Causes of global warming in points

Tipping points This article is part of a week-long special series on “tipping points”, where a changing climate could push parts of the Earth system into abrupt or irreversible change • • • • • Imagine a child pushing themselves from the top of a playground slide. There is a point beyond which it is too late for the child to stop themselves sliding down. Pass this threshold and the child continues inevitably towards a different state – at the bottom of the slide rather than the top. In this article, Carbon Brief explores nine key tipping points across the Earth system, from collapsing ice sheets and thawing permafrost, to shifting monsoons and forest dieback. Along with this explainer, Carbon Brief has published Tipping towers A glance at the news media on any given week will likely highlight all sorts of climate change impacts. From Broadly, these impacts reflect gradual changes caused by a climate that is steadily warming. Scientists have estimated, for example, that for every tonne of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, summer sea ice cover in the Arctic However, there are parts of the Earth system that have the potential to “A climate tipping point, or any tipping point in any complex system, is where a small change makes a big difference and changes the state or the fate of a system.” So, rather than a bit more warming causing slightly hotter heatwaves or more melting of glaciers, it causes a dramatic shift to an entire system. That extra bit of warming would be, as the ...

Sea surface anomalies on June 10th, 2023 Climate Reanalyzer/University of Maine I saw a Tweet recently that asked, “So what caused climate to change before humans were around?” It was clearly an ill-posed question with the intent of undermining the notion that humans can contribute to climate change. After my head stopped hurting from consuming that question, the first thing that came to mind is, “Gee, what caused grass to grow before fertilizer and big box hardware stores?” Hopefully, you get my point. Anyhow, climate has always changed naturally, and anthropogenic activities are amplifying those changes now. At roughly the halfway point of 2023, three things have caught the eye of climate scientists and not in a good way. I will deal with the 2-meter temperatures first. The black line in the graphic on the left represents the year 2023. Right now, it is trending well above any other years since recordkeeping began. Why so? It certainly not an “either/or” answer as some people try to make it. There is clearly a strong influence of anthropogenic climate change, but there is likely some natural variability associated with complicated dynamics and modes within the atmosphere-ocean system. For example, we have gradually been shifting into an El Niño pattern, which will likely continue to influence global temperatures. When asked by a follower if we are at a point of extinction, McNoldy said, “Well, I don't think it's anything that extreme immediately....an anomaly for sure, a...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have reached an all-time high with marked acceleration in the past two years threatening to push the world into “unprecedented” levels of global heating, leading climate scientists have said. Analysis by the 50 scientists from Ireland and the UK issued yesterday shows a record level of carbon was emitted each year of the past decade, equivalent to 54 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, with human-induced warming averaging 1.14 degrees. The remaining “carbon budget” – how much carbon dioxide can be emitted to have a better than 50 per cent chance of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees (a key Paris Agreement target) – has halved over three years. Their data was published to coincide with UN climate negotiations in Germany this week. Climate experts under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are meeting in Bonn to prepare for COP28 next December when a stocktake of progress towards keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050 will be conducted. It is critical that policymakers and the public are made aware “how quickly we are changing the climate through our collective activities”, said Prof Peter Thorne, IPCC author and director of ICARUS climate research centre at Maynooth University, who contributed to the research. “Already since the IPCC assessment of the physical science basis [of climate change] in 2021 key numbers have changed markedly and we remain well off track globally to avert warming above 1.5 degrees,” he said. Re...

1. Burning fossil fuels When we burn fossil fuels like coal, and gas to create electricity or power our cars, we release CO2 pollution into the atmosphere. Australians are big producers of CO2 pollution compared to the rest of the world. Our level of CO2 pollution per person is nearly double the average of other developed nations and more than four times the world average. Electricity generation is the main cause of carbon pollution in Australia as 73% of our electricity comes from burning coal and 13% from burning gas. The remaining 14% comes from renewable energy sources such as hydro, solar and wind, which do not emit carbon. Solutions • Reducing the amount of electricity generated from coal and gas • Increasing the amount of electricity from clean, renewable energy sources like solar and wind • 2. Deforestation & Tree-Clearing Plants and trees play an important role in regulating the climate because they absorb carbon dioxide from the air and release oxygen back into it. Forests and bushland act as carbon sinks and are a valuable means of keeping global warming to 1.5°C. But humans clear vast areas of vegetation around the world for Up to one-fifth of global greenhouse gas pollution comes from deforestation and forest degradation. Solutions: • Prevent deforestation and tree-clearing • Plant more trees through reforestation and afforestation • • 3. Agriculture & Farming Animals, Australian farming contributes 16% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. Solutions • Use di...

Comments “ How does carbon dioxide trap heat? You’ve probably already read that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases act like a blanket or a cap, trapping some of the heat that Earth might have otherwise radiated out into space. That’s the simple answer. But how exactly do certain molecules trap heat? The answer there requires diving into physics and chemistry. Simplified diagram showing how Earth transforms sunlight into infrared energy. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane absorb the infrared energy, re-emitting some of it back toward Earth and some of it out into space. Credit: When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves, which we feel as heat. (Hold your hand over a dark rock on a warm sunny day and you can feel this phenomenon for yourself.) These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will escape back into space if unimpeded. Oxygen and nitrogen don’t interfere with infrared waves in the atmosphere. That’s because molecules are picky about the range of wavelengths that they interact with, Smerdon explained. For example, oxygen and nitrogen absorb energy that has tightly packed wavelengths of around 200 nanometers or less, whereas infrared energy travels at wider and lazier wavelengths of 700 to 1,000,000 nanometers. Those ranges don’t overlap, so to oxygen and nitrogen, it’s as if the infrared waves don’t even exist; they let the waves (and heat) pass freely through the atm...

Last week during his tour of Asia, President Barack Obama struck a new global warming deal with China. It was a landmark agreement that many expect could break the logjam that has kept the world’s two largest emitters largely on the sidelines of talks to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Both countries agreed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, with the U.S. ramping up reductions starting in 2020 and China beginning cuts in 2030. Yet back home, President Obama still faces an electorate that doesn’t believe climate change is caused by humans. Only 40% of Americans attribute global warming to human activity, according to That apparent cognitive dissonance has vexed two scientists in particular: Michael Ranney, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dan Kahan, a professor of law at Yale University. According to both, we haven’t been asking the right questions. But they disagree on what, exactly, those questions should be. If one or both of them are right, the shift in tone could transform our society’s debate over climate change. The Wisdom Deficit In the 1990s, Michael Ranney started informally asking people what they perceived to be the world’s biggest problem. He hadn’t set out to tackle environmental issues—he was first trained in applied physics and materials science before turning to cognitive psychology. But time and again, he heard “climate change” as an answer. Ranney had also noticed that while the scientific community had converged on ...