persuasive essay about global warming is real

Persuasive Essay Sample: Global Warming

16 December, 2020

9 minutes read

Author:  Kate Smith

What is a secret to successful persuasive essay writing? There are two main things to look out for: a proper knowledge base from our HandMade Writing blog, and an excellent essay sample that demonstrate how to apply all the knowledge in writing. Here is a top-notch sample you can use. We hope it'll guide in your writing!

Global Warming: Causes and Mitigation

It is an indisputable truth that global warming has become a major challenge. It’s a cause of worry for humans who are at risk of extinction, bearing in mind the rate of continual rise of the earth’s average temperature. Besides, it is even more worrisome that some governments are yet to come to terms with an obvious fact. The fact is that global warming poses a serious threat to humans and requires urgent action.

This phenomenon undermines food and water security. With environmental sustainability issues and disruption of a delicate balance of the ecosystem, climate change becomes inevitable. And above all, its dire consequences are dreadful.

What Experts Say

According to World Bank sources, the Millennium Development Goals MDGs and its prospects are also threatened by global climate changes. The resulting changes in weather “such as shifts in the intensity and pattern of rainfall and variations in temperature” would probably decrease agricultural/food output as a result of the death of the infrastructure. Hence environmental disasters, like drought or flood, would displace people’s means of livelihood leading to poverty, migration and diseases. (World Bank, 2010).

Related Post: How to Write a Persuasive essay

Global warming is indeed a major challenge for the world today. Although the figures may vary between regions, most people all over the world agree that it is a serious problem requiring urgent attention. For instance, the World Bank 2010 development Indicators puts it succinctly:

“The poorest countries and regions face the greatest danger. Africa – with the most rain-fed agricultural land of any continent, half its population without access to improved water sources, and about 70 percent without access to improved sanitation facilities – is particularly vulnerable to climate change”. (World Bank, 2010).

In the United States, the views are “divided along ideological lines.” The Pew Research Center’s 2009 survey on global warming discovered that between the liberals and the conservatives, the former agree more than twice that global warming is a severe problem (about 66% vs. 30%)”. According to that survey, a similar divide is also evident in Britain. With those on the political left and those on the right putting a severity rate of 66% and 42% respectively. Germany, Spain and France have smaller ideological splits (Pew Research Center, 2009).

The world is already experiencing the effects of this warming with rising sea levels when the surface temperature warms up. As a result, it is melting ice from the glaciers, bringing severe heat waves and dangerous storms. Even drought, desertification and perceived extinction of animal life goes a long way to show that global warming is not just a hoax.

Notably, scientists believe these are mostly caused by man’s activities. Including the burning of fossil fuels thus, “releasing carbon dioxide, CO 2 that traps heat within the atmosphere”. (World Health Organization, 2007). Also, according to WHO source:

“the Earths’ surface has warmed by more than 0.8 o C over the past century and by approximately 0.6 o C in the previous three decades.” With the continuous emissions of CO 2 , it is projected that the surface temperature will “rise by 1.1 o C to 6.4 o C over the 21 st century”. (World Health Organization, 2007).

GreenHouse Gas, GHGs – causes of global warming are emitted in various ways apart from the combustion of fossil fuels in car. The CO 2  gas is “also released in landfills and agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals). This is not to mention nitrous oxide from fertilizers, gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes, and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO 2 ”.

Evidently, carbon dioxide is the highest cause of global warming among other greenhouse gases which also include methane, nitrous oxide, and some other artificial gases. In particular, this has been on the increase as a result of industrialization and commercialization. Especially in China, the United States, the Russian Federation, India and Japan – the world’s highest emitters of carbon dioxide. (World Bank, 2010)

What’s the Solution?

Obviously, the activities of a man with regards to contributing to global warming are overwhelming and substantial. But they are also caused by natural influences such as solar and volcanic activities.

The importance of mitigating the effects of global warming therefore cannot be overemphasized. The consequence of not doing this could be very devastating. While the majority of the world leaders agree with the fact that global warming is indeed a global challenge. They are, however, divided on the method of tackling this menace or “which country is trusted to do the right thing on this issue” (Pew Research Center, 2009).

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The United Nations has been spearheading moves towards tackling the menace of climate change. The Copenhagen Conference on climate change further raised the awareness to a high level and the desire to tackle the menace. It later invented what is now known as the “Copenhagen Accord.” While the agreements were lauded by many as a significant success, many others doubted the practical application.

But what the conference achieved which is seen as a bold step towards ending the menace of global warming was the resolution of developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All this while adapting to the effects and providing finance for doing this. The conference also agreed on a long-term plan of keeping the temperature below 2 degrees Celsius.

Whether these resolutions will be adhered to remains to be seen. However, there are things we can do as individuals to reduce the rate of emission of greenhouse gases and the effects of climate change.

Indeed, attitudinal change is the key to achieving this and being more environmentally friendly. Specifically, practical steps include the use of recyclable products and buying goods with minimal packaging. Eventually, this action will reduce waste once the world recovers by energy-efficient products, less energy use, heat abd air leakages prevention. Besides, driving less and walking or riding to school and work, are also optimal actions for effective preservation of the planet. That not only reduces the emission of carbon-dioxide but also keeps you physically fit.

Also, to further reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, one can plant trees. That is a very effective way of cutting down carbon-dioxide, since during photosynthesis, they (trees) use-up carbon-dioxide and give out oxygen. In addition, one can include conservation of water and encouragement of others to adopt environmentally friendly practices to protect our future.

Admittedly, governments at all levels should adopt long term measures towards sustainable energy and encourage their citizens to “go green”. The role of sustainable energy education here cannot be overemphasized since it would increase the awareness of global warming. Moreover, this initiative will gradually re-orientate the masses and make them more environmental friendly. Ultimately, they should implement plans and international agreements on reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.

Developed countries should assist developing countries to mitigate the effects of global warming. They should also implement adaptation measures to the adverse effect of climate change. A decisive action must be taken by all stakeholders to stop the way we pollute the environment. In the long run, it will preserve and handover a safe environment generations yet unborn.

We must all act. The time is now.

References:

• World Bank. (2010). 2010 World Bank Development Indicators. A World Bank publication. Retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/section3.pdf      
• Pew Research Global Attitudes Project (2009). Global Warming Seen as a Major Problem Around the World Less Concern in the U.S., China and Russia. Retrieved from, Retrieved from http://www.pewglobal.org/2009/12/02/global-warming-seen-as-a-major-problem-around-the-world-less-concern-in-the-us-china-and-russia/
• World health organization (2007). Global climate change: implications for international public health policy. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/85/3/06-039503/en/

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Essay on Global Warming

• Updated on  
• Nov 23, 2023

Being able to write an essay is an integral part of mastering any language. Essays form an integral part of many academic and scholastic exams like the SAT , and UPSC amongst many others. It is a crucial evaluative part of English proficiency tests as well like IELTS , TOEFL , etc. Major essays are meant to emphasize public issues of concern that can have significant consequences on the world. To understand the concept of Global Warming and its causes and effects, we must first examine the many factors that influence the planet’s temperature and what this implies for the world’s future. Here’s an unbiased look at the essay on Global Warming and other essential related topics.

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Since the industrial and scientific revolutions, Earth’s resources have been gradually depleted. Furthermore, the start of the world’s population’s exponential expansion is particularly hard on the environment. Simply put, as the population’s need for consumption grows, so does the use of natural resources , as well as the waste generated by that consumption.

