What Is Climate Change?

Climate change refers to long-term changes in temperature and weather patterns. These changes can be natural, such as through changes in the solar cycle. But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. Burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gas that acts like a blanket wrapped around the earth, blocking the sun's heat and raising the temperature. Examples of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change include carbon dioxide and methane. For example, these come from using gasoline to drive a car or coal to heat a building. Carbon dioxide is released by forest fires.

Greenhouse gas concentrations are at their highest levels in 2 million years and emissions continue to rise. As a result, the Earth is now about 1.1 °C warmer than it was in the late 1800s. The previous decade (2011-2020) was the warmest on record. Many people think that climate change mainly means warmer temperatures. But the temperature rise is only the beginning of the story. Because the Earth is a system where everything is connected, changes in one area can affect changes in all others.

Global Warming Cases Increase

In a series of UN reports, thousands of scientists and government reviewers agreed that limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 °C would help us avoid the worst climate impacts and maintain a habitable climate. Yet based on current national climate plans, global warming is projected to reach about 3.2 °C by the end of the century.

Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants accumulate in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that bounce off the Earth's surface and return. Normally this radiation escapes into space, but these pollutants, which can remain in the atmosphere for years to centuries, trap heat and warm the planet. These heat-trapping pollutants—particularly carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, and synthetic fluorinated gases—are known as greenhouse gases, and their effect is called the greenhouse effect.

Although Earth's climate has changed several times over the past 800,000 years due to natural cycles and fluctuations, our current era of global warming is directly attributable to human activity – particularly coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas. Burning gas has a greenhouse effect. In the United States, the largest source of greenhouse gases is transportation (29 percent), followed by electricity generation (28 percent) and industrial activity (22 percent).

Preventing dangerous climate change requires very deep reductions in emissions, as well as the use of alternatives to fossil fuels around the world. The good news is that countries around the world—as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement—have formally committed – by setting new standards and creating new policies to meet or exceed those standards – to reduce their emissions. To reduce. But we are not acting fast enough. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, scientists tell us we need to reduce global carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030. For this to happen, the global community must take immediate, concrete steps to: transition from fossil fuel-based generation to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar to equitably reduce electricity generation; To electrify our cars and trucks; and to maximize energy efficiency in our buildings, equipment and industries.