greenhouse gas savings equivalent to removing 110,000 cars from the road for a year. Their results were covered in the  LA Times .

18) Help a neighbor .

It’s not only nice, it also helps  build community resilience .

There are plenty of other ways to tackle climate change: Buy and grow local food, use renewable energy and energy-efficient appliances, insulate your home,  nurture soils and grasslands , run for office, explore high- and  low-tech ways  to capture greenhouse gases, support research and organizations that can mobilize more people and resources to find solutions … But that’s enough for starters.

Read more stories on climate science

Media resources.

Kat Kerlin  is an environmental science writer and media relations specialist at UC Davis. She’s the editor of the “What Can I Do About Climate Change?” blog.  @UCDavis_Kerlin

Primary Category

Secondary categories.

What Is Climate Change?

Climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional and global climates. These changes have a broad range of observed effects that are synonymous with the term.

Changes observed in Earth’s climate since the mid-20th century are driven by human activities, particularly fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, raising Earth’s average surface temperature. Natural processes, which have been overwhelmed by human activities, can also contribute to climate change, including internal variability (e.g., cyclical ocean patterns like El Niño, La Niña and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and external forcings (e.g., volcanic activity, changes in the Sun’s energy output , variations in Earth’s orbit ).

Scientists use observations from the ground, air, and space, along with computer models , to monitor and study past, present, and future climate change. Climate data records provide evidence of climate change key indicators, such as global land and ocean temperature increases; rising sea levels; ice loss at Earth’s poles and in mountain glaciers; frequency and severity changes in extreme weather such as hurricanes, heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and precipitation; and cloud and vegetation cover changes.

“Climate change” and “global warming” are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. Similarly, the terms "weather" and "climate" are sometimes confused, though they refer to events with broadly different spatial- and timescales.

What Is Global Warming?

Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth’s surface observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere. This term is not interchangeable with the term "climate change."

Since the pre-industrial period, human activities are estimated to have increased Earth’s global average temperature by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), a number that is currently increasing by more than 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. The current warming trend is unequivocally the result of human activity since the 1950s and is proceeding at an unprecedented rate over millennia.

Weather vs. Climate

“if you don’t like the weather in new england, just wait a few minutes.” - mark twain.

Weather refers to atmospheric conditions that occur locally over short periods of time—from minutes to hours or days. Familiar examples include rain, snow, clouds, winds, floods, or thunderstorms.

Climate, on the other hand, refers to the long-term (usually at least 30 years) regional or even global average of temperature, humidity, and rainfall patterns over seasons, years, or decades.

Find Out More: A Guide to NASA’s Global Climate Change Website

This website provides a high-level overview of some of the known causes, effects and indications of global climate change:

Evidence. Brief descriptions of some of the key scientific observations that our planet is undergoing abrupt climate change.

Causes. A concise discussion of the primary climate change causes on our planet.

Effects. A look at some of the likely future effects of climate change, including U.S. regional effects.

Vital Signs. Graphs and animated time series showing real-time climate change data, including atmospheric carbon dioxide, global temperature, sea ice extent, and ice sheet volume.

Earth Minute. This fun video series explains various Earth science topics, including some climate change topics.

Other NASA Resources

Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio. An extensive collection of animated climate change and Earth science visualizations.

Sea Level Change Portal. NASA's portal for an in-depth look at the science behind sea level change.

NASA’s Earth Observatory. Satellite imagery, feature articles and scientific information about our home planet, with a focus on Earth’s climate and environmental change.

Header image is of Apusiaajik Glacier, and was taken near Kulusuk, Greenland, on Aug. 26, 2018, during NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) field operations. Learn more here . Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Essay on Climate Change

Climate Change Essay - The globe is growing increasingly sensitive to climate change. It is currently a serious worldwide concern. The term "Climate Change" describes changes to the earth's climate. It explains the atmospheric changes that have occurred across time, spanning from decades to millions of years. Here are some sample essays on climate change.

100 Words Essay on Climate Change

200 words essay on climate change, 500 words essay on climate change.

The climatic conditions on Earth are changing due to climate change. Several internal and external variables, such as solar radiation, variations in the Earth's orbit, volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics, etc., are to blame for this.

There are strategies for climate change reduction. If not implemented, the weather might get worse, there might be water scarcity, there could be lower agricultural output, and it might affect people's ability to make a living. In order to breathe clean air and drink pure water, you must concentrate on limiting human activity. These are the simple measures that may be taken to safeguard the environment and its resources.