Climate change has been one of the most significant long-term consequences of this. Climate change is more than just the rise or fall of global temperatures; it also affects rain cycles, wind patterns, cyclone frequencies, sea levels, and other factors. It has an impact on all major life groupings on the planet.

Also Read: World Population Day

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century, primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels . The greenhouse gases consist of methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and chlorofluorocarbons. The weather prediction has been becoming more complex with every passing year, with seasons more indistinguishable, and the general temperatures hotter. The number of hurricanes, cyclones, droughts, floods, etc., has risen steadily since the onset of the 21st century. The supervillain behind all these changes is Global Warming. The name is quite self-explanatory; it means the rise in the temperature of the Earth.

Also Read: What is a Natural Disaster?

According to recent studies, many scientists believe the following are the primary four causes of global warming:

• Deforestation 
• Greenhouse emissions
• Carbon emissions per capita

Extreme global warming is causing natural disasters , which can be seen all around us. One of the causes of global warming is the extreme release of greenhouse gases that become trapped on the earth’s surface, causing the temperature to rise. Similarly, volcanoes contribute to global warming by spewing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere.

The increase in population is one of the major causes of Global Warming. This increase in population also leads to increased air pollution . Automobiles emit a lot of CO2, which remains in the atmosphere. This increase in population is also causing deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

The earth’s surface emits energy into the atmosphere in the form of heat, keeping the balance with the incoming energy. Global warming depletes the ozone layer, bringing about the end of the world. There is a clear indication that increased global warming will result in the extinction of all life on Earth’s surface.

Also Read: Land, Soil, Water, Natural Vegetation, and Wildlife Resources

Of course, industries and multinational conglomerates emit more carbon than the average citizen. Nonetheless, activism and community effort are the only viable ways to slow the worsening effects of global warming. Furthermore, at the state or government level, world leaders must develop concrete plans and step-by-step programmes to ensure that no further harm is done to the environment in general.

Although we are almost too late to slow the rate of global warming, finding the right solution is critical. Everyone, from individuals to governments, must work together to find a solution to Global Warming. Some of the factors to consider are pollution control, population growth, and the use of natural resources.

One very important contribution you can make is to reduce your use of plastic. Plastic is the primary cause of global warming, and recycling it takes years. Another factor to consider is deforestation, which will aid in the control of global warming. More tree planting should be encouraged to green the environment. Certain rules should also govern industrialization. Building industries in green zones that affect plants and species should be prohibited.

Also Read: Essay on Pollution

Global warming is a real problem that many people want to disprove to gain political advantage. However, as global citizens, we must ensure that only the truth is presented in the media.

This decade has seen a significant impact from global warming. The two most common phenomena observed are glacier retreat and arctic shrinkage. Glaciers are rapidly melting. These are clear manifestations of climate change.

Another significant effect of global warming is the rise in sea level. Flooding is occurring in low-lying areas as a result of sea-level rise. Many countries have experienced extreme weather conditions. Every year, we have unusually heavy rain, extreme heat and cold, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Similarly, as global warming continues, marine life is being severely impacted. This is causing the extinction of marine species as well as other problems. Furthermore, changes are expected in coral reefs, which will face extinction in the coming years. These effects will intensify in the coming years, effectively halting species expansion. Furthermore, humans will eventually feel the negative effects of Global Warming.

Also Read: Concept of Sustainable Development

Sample Essays on Global Warming

Here are some sample essays on Global Warming:

Global Warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere and is a result of human activities that have been causing harm to our environment for the past few centuries now. Global Warming is something that can’t be ignored and steps have to be taken to tackle the situation globally. The average temperature is constantly rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the last few years. The best method to prevent future damage to the earth, cutting down more forests should be banned and Afforestation should be encouraged. Start by planting trees near your homes and offices, participate in events, and teach the importance of planting trees. It is impossible to undo the damage but it is possible to stop further harm.

Also Read: Social Forestry

Over a long period, it is observed that the temperature of the earth is increasing. This affected wildlife , animals, humans, and every living organism on earth. Glaciers have been melting, and many countries have started water shortages, flooding, and erosion and all this is because of global warming. No one can be blamed for global warming except for humans. Human activities such as gases released from power plants, transportation, and deforestation have increased gases such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere. The main question is how can we control the current situation and build a better world for future generations. It starts with little steps by every individual. Start using cloth bags made from sustainable materials for all shopping purposes, instead of using high-watt lights use energy-efficient bulbs, switch off the electricity, don’t waste water, abolish deforestation and encourage planting more trees. Shift the use of energy from petroleum or other fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Instead of throwing out the old clothes donate them to someone so that it is recycled. Donate old books, don’t waste paper.  Above all, spread awareness about global warming. Every little thing a person does towards saving the earth will contribute in big or small amounts. We must learn that 1% effort is better than no effort. Pledge to take care of Mother Nature and speak up about global warming.

Also Read: Types of Water Pollution

Global warming isn’t a prediction, it is happening! A person denying it or unaware of it is in the most simple terms complicit. Do we have another planet to live on? Unfortunately, we have been bestowed with this one planet only that can sustain life yet over the years we have turned a blind eye to the plight it is in. Global warming is not an abstract concept but a global phenomenon occurring ever so slowly even at this moment. Global Warming is a phenomenon that is occurring every minute resulting in a gradual increase in the Earth’s overall climate. Brought about by greenhouse gases that trap the solar radiation in the atmosphere, global warming can change the entire map of the earth, displacing areas, flooding many countries, and destroying multiple lifeforms. Extreme weather is a direct consequence of global warming but it is not an exhaustive consequence. There are virtually limitless effects of global warming which are all harmful to life on earth. The sea level is increasing by 0.12 inches per year worldwide. This is happening because of the melting of polar ice caps because of global warming. This has increased the frequency of floods in many lowland areas and has caused damage to coral reefs. The Arctic is one of the worst-hit areas affected by global warming. Air quality has been adversely affected and the acidity of the seawater has also increased causing severe damage to marine life forms. Severe natural disasters are brought about by global warming which has had dire effects on life and property. As long as mankind produces greenhouse gases, global warming will continue to accelerate. The consequences are felt at a much smaller scale which will increase to become drastic shortly. The power to save the day lies in the hands of humans, the need is to seize the day. Energy consumption should be reduced on an individual basis. Fuel-efficient cars and other electronics should be encouraged to reduce the wastage of energy sources. This will also improve air quality and reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming is an evil that can only be defeated when fought together. It is better late than never. If we all take steps today, we will have a much brighter future tomorrow. Global warming is the bane of our existence and various policies have come up worldwide to fight it but that is not enough. The actual difference is made when we work at an individual level to fight it. Understanding its import now is crucial before it becomes an irrevocable mistake. Exterminating global warming is of utmost importance and each one of us is as responsible for it as the next.  

