Arthur Villator/Shutterstock
In the U.S., an unprecedented heat wave gripped much of Texas and the Southwest with highs well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) for the entire month of July. Historic rainfall in April flooded Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 25 inches of rain in 24 hours.
A wave of severe storms in July sent water pouring into cities across Vermont and New York. Another powerful system in December swept up the Atlantic coast with hurricane-like storm surge and heavy rainfall…..Continue reading…
By: Shuang-Ye Wu
Source: 2023’s extreme storms, heat and wildfires broke records | PreventionWeb
.
Critics:
The five causes of climate change greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and water vapor. While the Sun has played a role in past climate changes, the evidence shows the current warming cannot be explained by the Sun.
While the effects of human activities on Earth’s climate to date are irreversible on the timescale of humans alive today, every little bit of avoided future temperature increases results in less warming that would otherwise persist for essentially forever.
Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the main drivers of global warming. While climate change cannot be stopped, it can be slowed. To avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we’ll need to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner. Humans are the main cause of climate change — burning fossil fuels, producing livestock, clearing trees and otherwise increasing the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
Burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests and farming livestock are increasingly influencing the climate and the earth’s temperature. This adds enormous amounts of greenhouse gases to those naturally occurring in the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect and global warming. A third of the world’s population could live in a climate similar to the Sahara in just 50 years, according to a study published in PNAS in 2020.
That means 3.5 billion people could live with average temperatures in the mid-80s, “outside of humanity’s comfort zone” by 2070. Temperatures will likely stop rising in a few years or decades—but it could take centuries for them to fall to the levels humans enjoyed before we started burning fossil fuels.
Even as climate change impacts ever more people ever more dramatically, it is never too late to act. On the contrary, the case for action grows ever stronger. The supercomputer says 10 percent of all plant and animal species will disappear by 2050, and 27 percent of vertebrate diversity will vanish by 2100. Yeah, that’s over a quarter of our animals gone in about 75 years.
Roughly 1.3 billion years from now, “humans will not be able to physiologically survive, in nature, on Earth” due to sustained hot and humid conditions. In about 2 billion years, the oceans may evaporate when the sun’s luminosity is nearly 20% more than it is now, Kopparapu said. The global average temperature rise is predicted to climb permanently above 1.5°C by between 2026 and 2042, with a central estimate of 2032, while business as usual will see the 2°C breached by 2050 or very soon after.
Since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earth’s climate. Natural processes, such as changes in the sun’s energy and volcanic eruptions, also affect the earth’s climate. Without any greenhouse gases, Earth would be an icy wasteland.
Greenhouse gases keep our planet livable by holding onto some of Earth’s heat energy so that it doesn’t all escape into space. This heat trapping is known as the greenhouse effect. Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels.
Chad ranks as the world’s most climate-vulnerable country on the Notre Dame-Global Adaptation Initiative Index, which examines a country’s exposure, sensitivity and capacity to adapt to the negative effects of climate change. The unchecked burning of fossil fuels over the past 150 years has drastically increased the presence of atmospheric greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide.
Future changes are expected to include a warmer atmosphere, a warmer and more acidic ocean, higher sea levels, and larger changes in precipitation patterns. The extent of future climate change depends on what we do now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The more we emit, the larger future changes will be.
According to NOAA’s 2023 Annual Climate Report the combined land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.11° Fahrenheit (0.06° Celsius) per decade since 1850, or about 2° F in total. The rate of warming since 1982 is more than three times as fast: 0.36° F (0.20° C) per decade. Since 1981, however, the rate of increase has more than doubled: For the last 40 years, we’ve seen the global annual temperature rise by 0.18 degrees Celsius, or 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit, per decade.
The result? A planet that has never been hotter. Humanity has a 95% probability of being extinct in 7,800,000 years, according to J. Richard Gott’s formulation of the controversial doomsday argument, which argues that we have probably already lived through half the duration of human history. But according to an August 2023 study, our ancestors may have come close to extinction some 900,000 to 800,000 years ago.
During this period, our human ancestors lost 98.7 percent of their population, according to the study published in Science. This makes Europa the first satellite ever found to have an oxygen atmosphere, and only the third such solar system object beyond Earth (the planets Mars and Venus have traces of molecular oxygen in their atmospheres).
Leave a Reply