The climate of the Earth has changed significantly over time. While some of these changes were brought on by natural events like volcanic eruptions, floods, forest fires, etc., many of the changes were brought on by human activity. The burning of fossil fuels, domesticating livestock, and other human activities produce a significant quantity of greenhouse gases. This results in an increase of greenhouse effect and global warming which are the major causes for climate change.

Reasons of Climate Change

Some of the reasons of climate change are:

Deforestation

Excessive use of fossil fuels

Water and soil pollution

Plastic and other non biodegradable waste

Wildlife and nature extinction

Consequences of Climate Change

All kinds of life on earth will be affected by climate change if it continues to change at the same pace. The earth's temperature will increase, the monsoon patterns will shift, the sea level will rise, and there will be more frequent storms, volcano eruptions, and other natural calamities. The earth's biological and ecological equilibrium will be disturbed. Humans won't be able to access clean water or air to breathe when the environment becomes contaminated. The end of life on this earth is imminent. To reduce the issue of climate change, we need to bring social awareness along with strict measures to protect and preserve the natural environment.

A shift in the world's climatic pattern is referred to as climate change. Over the centuries, the climate pattern of our planet has undergone modifications. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has significantly grown.

When Did Climate Change Begin

It is possible to see signs of climate change as early as the beginning of the industrial revolution. The pace at which the manufacturers produced things on a large scale required a significant amount of raw materials. Since the raw materials being transformed into finished products now have such huge potential for profit, these business models have spread quickly over the world. Hazardous substances and chemicals build up in the environment as a result of company emissions and waste disposal.

Although climate change is a natural occurrence, it is evident that human activity is turning into the primary cause of the current climate change situation. The major cause is the growing population. Natural resources are utilised more and more as a result of the population's fast growth placing a heavy burden on the available resources. Over time, as more and more products and services are created, pollution will eventually increase.

Causes of Climate Change

There are a number of factors that have contributed towards weather change in the past and continue to do so. Let us look at a few:

Solar Radiation |The climate of earth is determined by how quickly the sun's energy is absorbed and distributed throughout space. This energy is transmitted throughout the world by the winds, ocean currents etc which affects the climatic conditions of the world. Changes in solar intensity have an effect on the world's climate.

Deforestation | The atmosphere's carbon dioxide is stored by trees. As a result of their destruction, carbon dioxide builds up more quickly since there are no trees to absorb it. Additionally, trees release the carbon they stored when we burn them.

Agriculture | Many kinds of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere by growing crops and raising livestock. Animals, for instance, create methane, a greenhouse gas that is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The nitrous oxide used in fertilisers is roughly 300 times more strong than carbon dioxide.

How to Prevent Climate Change

We need to look out for drastic steps to stop climate change since it is affecting the resources and life on our planet. We can stop climate change if the right solutions are put in place. Here are some strategies for reducing climate change:

Raising public awareness of climate change

Prohibiting tree-cutting and deforestation.

Ensure the surroundings are clean.

Refrain from using chemical fertilisers.

Water and other natural resource waste should be reduced.

Protect the animals and plants.

Purchase energy-efficient goods and equipment.

Increase the number of trees in the neighbourhood and its surroundings.

Follow the law and safeguard the environment's resources.

Reduce the amount of energy you use.

During the last few decades especially, climate change has grown to be of concern. Global concern has been raised over changes in the Earth's climatic pattern. The causes of climate change are numerous, as well as the effects of it and it is our responsibility as inhabitants of this planet to look after its well being and leave it in a better condition for future generations.

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13 ways to save the Earth from climate change

Easy ways to help

We know you love watching videos on your phone. But modern activities— such as plugging in devices, driving cars, and cooling homes—often rely on energy sources such as natural gas, oil, and coal. Those energy sources release a gas called carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. When CO2 and other greenhouse gases trap heat that would otherwise escape Earth’s atmosphere, the planet’s temperature rises. That’s called global warming, which causes climate change .

Most scientists believe that climate change is happening and causing rising seas, stronger storms, and shifting habitats for wildlife and people. But you don’t have to give up videos or totally shut down the A/C to fight climate change. Read on to learn how you can help!

Used Goods Are Good

Reduce and reuse as much as possible. Factories emit carbon dioxide when making new products. So instead of buying new stuff, fix your appliances and clothes. Good thing holey jeans are back in style!