Always hear about global warming everywhere, but do we know what it is? The evil of the worst form, global warming is a phenomenon that can affect life more fatally. Global warming refers to the increase in the earth’s temperature as a result of various human activities. The planet is gradually getting hotter and threatening the existence of lifeforms on it. Despite being relentlessly studied and researched, global warming for the majority of the population remains an abstract concept of science. It is this concept that over the years has culminated in making global warming a stark reality and not a concept covered in books. Global warming is not caused by one sole reason that can be curbed. Multifarious factors cause global warming most of which are a part of an individual’s daily existence. Burning of fuels for cooking, in vehicles, and for other conventional uses, a large amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and methane amongst many others is produced which accelerates global warming. Rampant deforestation also results in global warming as lesser green cover results in an increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas.  Finding a solution to global warming is of immediate importance. Global warming is a phenomenon that has to be fought unitedly. Planting more trees can be the first step that can be taken toward warding off the severe consequences of global warming. Increasing the green cover will result in regulating the carbon cycle. There should be a shift from using nonrenewable energy to renewable energy such as wind or solar energy which causes less pollution and thereby hinder the acceleration of global warming. Reducing energy needs at an individual level and not wasting energy in any form is the most important step to be taken against global warming. The warning bells are tolling to awaken us from the deep slumber of complacency we have slipped into. Humans can fight against nature and it is high time we acknowledged that. With all our scientific progress and technological inventions, fighting off the negative effects of global warming is implausible. We have to remember that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our future generations and the responsibility lies on our shoulders to bequeath them a healthy planet for life to exist. 

Also Read: Essay on Disaster Management

One good action in a day is to combat the heat.

Global Warming and Climate Change are two sides of the same coin. Both are interrelated with each other and are two issues of major concern worldwide. Greenhouse gases released such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere cause Global Warming which leads to climate change. Black holes have started to form in the ozone layer that protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays. Human activities have created climate change and global warming. Industrial waste and fumes are the major contributors to global warming. Another factor affecting is the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and also one of the reasons for climate change.  Global warming has resulted in shrinking mountain glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic and causing climate change. Switching from the use of fossil fuels to energy sources like wind and solar. When buying any electronic appliance buy the best quality with energy savings stars. Don’t waste water and encourage rainwater harvesting in your community. 

Also Read: Essay on Air Pollution

Writing an effective essay needs skills that few people possess and even fewer know how to implement. While writing an essay can be an assiduous task that can be unnerving at times, some key pointers can be inculcated to draft a successful essay. These involve focusing on the structure of the essay, planning it out well, and emphasizing crucial details. Mentioned below are some pointers that can help you write better structure and more thoughtful essays that will get across to your readers:

• Prepare an outline for the essay to ensure continuity and relevance and no break in the structure of the essay
• Decide on a thesis statement that will form the basis of your essay. It will be the point of your essay and help readers understand your contention
• Follow the structure of an introduction, a detailed body followed by a conclusion so that the readers can comprehend the essay in a particular manner without any dissonance.
• Make your beginning catchy and include solutions in your conclusion to make the essay insightful and lucrative to read
• Reread before putting it out and add your flair to the essay to make it more personal and thereby unique and intriguing for readers  

Relevant Blogs

Ans. Both natural and man-made factors contribute to global warming. The natural one also contains methane gas, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gases. Deforestation, mining, livestock raising, burning fossil fuels, and other man-made causes are next.

Ans. The government and the general public can work together to stop global warming. Trees must be planted more often, and deforestation must be prohibited. Auto usage needs to be curbed, and recycling needs to be promoted.

Ans. Switching to renewable energy sources , adopting sustainable farming, transportation, and energy methods, and conserving water and other natural resources.

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

Digvijay Singh

Having 2+ years of experience in educational content writing, withholding a Bachelor's in Physical Education and Sports Science and a strong interest in writing educational content for students enrolled in domestic and foreign study abroad programmes. I believe in offering a distinct viewpoint to the table, to help students deal with the complexities of both domestic and foreign educational systems. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, I aim to inspire my readers to embark on their educational journeys, whether abroad or at home, and to make the most of every learning opportunity that comes their way.

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This was really a good essay on global warming… There has been used many unic words..and I really liked it!!!Seriously I had been looking for a essay about Global warming just like this…

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I want to learn how to write essay writing so I joined this page.This page is very useful for everyone.

Hi, we are glad that we could help you to write essays. We have a beginner’s guide to write essays ( https://leverageedu.com/blog/essay-writing/ ) and we think this might help you.

It is not good , to have global warming in our earth .So we all have to afforestation program on all the world.

thank you so much

Very educative , helpful and it is really going to strength my English knowledge to structure my essay in future

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Global warming is the increase in 𝓽𝓱𝓮 ᴀᴠᴇʀᴀɢᴇ ᴛᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴀᴛᴜʀᴇs ᴏғ ᴇᴀʀᴛʜ🌎 ᴀᴛᴍᴏsᴘʜᴇʀᴇ

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The importance of storytelling in fighting climate change

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Yale Climate Connections

Scientists agree: Climate change is real and caused by people

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The scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that it is human-caused is strong. Scientific investigation of global warming began in the 19th century , and by the early 2000s, this research began to coalesce into confidence about the reality, causes, and general range of adverse effects of global warming. This conclusion was drawn from studying air and ocean temperatures, the atmosphere’s composition, satellite records, ice cores, modeling, and more.

In 1988 the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, to provide regular updates on the scientific evidence on global warming. In a 2013 report , the IPCC concluded that scientific evidence of warming is “unequivocal” and that the largest cause is an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of humans burning fossil fuels. The IPCC continues to assess this science, periodically issuing new reports.

Climate change is real and caused by humans

The IPCC is not the only scientific group that has reached a clear consensus on the scientific evidence of human-caused global warming. As this NASA page points out, 200 global scientific organizations, 11 international science academies, and 18 American science associations have released statements in alignment with this consensus.

Amanda Staudt is the senior director for climate, atmospheric and polar sciences at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, where she has worked since 2001. The Academies, she said, first began studying climate change in 1979, researching how much warming would likely happen if the amount of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were doubled.

Four decades later, those findings have held up and have been strengthened based on scores of continued studies and analysis. “The remarkable thing about that study,” she said, “is that they basically got the right answer” from the start. This 1979 study by the National Research Council, Staudt said, led to investment in climate science in the U.S. 

Though this consensus has been thoroughly established, scientific research and new findings continue. Staudt said countless attempted rebuttals of climate science findings have been researched and disproved.

“We did a lot of studies in that time period, looking at those questions,” she said, ”and one by one, putting them to bed and convincing ourselves over and over again, that humans were affecting climate, and that we could document that effect.”

At the National Academies, reaching consensus requires open sessions and dialogue with scientists and agreement from committees, which typically consist of 12-15 experts. Their draft reports go through peer review, and reviewers’ concerns are resolved before publication is approved. The goal is for the complex science of climate change to become as thoroughly researched and substantiated as possible.

“One of the things I think about scientists is that we’re all inherently skeptics at some level,” Staudt said. “That’s what drives us to science, that we have questions about the world around us. And we want to prove that for ourselves.”

Scientists consistently reaffirm evidence that climate change is happening

Climate scientists worldwide go through similar processes before their findings are published. And their research papers, too, show a strong consensus about global warming. As NASA states on its website , “Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” (By sound practice, scientists resist saying science is for all times “certain” or that its findings are “final,” and the “extremely likely” language respects that practice.)

One of the studies about the consensus was led by John Cook, a fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Cook and colleagues reviewed nearly 12,000 scientific papers to examine how aligned published research is on major findings on climate change. That study found that 97 percent of scholarly papers that take a position on climate change do endorse the consensus. The papers that rejected the consensus position contained errors, according to subsequent research .

