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 GLOBAL WARMING



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Climate models predict global warming will result in major changes in global weather patterns. According to Climate Central, scientists predict extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts, blizzards, and rainstorms, will continue to occur with greater frequency and intensity as a result of global warming. These and other effects of global warming, left unchecked, are likely to lead to up to a half of Earth's plants and one-third of its animals vanishing from their present ranges by 2080, according to a 2013 report in the journal Nature Climate Change. In fact, scientists project that, if we continue on the trajectory of current greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will lead more than a third of the planet's animal and plant species to go extinct by 2050 - and as many as 70% of them by the end of the century.  

Natural cycles and fluctuations have caused the Earth's climate to shift multiple times in the past 800,000 years, but our current era of global warming is directly due to human activities -- in particular, our burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas, all of which produce the greenhouse effect. The changes observed in Earth's climate since the middle of the 20th century are caused by human activities, especially fossil fuel combustion, that have increased the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, raising Earth's average surface temperature. The extra heat in Earth's atmosphere has caused an overdue rise in the average global temperature, a phenomenon known otherwise as global warming. The 2deg rise in the world's average surface temperature since the pre-industrial period (1880-1900) may not sound like much, but that means that accumulated heat has increased significantly. 





A special report produced by the IPCC in 2018 refined that assessment further, noting that humans and human activities are responsible for an increase of between 0.8 and 1.2degC (1.4 and 2.2degF) of global warming since pre-industrial times, and most of the observed warming during the latter part of the 20th century can be attributed to human activities. There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that the surface global temperature has increased over recent decades, and the trend is caused primarily by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, with 90%-100 percent (depending on the precise issue, time period, and sampling methodology) of published climate scientists agreeing. Climate data records provide evidence for climate change of the main indicators, such as increases in global land and ocean temperatures; increases in sea levels; ice loss in land poles and mountain glaciers; changes in frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, forest fires, droughts, flooding, and rainfall; changes in clouds and vegetation cover. 

The global climate has changed from pre-industrial times, and multiple lines of evidence exist suggesting these changes have had impacts on organisms and ecosystems, and human systems and wellbeing (high confidence). Several regional changes in climate are estimated to occur as a result of global warming of up to 1.5degC compared with pre-industrial levels, including increases in extreme temperatures in several regions (high confidence), increases in the frequency, intensity, and/or quantity of heavy precipitation in several regions (high confidence), and increases in intensity or frequency of droughts in several regions (medium confidence). Climate change deniers claim there has been a pause, or a slowdown, of rising global temperatures. Still, a number of studies, including a 2018 paper published in Environmental Research Letters, refute that claim. 

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