Send a postcard

Send a letter, postcard, or drawing to your mayor, government representative, or even the president asking them to do something about climate change.

Slay the vampire

"Vampire" appliances suck energy even when turned off. Kill these monsters by unplugging phone and laptop chargers when not in use, and use power strips for lamps and TVs. (Bonus: It’ll save your parents money on energy bills!)

Close the door

If you see a business with its door wide open in the summer, ask an adult to help you email or talk to an employee about closing it. An open door to an air-conditioned building can let 2.2 tons of carbon dioxide escape over one summer. That’s about as much as a car on a 5,000- mile road trip.

Season your fruit

Try to eat mostly inseason and locally grown fruits and vegetables. This cuts down on the energy used to grow and transport food, which reduces the release of heattrapping gases.Does your favorite ice-cream shop use plastic spoons? Ask an adult to help you talk to the owner about switching to a non-plastic option. Some kinds of spoons are even edible!

Calculate your impact

Use an online carbon footprint calculator to see how much carbon dioxide your actions release. If you know how you’re impacting the planet, you can take steps for change.

Eat your veggies

Livestock such as cows account for some of Earth’s heat-trapping gas emissions. (Yep, it’s the cow toots!) Eating more plants cuts down on the need for so much livestock.

Help out at the hotel

Hang up and reuse your hotel towels instead of washing them after each use. That saves water and energy.

Walk it out

Walk or bike as much as you can. Biking or walking just one mile a day for a year could save 330 pounds of carbon dioxide—that’s the same as planting four trees and letting them grow for 10 years!

Spread the word

Write a letter to the editor about climate change in your local or school newspaper. The more people talk about the issue, the better!

Wear a warm sweater instead of turning up the heat, and open your windows and turn on a fan instead of blasting the air conditioner.

Be a science champion

Not everyone understands climate change. Learn the facts and talk to your friends and family. If everyone gets the science, we can work together to find solutions.

Hang up your freshly washed clothes to dry. You’ll be saving energy by not using the dryer and helping with chores.

Photo credits: Adobe Stock / jzehnder (smokestack); Katalinks, Shutterstock (vampire); Nate Allred, Shutterstock (cow); Photograph by iofoto, Shutterstock (bikes); Alex Staroseltsev, Shutterstock (strawberry); Cookie Studio, Shutterstock (sweater); Mike Flippo, Shutterstock (clothes)

Explore more

Learn about plastic and how to reduce your use., save the earth, save the earth tips, endangered species act.

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How to reduce the impact of climate change on the oceans

Called “the speed bumps of the ocean,” coral reefs work to shrink and slow waves as they speed toward the shore, helping to protect coastlines around the world from tsunamis, hurricanes and cyclones. Coastal managers protect these habitats through measures like creating marine protected areas. More broadly, scientists and policymakers around the world have suggested and tested a range of solutions for climate change ocean impacts. Few had been scientifically vetted. Until now.

A new study,  published  in  Frontiers in Marine Science , is the first of its kind to assess and compare the potential of the 13 most-discussed ocean-based solutions, instead of studying the effectiveness or the cost of just one measure. Scientists gathered a wide range of options into their assessment, ranging from developing renewable energy to creating marine protected areas to promoting carbon storage in marine plants, in a quest to answer the question: To what extent can the oceans help reduce climate change and its impacts?

The team found that the potential for ocean-based options to address climate change and its impacts is very high, and that combining global and local solutions will yield the greatest benefit. Study co-author and Stanford marine biologist  Fiorenza Micheli explains, “we find that all actions have limitations and trade-offs. By systematically assessing each measure across multiple factors, like their effectiveness in addressing climate change impacts, their technical readiness, and any associated benefits or unintended impacts, we provide a transparent and scientifically-vetted approach to creating portfolios of actions.”

Comparing solutions

When choosing the 13 ocean-based solutions, the authors considered old and new technologies, policies and local actions. Each solution in the assessment was rated on feasibility, scale of benefits, cost, governability, and effectiveness related to reducing the three most concerning impacts on the ocean due to climate change: ocean warming, ocean acidification and sea-level rise. To measure the potential of these solutions, each option was then applied to vulnerable ecosystems, namely coral reefs, mangroves, salt marshes, seagrass habitats and the Arctic.

The assessment also compared global and local solutions. On the one hand, global measures showed high potential to effectively address climate-related challenges, but exhibited potentially large negative collateral effects. In contrast to global measures, local measures had multiple benefits beyond the direct benefit of a more stable climate and were considered “low-regret” options, but individually cannot provide adequate solutions worldwide.