In reviewing the papers, Cook has said he and his colleagues found the consensus to have been so widely accepted by 2013 that many researchers by then no longer felt a need to mention or reaffirm it in their research papers.

Also see: Causes of global warming: How scientists know that humans are responsible

Samantha Harrington

Samantha Harrington, director of audience experience for Yale Climate Connections, is a journalist and graphic designer with a background in digital media and entrepreneurship. Sam is especially interested... More by Samantha Harrington

Why climate change is still the greatest threat to human health

Polluted air and steadily rising temperatures are linked to health effects ranging from increased heart attacks and strokes to the spread of infectious diseases and psychological trauma.

People around the world are witnessing firsthand how climate change can wreak havoc on the planet. Steadily rising average temperatures fuel increasingly intense wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that are now impossible to ignore. And while the world has been plunged into a deadly pandemic, scientists are sounding the alarm once more that climate change is still the greatest threat to human health in recorded history .

As recently as August—when wildfires raged in the United States, Europe, and Siberia—World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement that “the risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.”

On September 5, more than 200 medical journals released an unprecedented joint editorial that urged world leaders to act. “The science is unequivocal,” they write. “A global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”

Despite the acute dangers posed by COVID-19, the authors of the joint op-ed write that world governments “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.” Instead, they argue, everyone must treat climate change with the same urgency as they have COVID-19.

Here’s a look at the ways that climate change can affect your health—including some less obvious but still insidious effects—and why scientists say it’s not too late to avert catastrophe.

Air pollution

Climate change is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. But burning fossil fuels can also have direct consequences for human health. That’s because the polluted air contains small particles that can induce stroke and heart attacks by penetrating the lungs and heart and even traveling into the bloodstream. Those particles might harm the organs directly or provoke an inflammatory response from the immune system as it tries to fight them off. Estimates suggest that air pollution causes anywhere between 3.6 million and nine million premature deaths a year.

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“The numbers do vary,” says Andy Haines , professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the recently published book Planetary Health . “But they all agree that it’s a big public health burden.”

People over the age of 65 are most susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution, but many others are at risk too, says Kari Nadeau , director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. People who smoke or vape are at increased risk, as are children with asthma.

Air pollution also has consequences for those with allergies. Carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the air, which then pulls more pollen out from plants. For some people, this might just mean that they face annoyingly long bouts of seasonal allergies. But for others, it could be life-threatening.

“For people who already have respiratory disease, boy is that a problem,” Nadeau says. When pollen gets into the respiratory pathway, the body creates mucus to get rid of it, which can then fill up and suffocate the lungs.

Even healthy people can have similar outcomes if pollen levels are especially intense. In 2016, in the Australian state of Victoria, a severe thunderstorm combined with high levels of pollen to induce what The Lancet has described as “the world’s largest and most catastrophic epidemic of thunderstorm asthma.” So many residents suffered asthma attacks that emergency rooms were overwhelmed—and at least 10 people died as a result.

Climate change is also causing wildfires to get worse, and wildfire smoke is especially toxic. As one recent study showed, fires can account for 25 percent of dangerous air pollution in the U.S. Nadeau explains that the smoke contains particles of everything that the fire has consumed along its path—from rubber tires to harmful chemicals. These particles are tiny and can penetrate even deeper into a person’s lungs and organs. ( Here’s how breathing wildfire smoke affects the body .)

Extreme heat

Heat waves are deadly, but researchers at first didn’t see direct links between climate change and the harmful impacts of heat waves and other extreme weather events. Haines says the evidence base has been growing. “We have now got a number of studies which has shown that we can with high confidence attribute health outcomes to climate change,” he says.

Most recently, Haines points to a study published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change that attributes more than a third of heat-related deaths to climate change. As National Geographic reported at the time , the study found that the human toll was even higher in some countries with less access to air conditioning or other factors that render people more vulnerable to heat. ( How climate change is making heat waves even deadlier .)

That’s because the human body was not designed to cope with temperatures above 98.6°F, Nadeau says. Heat can break down muscles. The body does have some ways to deal with the heat—such as sweating. “But when it’s hot outside all the time, you cannot cope with that, and your heart muscles and cells start to literally die and degrade,” she says.

If you’re exposed to extreme heat for too long and are unable to adequately release that heat, the stress can cause a cascade of problems throughout the body. The heart has to work harder to pump blood to the rest of the organs, while sweat leeches the body of necessary minerals such as sodium and potassium. The combination can result in heart attacks and strokes .

Dehydration from heat exposure can also cause serious damage to the kidneys, which rely on water to function properly. For people whose kidneys are already beginning to fail—particularly older adults—Nadeau says that extreme heat can be a death sentence. “This is happening more and more,” she says.

Studies have also drawn links between higher temperatures and preterm birth and other pregnancy complications. It’s unclear why, but Haines says that one hypothesis is that extreme heat reduces blood flow to the fetus.

Food insecurity

One of the less direct—but no less harmful—ways that climate change can affect health is by disrupting the world’s supply of food.

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Climate change both reduces the amount of food that’s available and makes it less nutritious.   According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report , crop yields have already begun to decline as a result of rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, studies have shown that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can leech plants of zinc, iron, and protein—nutrients that humans need to survive.

Malnutrition is linked to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It can also increase the risk of stunting, or impaired growth , in children, which can harm cognitive function.

Climate change also imperils what we eat from the sea. Rising ocean temperatures have led many fish species to migrate toward Earth’s poles in search of cooler waters. Haines says that the resulting decline of fish stocks in subtropic regions “has big implications for nutrition,” because many of those coastal communities depend on fish for a substantial amount of the protein in their diets.

This effect is likely to be particularly harmful for Indigenous communities, says Tiff-Annie Kenny, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Laval University in Quebec who studies climate change and food security in the Canadian Arctic. It’s much more difficult for these communities to find alternative sources of protein, she says, either because it’s not there or because it’s too expensive. “So what are people going to eat instead?” she asks.

Infectious diseases  

As the planet gets hotter, the geographic region where ticks and mosquitoes like to live is getting wider. These animals are well-known vectors of diseases such as the Zika virus, dengue fever, and malaria. As they cross the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Nadeau says, mosquitoes and ticks bring more opportunities for these diseases to infect greater swaths of the world.

“It used to be that they stayed in those little sectors near the Equator, but now unfortunately because of the warming of northern Europe and Canada, you can find Zika in places you wouldn’t have expected,” Nadeau says.

In addition, climate conditions such as temperature and humidity can impact the life cycle of mosquitoes. Haines says there’s particularly good evidence showing that, in some regions, climate change has altered these conditions in ways that increase the risk of mosquitos transmitting dengue .

There are also several ways in which climate change is increasing the risk of diseases that can be transmitted through water, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and parasites. Sometimes that’s fairly direct, such as when people interact with dirty floodwaters. But Haines says that drought can have indirect impacts when people, say, can’t wash their hands or are forced to drink from dodgier sources of freshwater.

Mental health

A common result of any climate-linked disaster is the toll on mental health. The distress caused by drastic environmental change is so significant that it has been given its own name— solastalgia .

Nadeau says that the effects on mental health have been apparent in her studies of emergency room visits arising from wildfires in the western U.S. People lose their homes, their jobs, and sometimes their loved ones, and that takes an immediate toll. “What’s the fastest acute issue that develops? It’s psychological,” she says. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes cause so much stress and anxiety that they can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide in the long run.

Another common factor is that climate change causes disproportionate harm to the world’s most vulnerable people. On September 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an analysis showing that racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly at risk . According to the report, if temperatures rise by 2°C (3.6°F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in related deaths. Another 34 percent are more likely to live in areas with a rise in childhood asthma.

Further, the effects of climate change don’t occur in isolation. At any given time, a community might face air pollution, food insecurity, disease, and extreme heat all at once. Kenny says that’s particularly devastating in communities where the prevalence of food insecurity and poverty are already high. This situation hasn’t been adequately studied, she says, because “it’s difficult to capture these shocks that climate can bring.”

Why there’s reason for hope

In recent years, scientists and environmental activists have begun to push for more research into the myriad health effects of climate change. “One of the striking things is there’s been a real dearth of funding for climate change and health,” Haines says. “For that reason, some of the evidence we have is still fragmentary.”

Still, hope is not lost. In the Paris Agreement, countries around the world have pledged to limit global warming to below 2°C (3.6°F)—and preferably to 1.5°C (2.7°F)—by cutting their emissions. “When you reduce those emissions, you benefit health as well as the planet,” Haines says.

Meanwhile, scientists and environmental activists have put forward solutions that can help people adapt to the health effects of climate change. These include early heat warnings and dedicated cooling centers, more resilient supply chains, and freeing healthcare facilities from dependence on the electric grid.

Nadeau argues that the COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for world leaders to think bigger and more strategically. For example, the pandemic has laid bare problems with efficiency and equity that have many countries restructuring their healthcare facilities. In the process, she says, they can look for new ways to reduce waste and emissions, such as getting more hospitals using renewable energy.

“This is in our hands to do,” Nadeau says. “If we don’t do anything, that would be cataclysmic.”

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The Center for Global Studies

Climate change argumentation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does the evidence come from?

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

What is a claim and how do I find it?

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

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

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

Implementation

Learning context and connecting to state standards.

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

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

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

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

New Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Connections

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

Lesson 1: Introduction to climate change

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

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

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

Lesson 2: Searching for and evaluating evidence

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

Lesson 3: Writing an argument using evidence

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

Lesson 4: Argumentation discussion  

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

Lesson 5: Argumentation in action case study

Mumbai, india case study.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resources:    

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

Differentiated Instruction

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Act: Inspiration

How do we convince climate change deniers that’s the wrong question..

By Laalitha Surapaneni , originally published by Ensia

November 22, 2019

Instead of wasting time trying to convert opponents, we should invest it in motivating passive allies to act.

I have struggled to come up with a convincing answer. Should I show them the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report ? Share gut-wrenching facts on the mass extinction of species ? Offer statements from trusted medical organizations ?

But I know none of this would work. Research shows us that presenting scientific facts, the “information deficit model” of communication, is often not effective in changing deeply held beliefs about climate change.

So instead of asking myself how I should convince someone of climate change, I started asking why instead. The answer is simple, isn’t it? If they “believe” in climate change, they will want to take action. They will cut down their carbon footprint, vote …

I lost confidence in what I was saying halfway through that sentence. As a physician, I know how difficult behavior change is. Smokers, who are well aware of the harms of cigarettes, take a long time to move from the stage of “pre-contemplation,” where they are not considering quitting smoking, to the “action” phase of quitting smoking.

When we look at climate-behavior change, an analysis by Yale Climate Communications in 2018 might give us an insight into the tedious nature of the task. The study estimated that 70% of respondents believe in climate change. But only 57% believe humans cause it. So, first, we need to convince people it’s real. Then we need to convince them it’s man-made. Then we need to motivate them to take action — action that essentially requires changing every aspect of their lives.

Well, if we don’t convince everyone that climate change is real, how do we fix it? A common misconception is that to create change, everyone needs to act. However, the data show otherwise. According to the Washington Post, a Gallup Poll in 1961 showed only 28% of respondents in a U.S. survey approved of the lunch counter sit-ins and freedom buses during the Civil Rights movement. Only 57% supported same-sex marriage when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in its favor in 2015. Erica Chenoweth from Harvard University analyzed hundreds of nonviolent campaigns over the course of a century. She found that it takes only around 3.5% of the population actively participating in civil protests to cause real political change.

In other words, the efficient move now is to take the time and energy we want to expend on convincing deniers and use it instead to assemble the critical mass to turn the tide.

With a few exceptions — speaking truth to leaders in power and helping loved ones recognize the magnitude of the threat — we need to shift our way of approaching climate communication from changing minds to giving people already on board concrete tasks on which to take action.

An excellent way to visualize this is an advocacy tool called “Spectrum of Allies.” This tool is based on the premise that the most effective way to create social change is to convince, not vehement opponents, but people who are neutral about an issue or passively agree with you to support your cause.

The “Global Warming’s Six Americas” 2018 survey on climate attitudes of Americans showed that 29% are “alarmed” and are taking action. Another 30% are “concerned,” and 17% are “cautious” but not taking action. The Spectrum of Allies framework suggests that for greatest impact we should focus action-oriented climate communication on the latter two groups rather than trying to convince the 18% who fall in the “doubtful” and “dismissive” categories that they’re wrong.

So, what should you do when your uncle calls climate change a liberal hoax over the Thanksgiving dinner table?

Here’s my suggestion. Estimate how many minutes you would likely invest in this “discussion.” Then — don’t. Engage about something else that connects you on shared values. And once you’re done with the interaction, use the time you didn’t spend arguing about climate change to call your legislator or write a letter to the editor. Better yet, mobilize a friend who already believes climate change is a problem. Help them set up an in-person meeting with their representative, join a protest or build a relationship with a local environmental nonprofit.

We are past the time for convincing. It’s time to act.

Teaser photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Laalitha Surapaneni

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clock This article was published more than  6 years ago

How to persuade people that climate change is real

Last week, Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration has asked for $12 billion to help communities fight climate-change-related flooding — a request that might seem surprising, given Trump’s stance that climate change is a hoax and his administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement . Of course, we don’t know whether Trump has actually come to agree with the scientific consensus that humans have caused a drastic change in Earth’s climate.

But the news prompts the question: What exactly does change minds about climate science? Research suggests that a variety of messages can influence people’s agreement with the scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and humans are contributing to it. And different people may respond differently to different kinds of messages.

The strange story of how Florida lawmakers subsidized hurricane insurance

Here are five insights from the young but growing body of research on climate change communication.

1. The messenger matters

Some experimental studies manipulate the messenger to find out to whom respondents are most likely to listen. In general , matching messenger to audience leads to more effective messages. This is certainly true in climate messaging . For example, experimental research discovered that when free market enthusiasts who are concerned about government regulation hear from experts who emphasize how companies are developing climate  responses , they are more likely to accept climate science.

Among religious audiences, religious leaders may also make a difference. Mixed evidence suggests that pointing to Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on climate change may help conservative Catholics appreciate climate science.

Climate scientists themselves have been painted as political actors. Longitudinal research finds that people are more likely to believe climate science when it is discussed by meteorologists .

2. People respond to appeals based on their values

Once the messenger matches the audience, research suggests that  tailoring messages to fit the audience’s values can make people more willing to believe climate science.