For example, conserving and restoring ocean plants like mangroves and seagrasses helps oceans to better absorb carbon dioxide. In addition, this marine vegetation measure also helps to maintain healthy conditions for fisheries and provides a natural water filter. However, its potential to counter climate impacts is constrained because there are only limited ocean areas around the world with vegetated habitats.

Combinations are key

The assessment resulted in five evidence-based key messages to guide ocean-based solutions to address climate change. The most noteworthy key message was that by combining local and global efforts, and including both scientific research and policy, ocean-based solutions could greatly diminish the impacts of climate change on the ocean as a whole.

The study suggests that while trade-offs are involved in each option, it is the combination of measures, both global and local in scale, which will bring major benefits. “Our findings reinforced the fact that, for any lasting solution, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Success depends on societies’ ability, from local and international levels, to join forces and coordinate actions. Diversity and collaboration are key,” explained Micheli.  

Fiorenza Micheli is also a senior fellow at the  Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment  and co-director of the  Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions .

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News from the Columbia Climate School

You Asked: How Can Students Make a Difference on Climate Change?

Earth Institute

“ You Asked ” is a series where Earth Institute experts tackle reader questions on science and sustainability. In honor of Climate Week NYC and the Covering Climate Now initiative , we’re dedicating a few weeks to focusing on your questions about climate change.

The following question was submitted through our Instagram page by one of our followers:

How can many of us, as younger students, do our part to help limit the effects of climate change?

Response from Meredith Harris, a student in Barnard College and the Jewish Theological Seminary (Class of ’21):

Students can take action by educating their non-environmentally informed friends about the perils of climate change, and the basic habits they can change in their daily lives (such as eating less meat) to help make an impact. While it is difficult to write policy, or change the minds of adults in power, informing the current and next generation will help prepare society for how we can combat the most life-threatening issue any of us will have to face in the coming years.

Response from Arianna Christina Menzelos, a student in Columbia College (Class of ’21):

There’s no question that I want radical climate action — i.e. upending social, economic, and political orders in favor of a more sustainable status quo overnight. However, I worry that a narrow focus on macro goals (a Green New Deal, international agreements, etc), will prevent me from taking initiative on the impacts that I  can  make as a student. In the past two years, I co-led a campaign with my close friend to urge Columbia to commit to carbon neutrality. Sure, Columbia is not New York City, or the state, or the country, but it is my world (at least for the next two years).

My best advice in taking climate action is to choose a project — no matter the scale — and see it to its completion. Then, you can take up another one. And maybe one day it  will  be on a more global scale!

Note: On September 20, three days before the UN Climate Summit in NYC, millions of young people and adults will strike all across the US and world to demand transformative action be taken to address the climate crisis. Click here to find a climate strike near you.

Got a question about climate change? Feeling curious about conservation? To submit a question, drop a comment below, message us on Instagram , or email us  here .

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How Can Technology Help Combat Climate Change

Setting targets is only the first step. How can countries and companies make sure they hit them? Image:  Pixabay

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• After setting climate targets, countries and companies will need to quantify, reduce and monitor their emissions.
• This process can be complex, time-consuming and prone to errors, especially for novices.
• The right technology can simplify this process and make it more efficient, transparent and effective.
• Here are three ways climate change technology solutions – particularly AIoT.

As society pressures leaders for a more environmentally-friendly agenda, governments responsible for 63% of world emissions have committed to net zero with corporate net-zero commitments covering 12% of the global economy (representing $9.81 trillion in revenue).

However, it is not uncommon to see large disconnects between targets and actual emissions – when the talk and the walk must go hand-in-hand in terms of effective emission-reduction progress. In June 2021, when the G7 decided to make climate risk disclosure mandatory, seven of the most influential global economies indicated that carbon reporting and disclosures would play a vital role in ensuring that emission reduction targets are in fact met.

Setting a target is just the first step; the second is to understand and quantify the real emission baseline into measurable units. Next, a clear definition of the emissions reduction strategy must be built. Finally, near real-time monitoring of targets vs actual progress should be in place. Ultimately, if countries and companies are to achieve net zero, they need to monitor, reduce and, in some cases, offset the emissions they generate.