For example, experimental studies have found that when messages emphasize environmental stewardship and respect for God’s creation , conservatives are more likely to accept climate science and say they’re likely to take environmental action. More broadly, some research suggests that raising health concerns is effective among all Americans. On the other hand, for those skeptical about climate change, messages about how an eroding climate will hurt national security may backfire .

3. Educating people about the science can make a difference

Polling suggests that Democrats who are generally knowledgeable about science are more likely to believe in climate change. Educating people that there’s a broad scientific consensus about climate change may make people, particularly Republicans, more likely to believe it exists. What’s not so clear is whether metaphors or narratives can help people appreciate the nuances of the climate science.

4. Emphasizing risk may spur people to action

Some research has focused not just on whether people accept climate science, but also whether they’re motivated and willing to reduce their carbon emissions or support climate mitigation policies. A 2016 Gallup survey found that only 47 percent of the American public believes addressing climate change is “extremely” or “very” important. That’s considerably lower than the 92 percent who said the same about the economy, or the 83 percent who said that about the importance of health care.

Think living through a hurricane would change minds about climate change? Yeah, right.

A great deal of communications research, ranging over decades and subjects, has examined how to raise concern about social issues among the public. One conclusion is that messages emphasizing risks — whether the risks of acting or of failing to act — on social issues are especially effective , particularly in collectivistic cultures and among those more highly educated.

This is upheld by a large-scale review of correlational evidence — what researchers refer to as a “meta-analysis” — that suggests that when people experience extreme weather or have noticed changes in the local weather, they are more likely to believe that climate change is occurring. In other words, the record hurricane season this year, polling suggests , may have led to more people believing climate change is linked to severe hurricanes, as the science suggests .

5. Affirming the power of the people

Finally, correlational research suggests that when individuals and communities feel that they can help mitigate climate change, they’re more likely to act. Many people incorrectly believe their social circles are unconcerned about climate change — which leads them to feel there’s nothing they can do as individuals. People are also likely to feel more engaged and effective when they have tools to combat misinformation and misunderstanding about climate change.

What’s next for the Paris climate agreement?

But wait, there’s more

Of course, this is not an exhaustive set of findings; the field is still growing. For climate advocates, there is no magic-bullet strategy for how to talk about climate change, and effective messaging is unlikely to be sufficient by itself in changing policies on a large scale. But these five factors help us understand how people react to messages about climate change and what motivates their concern.

Alexander Maki is a postdoctoral researcher with the Vanderbilt Institute  for Energy and Environment, where he studies environmental, volunteer and health behavior change. Follow him on Twitter @alexmaki .

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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The Paradox That's Supercharging Climate Change

No good deed goes unpunished—and that includes trying to slow climate change. By cutting greenhouse gas emissions, humanity will spew out fewer planet-cooling aerosols—small particles of pollution that act like tiny umbrellas to bounce some of the sun’s energy back into space.

“Even more important than this direct reflection effect, they alter the properties of clouds,” says Øivind Hodnebrog, a climate researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “In essence, they make the clouds brighter, and the clouds reflect sunlight back into space.”

So as governments better regulate air quality and deploy renewable energy and electric vehicles, we’ll get less warming thanks to fewer insulating emissions going into the sky, but some additional warming because we’ve lost some reflective pollution. Hodnebrog's new research suggests that this aerosol effect has already contributed to a significant amount of heating.

The most important component in fossil fuel pollution is gaseous sulfur dioxide, which forms aerosols in the atmosphere that linger for mere days. So slashing pollution has an almost immediate effect, unlike with carbon dioxide, which lasts for centuries in the atmosphere.

It’s a gnarly, unavoidable catch-22, but in no way a reason to keep polluting willy-nilly. Fossil fuel aerosols kill millions of people a year by contributing to respiratory problems, cardiovascular diseases, and other health issues. So by decarbonizing we’ll improve both planetary and human health. The urgency is growing by the day: Last year was by far the hottest on record , and this March was the 10th month in a row to notch all-time highs. Meanwhile, ocean temperatures—boosted by El Niño, the warm band of water that periodically arises in the Pacific, which also added heat to the atmosphere—have soared to and maintained record highs for over a year, stunning scientists .

“The preponderance of those records and the margins by which they were broken was eye-opening,” says Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “Until society manages to stop increasing the greenhouse blanket, record-smashing events like those in 2023 will become more common, even without the boost from El Niño.”

Slowing down the growth of that insulating blanket is already underway. “We seem to be flattening greenhouse gas emissions , which is a good thing,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “But we’re also uncovering some warming that our pollution had historically been masking. And because of that, our models expected—and we seem to be starting to see—some evidence of a speed-up in the rate of surface warming.” This is known in climate science as acceleration. Hausfather points to data showing that since 1970, the warming rate was 0.18 degree Celsius per decade, which has jumped to about 0.3 degree Celsius per decade over the past 15 years.

In his new paper, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment , Hodnebrog and his colleagues set out to quantify just how much an effect curbing aerosols has had. To start, they gathered measurements between 2001 and 2019 from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, satellite instruments that detect the difference in the solar energy coming to our planet and the energy reflected back out into space. This is the overall “energy imbalance” of the Earth, with it trending upwards as the world warms.

Lauren Goode

William Turton

Eric Ravenscraft

Vittoria Elliott

The researchers then fed global emissions data into four different state-of-the-art climate models and managed to reproduce those satellite measurements. “When we set the aerosol emissions to constant—so we didn’t include any change over time in the aerosol emissions—then this upward trend in the energy imbalance was much reduced, and we didn’t manage to reproduce the satellite measurements,” says Hodnebrog. “So our main conclusion is that these aerosol emission reductions need to be accounted for in order to explain what we see now, what we measure from space.”

The researchers found that over the past two decades, the reduction in aerosol emissions has accounted for nearly 40 percent of the increase in energy imbalance—that is, the extra warming energy that’s raised global temperatures. “I would be surprised if this will not lead to temporary acceleration in surface temperature warming,” says Hodnebrog of the ongoing tailing off of aerosol emissions.

Projecting forward with aerosols, though, is tricky, because we’re dealing with extraordinarily complex atmospheric processes. For one, modeling cloud formation is notoriously difficult, and it’s hard to tell just how much human-made aerosols contribute to a given cloud versus natural aerosols.

There’s also uncertainty about how strong a cooling effect aerosols have up in the sky. If they have an intense cooling effect, we’ll get more warming in the future as they decrease. It’d be like switching off the planet’s air conditioning. But if they have a milder cooling effect, losing them wouldn’t lead to as much warming. In 2022, a separate team of scientists calculated that if it ends up being the latter case, we’d have a better chance of keeping warming below the 1.5-degree Celsius limit established in the Paris Agreement. (In their new aerosols paper, Hodnebrog and his colleagues accounted for this uncertainty by running those different models, which had different representations of aerosols and their interactions with clouds. Their results were the average of the four models.)

Even in the present day, some scientists are skeptical that we’re seeing acceleration of global warming from reduced aerosols. “Yes, it is responsible for the acceleration in warming during the 1970s to 1980s,” says climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. That was when clean-air regulations started requiring “scrubbers” on coal-fired power plants to remove the sulfur dioxide that forms aerosols. “There is no evidence for any acceleration over the past few decades, however.”