The journey can be complex for beginners; it can be time-consuming, very manual, and prone to errors. That should not prevent companies from joining the decarbonization wave. After all, beyond satisfying consumers and political leaderships, committing to net zero might also prove economical, as access to capital will prove increasingly difficult for those not embracing the energy transition. As 'carbon tax' or 'cap-and-trade' schemes become the most likely path forward, and as and access to capital is reduced for those who fail to embrace the energy transition, early net-zero movers will have a competitive financial edge over laggards.

Carbon-management process

Carbon management can be broken down into three main categories: emission measuring and reporting, abatement, and offsetting.

1. Measuring and reporting carbon footprint

The first step is to measure carbon emissions. The carbon reporting process involves the collection of CO2 data, organising by emission type and geographical segment. The data is then measured against internationally recognised carbon-accounting standards such as GHG protocol or ISO 14064-1 . Currently, emission data may be obtained through meter readings, purchase records, utility bills, engineering models, direct monitoring, mass balance, stoichiometry (the calculation of reactants and products in chemical reactions), or other methods for acquiring data from specific activities in the company’s value chain. Challenges associated with measuring and reporting commonly include the laborious data collection process, difficulty reviewing carbon footprints across business units and assets, as well as validating underlying assumptions of emissions.

2. Abatement planning and management

Abatement planning involves identifying key sources of emissions and implementing measures to reduce them. By categorising emissions in step one, businesses can then pinpoint and measure which processes emit the highest volumes of CO2 and optimise their carbon-abatement plan. To achieve this, abatement roadmaps set out targets and KPIs to reduce emissions, focusing on changing emission-heavy processes and implementing new technologies to reduce emissions. Due to the multiple variables that need to be considered in such planning, the process can be uncertain and complex. Furthermore, tracking the performance and progress of abatement programmes is laborious. Organizational challenges include a lack of both transparency regarding marginal cost-benefit of abatement programmes, and resources for managing and executing this abatement journey.

3. Carbon offsetting

Carbon offsetting is considered the option of last resort once all abatement efforts and decarbonization investments have been exhausted. It is a way of taking responsibility for unavoidable carbon emissions by paying for others to reduce or absorb CO2. Multiple types of projects are used for carbon offsets, ranging from environmental projects such as reforestation, to carbon-capture technologies and renewable energy production. Carbon credits are measurable, verifiable emission reductions and have been used as a means for governments and companies to offset carbon emissions. Further methods include the use of RECs (renewable energy certificates) to offset energy consumed from non-renewable sources. However, offsets also come with challenges, from accurate measurement to transparency and verification to ease of trade.

How technology can fight climate change

Artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) solutions are integral to tackling some of the challenges associated with carbon management. There are three main areas of focus to make carbon management more efficient, transparent and effective.

1. AIoT – integration into measurement and reporting

With a myriad of databases and systems involved with different carbon-producing assets, the labour required to simply categorise and organise the data from multiple business units and assets is immense. AIoT integration enables seamless sourcing of real-time activity level data and asset inventory data from a variety of systems. This provides an organization with the capability to efficiently structure, collect and transform data into reports for accurate emissions-monitoring and measurement, reducing overall efforts around data collection and enhancing data quality and report resolution.

2. Abatement intelligence – predictive analytics to simulate emissions over time

Abatement planning is a challenge primarily due to the lack of accurate measures for determining the emissions derived from certain processes. AIoT technology tackles this challenge by creating insights from real-time data to better predict process emissions. By analysing and learning through data from multiple processes, AIoT can refine the performance evaluation of abatement measures and optimise emissions predictions. Beyond optimising abatement strategies, this technology also lowers the overall marginal abatement costs.

3. Carbon offsetting and offset integration

Although a last resort, the carbon offset market plays an essential role towards achieving global net-zero emissions goals for countries and organizations, with an estimated addressable market size of $200 billion by 2050 . However, verification of carbon offsetting and difficulty in trading plagues the industry. Technology can support validation of RECs in near real-time and offer a marketplace for affordable and fast carbon offsetting. Offset integration would provide a global pool of offsets to an organisation, improving ease of trade and emissions planning, reducing organizational hassle, and optimising the timings of REC purchases and retirement.

Carbon management solutions are essential to meeting the G7’s mandatory climate risk disclosures. More importantly, they provide the technology to actively manage and reduce carbon emissions and achieve the net-zero pledges made by governments and corporations. Driven by strong political, societal and economic agendas, carbon management solutions will be an integral part of emission reductions. For that, real-time measurement, abatement, and offset integration will help ensure companies not only talk the talk but also walk the walk and transparently meet their net-zero targets.

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