Instead, we could be seeing natural variability, Mann says—the rising and falling of global temperatures over the years that Earth would see even in the absence of human-caused warming. Last year was a good illustration of this. Record-smashing temperatures were due to humans failing to stop pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere, but also due in part to the natural emergence of El Niño. “Think of it as a tide on top of a rising sea,” Mann says. “The rising sea—the steady warming—is what we should be concerned about, and that will continue until net emissions reach zero.”

That much is very clear, and very much agreed upon by scientists: Humans need to stop burning fossil fuels, even if losing some aerosols leads to additional warming going forward. “Right now the recent acceleration is borderline significant, which is why there’s some debate,” says Francis. “But aside from all this, the real story is the relentless global warming that we know is caused by the thickening blanket of greenhouse gases owing to human activities.”

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House panel says China is subsidizing fentanyl production to fuel crisis in U.S.

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China is fueling the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. by directly subsidizing the manufacturing of materials that are used by traffickers to make the drug outside the country, according to a report released Tuesday by a special House committee focused on countering the Chinese government.

Committee investigators said they accessed a Chinese government website that revealed tax rebates for the production of specific fentanyl precursors as well as other synthetic drugs as long as those companies sell them outside of China.

“Through its actions, as our report has revealed, the Chinese Communist Party is telling us that it wants more fentanyl entering our country,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the special House committee. “It wants the chaos and devastation that has resulted from the epidemic.”

In November, President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a resumption of bilateral cooperation on counternarcotics with a focus on reducing the flow of precursor chemicals and synthetic drug trafficking. But the congressional report raises questions about whether China is following through.

The report’s findings were released Tuesday as part of a hearing examining China’s role in the fentanyl epidemic in the U.S. Most overdose deaths in the U.S. continue to be linked to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. Inexpensive fentanyl is increasingly cut into other drugs, often without the buyers’ knowledge.

‘It’s absolutely heartbreaking’: Fentanyl is officially Los Angeles County’s deadliest drug

A new report blames fentanyl for more fatal overdoses in L.A. County than methamphetamine for the first time in recent years. The opioid’s victims are disproportionately Black.

Dec. 14, 2023

The Chinese government not only subsidizes the manufacturing of precursor chemicals, but the report says it has also thwarted investigations into illicit manufacturers by warning the targets of an investigation when U.S. law enforcement has sent a formal request for assistance. Investigators said multiple current and former federal agents have described the notification of targets, leading those targets to revamp operations and make it harder to detect their activities.

Former Atty. Gen. William Barr told lawmakers in Tuesday’s hearing that it’s hard to believe that a country with the most pervasive surveillance system in the world is not fully aware of the massive drug trafficking taking place. He said the committee’s report “uncovered persuasive evidence” that China’s government is not just a bystander, but is “knee deep” in sponsoring and facilitating the export of fentanyl precursors.

Barr recommended the U.S. use its trade and economic power to seek greater enforcement from Chinese authorities. He also said victims should bring civil actions against companies and individuals involved in distributing the precursors and synthetic drugs.

“I don’t think we can count on their goodwill, as we have in the past,” Barr said.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

California is making fentanyl test strips free to organizations. How to get a kit

In an effort to slow the proliferation of synthetic opioid-related deaths, California will begin offering free fentanyl-testing strips to eligible organizations across the state that ask for them, the state Department of Health Care Services announced Thursday.

March 29, 2024

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the committee, said Chinese companies are also currently selling synthetic opioids on their websites, and pointed to a screenshot of one such solicitation that committee staff found just Monday night in advance of the hearing. He said such posts have to be taken down immediately.

“There are hundreds of these website posts — hundreds” Krishnamoorthi said. “This is completely unacceptable.”

The chemical companies providing fentanyl precursors often have legitimate businesses with customers around the world. The report said fentanyl precursors and other synthetic narcotics are a “side hustle” designed to maximize profits.

Businesses that deal in fentanyl precursors and narcotics on the side are particularly vulnerable to U.S sanctions. The same goes for companies such as banks, online platforms and shipping companies that enable illicit fentanyl trade.

The report calls on Congress to clarify the power of the president to sanction those involved in drug trafficking, for the U.S. to impose financial sanctions on violators and for regular reports to Congress on how often sanctions have been undertaken.

It also calls for forming a task force that would place intelligence, economic and enforcement resources under one roof. The head of the group would report directly to the attorney general and serve as a special assistant to the president on the National Security Council with authority over the opioids portfolio.

Freking writes for the Associated Press.

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Warming Is Getting Worse. So They Just Tested a Way to Deflect the Sun.

A spraying machine designed for cloud brightening on the flight deck of the Hornet, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that is now a museum in Alameda, Calif. Credit...

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By Christopher Flavelle

Photographs by Ian C. Bates

Christopher Flavelle reported from a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Alameda, Calif. He spoke with scientists, environmentalists and government officials.

• April 2, 2024

A little before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, an engineer named Matthew Gallelli crouched on the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, pulled on a pair of ear protectors, and flipped a switch.

A few seconds later, a device resembling a snow maker began to rumble, then produced a great and deafening hiss. A fine mist of tiny aerosol particles shot from its mouth, traveling hundreds of feet through the air.

It was the first outdoor test in the United States of technology designed to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating. The scientists wanted to see whether the machine that took years to create could consistently spray the right size salt aerosols through the open air, outside of a lab.

If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth’s oceans.

As humans continue to burn fossil fuels and pump increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the goal of holding global warming to a relatively safe level, 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times, is slipping away. That has pushed the idea of deliberately intervening in climate systems closer to reality.

Universities, foundations, private investors and the federal government have started to fund a variety of efforts, from sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to adding iron to the ocean in an effort to store carbon dioxide on the sea floor.

“Every year that we have new records of climate change, and record temperatures, heat waves, it’s driving the field to look at more alternatives,” said Robert Wood, the lead scientist for the team from the University of Washington that is running the marine cloud brightening project. “Even ones that may have once been relatively extreme.”

Brightening clouds is one of several ideas to push solar energy back into space — sometimes called solar radiation modification, solar geoengineering, or climate intervention. Compared with other options, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, marine cloud brightening would be localized and use relatively benign sea salt aerosols as opposed to other chemicals.

And yet, the idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday’s test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them. Although the Biden administration is funding research into different climate interventions, including marine cloud brightening, the White House distanced itself from the California study, sending a statement to The New York Times that read: “The U.S. government is not involved in the Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) experiment taking place in Alameda, CA, or anywhere else.”

David Santillo, a senior scientist at Greenpeace International, is deeply skeptical of proposals to modify solar radiation. If marine cloud brightening were used at a scale that could cool the planet, the consequences would be hard to predict, or even to measure, he said.

“You could well be changing climatic patterns, not just over the sea, but over land as well,” he said. “This is a scary vision of the future that we should try and avoid at all costs.”

Karen Orenstein, director of the Climate and Energy Justice Program at Friends of the Earth U.S., a nonprofit environmental group, called solar radiation modification “an extraordinarily dangerous distraction.” She said the best way to address climate change would be to quickly pivot away from burning fossil fuels.

On that last point, the cloud researchers themselves agree.

“I hope, and I think all my colleagues hope, that we never use these things, that we never have to,” said Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and the manager of its marine cloud brightening program.

She said there were potential side effects that still needed to be studied, including changing ocean circulation patterns and temperatures, which might hurt fisheries. Cloud brightening could also alter precipitation patterns, reducing rainfall in one place while increasing it elsewhere.

But it’s vital to find out whether and how such technologies could work, Dr. Doherty said, in case society needs them. And no one can say when the world might reach that point.

In 1990, a British physicist named John Latham published a letter in the journal Nature, under the heading “Control of Global Warming?,” in which he introduced the idea that injecting tiny particles into clouds could offset rising temperatures.

Dr. Latham later attributed his idea to a hike with his son in Wales, where they paused to look at clouds over the Irish Sea.

“He asked why clouds were shiny at the top but dark at the bottom,” Dr. Latham told the BBC in 2007 . “I explained how they were mirrors for incoming sunlight.”

Dr. Latham had a proposal that may have seemed bizarre: create a fleet of 1,000 unmanned, sail-powered vessels to traverse the world’s oceans and continuously spray tiny droplets of seawater into the air to deflect solar heat away from Earth.

The idea is built on a scientific concept called the Twomey effect: Large numbers of small droplets reflect more sunlight than small numbers of large droplets. Injecting vast quantities of minuscule aerosols, in turn forming many small droplets, could change the composition of clouds.

“If we can increase the reflectivity by about 3 percent, the cooling will balance the global warming caused by increased C02 in the atmosphere,” Dr. Latham, who died in 2021 , told the BBC. “Our scheme offers the possibility that we could buy time.”

A version of marine cloud brightening already happens every day, according to Dr. Doherty.

As ships travel the seas, particles from their exhaust can brighten clouds, creating “ship tracks,” behind them. In fact, until recently, the cloud brightening associated with ship tracks offset about 5 percent of climate warming from greenhouse gases, Dr. Doherty said.

Ironically, as better technology and environmental regulations have reduced the pollution emitted by ships, that inadvertent cloud brightening is fading, as well as the cooling that goes along with it.

A deliberate program of marine cloud brightening could be done with sea salts, rather than pollution, Dr. Doherty said.

Brightening clouds is no easy task. Success requires getting the size of the aerosols just right: Particles that are too small would have no effect, said Jessica Medrado, a research scientist working on the project. Too big and they could backfire, making clouds less reflective than before. The ideal size are submicron particles about 1/700th the thickness of a human hair, she said.

Next, you need to be able to expel a lot of those correctly sized aerosols into the air: A quadrillion particles, give or take, every second. “You cannot find any off-the-shelf solution,” Dr. Medrado said.

The answer to that problem came from some of the most prominent figures in America’s technology industry.

In 2006, the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, got a briefing from David Keith, one of the leading researchers in solar geoengineering, which is the idea of trying to reflect more of the sun’s rays. Mr. Gates began funding Dr. Keith and Ken Caldeira, another climate scientist and a former software developer, to further their research.

The pair considered the idea of marine cloud brightening but wondered if it was feasible.

So they turned to Armand Neukermans, a Silicon Valley engineer with a doctorate in applied physics from Stanford and 74 patents. One of his early jobs was at Xerox, where he devised a system to produce and spray ink particles for copiers. Dr. Caldeira asked if he could develop a nozzle that would spray not ink, but sea salt aerosols.

Intrigued, Dr. Neukermans, who is now 83, lured some of his old colleagues out of retirement and began research in a borrowed lab in 2009, with $300,000 from Mr. Gates. They called themselves the Old Salts.

The team worked on the problem for years, eventually landing on a solution: By pushing air at extremely high pressure through a series of nozzles, they could create enough force to smash salt crystals into exceedingly small particles of just the right size.

Their work moved to a larger laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center, a former Xerox research facility now owned by SRI International, a independent nonprofit research institute. Dr. Medrado became the lead engineer for the project two years ago. By the end of last year, the sprayer had been assembled and was waiting in a warehouse near San Francisco.

The machine was ready. The team needed somewhere to test it.

As the researchers were perfecting the sprayer, a profound transformation was happening outside their laboratory.

Since Dr. Latham first proposed the idea of marine cloud brightening, the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere has increased by about 20 percent. Last year was the hottest in recorded history and the World Meteorological Organization projects that 2024 will be another record year . Global ocean temperatures have been at record highs for the past year.

As the effects of climate change continue to grow, so has interest in some sort of backup plan. In 2020, Congress directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study solar radiation modification. In 2021, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine published a report saying the United States should “cautiously pursue” research into the idea. Last month, scientists from NOAA and other federal agencies proposed a road map for researching marine cloud brightening.

Interest is growing overseas, as well. In February, an Australian team of researchers at Southern Cross University, which was advised by Dr. Neukermans, conducted a monthlong experiment off the country’s northeast coast, spraying aerosols from a ship and measuring the response of clouds.

Daniel P. Harrison, the lead researcher, called the tests “the smallest of baby steps aimed at confirming and refining the underpinning theory in the real world.” He said it was too early to discuss any findings.

Private funding is also growing. Kelly Wanser is a former technology executive who helped establish the marine cloud brightening project at the University of Washington. In 2018 she created SilverLining , a nonprofit organization to advance research into what she calls “near-term climate interventions” like cloud brightening.

Ms. Wanser’s group is contributing part of the funding for the research at the University of Washington and SRI, which is budgeted at about $10 million over three years, she said. That includes the study aboard the Hornet, which is expected to cost about $1 million a year.

Finding money for that work has gotten easier as record heat has “really shifted attitudes” among funders, Ms. Wanser said. Donors include the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the Pritzker Innovation Fund and the Cohler Charitable Fund, established by the former Facebook executive Matt Cohler, according to Ms. Wanser.

Last year, Ms. Wanser spoke with a member of the board that runs the Hornet, which now operates as a museum affiliated with the Smithsonian. Would they host a first-of-its-kind study?

The museum agreed. The test was a go.

The flight deck of the Hornet rises 50 feet above the shore of Alameda, a small town on the east side of San Francisco Bay. On Tuesday, it held a series of finely calibrated sensors, perched atop a row of scissor lifts reaching into the air.

Underneath a United States flag at the far end of the flight deck was the sprayer: Shiny blue, roughly the shape and size of a spotlight, with a ring of tiny steel nozzles around its three-foot-wide mouth. The researchers call it CARI, for Cloud Aerosol Research Instrument.

On one side of the sprayer was a box the size of a shipping container that housed a pair of compressors, which fed highly pressurized air to the sprayer through a thick, black hose. On the other side was a tank of water. A series of switches, turned in careful sequence, fed the water and air into the device, which then shot a fine mist toward the sensors.

The goal was to determine whether the aerosols leaving the sprayer, which had been carefully manipulated to reach a specific size, remained that size as they rushed through the air in different wind and humidity conditions. It will take months to analyze the results. But the answers could determine whether marine cloud brightening would work, and how, according to Dr. Wood.

Ms. Wanser said she hoped the testing, which could continue for months or longer, will demystify the concept of climate intervention technologies. Toward that aim, the equipment will remain on the Hornet and be on display during hours when the ship is open to the public. Even if the equipment is not ultimately used to cool the planet, the data it generates can add to the understanding of how pollution and other aerosols interact with clouds, the researchers said.

Dr. Wood estimated that scientists could need another decade of tests before they were in a position to potentially use marine cloud brightening at the scale required to cool the Earth.

Ms. Wanser is already looking ahead to the next phase of that research. “The next step is go out to the ocean,” she said, “aim up the spray a little higher, and touch clouds.”

Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter who writes about how the United States is trying to adapt to the effects of climate change. More about Christopher Flavelle

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