Climate change
Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The modern-day rise in global temperatures is driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel burning since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices release greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere now has roughly 50% more carbon dioxide, the main gas driving global warming, than it did at the end of the pre-industrial era, reaching levels not seen for millions of years.
Climate change has an increasingly large impact on the environment. Deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified warming in the Arctic has contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Even if efforts to minimize future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.
Climate change threatens people with increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization calls climate change one of the biggest threats to global health in the 21st century. Societies and ecosystems will experience more severe risks without action to limit warming. Adapting to climate change through efforts like flood control measures or drought-resistant crops partially reduces climate change risks, although some limits to adaptation have already been reached. Poorer communities are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet have the least ability to adapt and are most vulnerable to climate change.
Many climate change impacts have been observed in the first decades of the 21st century, with 2024 the warmest on record at + since regular tracking began in 1850. Additional warming will increase these impacts and can trigger tipping points, such as melting all of the Greenland ice sheet. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations collectively agreed to keep warming "well under 2 °C". However, with pledges made under the Agreement, global warming would still reach about by the end of the century.
There is widespread support for climate action worldwide, and most countries aim to stop emitting carbon dioxide. Fossil fuels can be phased out by stopping subsidising them, conserving energy and switching to energy sources that do not produce significant carbon pollution. These energy sources include wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power. Cleanly generated electricity can replace fossil fuels for powering transportation, heating buildings, and running industrial processes. Carbon can also be removed from the atmosphere, for instance by increasing forest cover and farming with methods that store carbon in soil.
Terminology
Before the 1980s, it was unclear whether the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling effect of airborne particulates in air pollution. Scientists used the term inadvertent climate modification to refer to human impacts on the climate at this time. In the 1980s, the terms global warming and climate change became more common, often being used interchangeably. Scientifically, global warming refers only to increased global average surface temperature, while climate change describes both global warming and its effects on Earth's climate system, such as precipitation changes.Climate change can also be used more broadly to include changes to the climate that have happened throughout Earth's history as result of natural processes. The term anthropogenic climate change is sometimes used to describe climate change resulting from human activities.
Global warming—used as early as 1975—became the more popular term after NASA climate scientist James Hansen used it in his 1988 testimony in the U.S. Senate. Since the 2000s, usage of climate change has increased. Various scientists, politicians and media may use the terms climate crisis or climate emergency to talk about climate change, and may use the term global heating instead of global warming.
Global temperature rise
Temperatures prior to present-day global warming
Over the last few million years the climate cycled through ice ages. One of the hotter periods was the Last Interglacial, around 125,000 years ago, where temperatures were between 0.5 °C and 1.5 °C warmer than before the start of global warming. This period saw sea levels 5 to 10 metres higher than today. The most recent glacial maximum 20,000 years ago was some 5–7 °C colder. This period has sea levels that were over lower than today.Temperatures stabilized in the current interglacial period beginning 11,700 years ago. This period also saw the start of agriculture. Historical patterns of warming and cooling, like the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, did not occur at the same time across different regions. Temperatures may have reached as high as those of the late 20th century in a limited set of regions. Climate information for that period comes from climate proxies, such as trees and ice cores.
Warming since the Industrial Revolution
Around 1850 thermometer records began to provide global coverage.Between the 18th century and 1970 there was little net warming, as the warming impact of greenhouse gas emissions was offset by cooling from sulfur dioxide emissions. Sulfur dioxide causes acid rain, but it also produces sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, which reflect sunlight and cause global dimming. After 1970, the increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases and controls on sulfur pollution led to a marked increase in temperature.
Ongoing changes in climate have had no precedent for several thousand years. Multiple datasets all show worldwide increases in surface temperature, at a rate of around 0.2 °C per decade. The 2014–2023 decade warmed to an average 1.19 °C compared to the pre-industrial baseline. Not every single year was warmer than the last: internal climate variability processes can make any year 0.2 °C warmer or colder than the average. From 1998 to 2013, negative phases of two such processes, Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation caused a short slower period of warming called the "global warming hiatus". After the "hiatus", the opposite occurred, with 2024 well above the recent average at more than +1.5 °C. This is why the temperature change is defined in terms of a 20-year average, which reduces the noise of hot and cold years and decadal climate patterns, and detects the long-term signal.
A wide range of other observations reinforce the evidence of warming. The upper atmosphere is cooling, because greenhouse gases are trapping heat near the Earth's surface, and so less heat is radiating into space. Warming reduces average snow cover and forces the retreat of glaciers. At the same time, warming also causes greater evaporation from the oceans, leading to more atmospheric humidity, more and heavier precipitation. Plants are flowering earlier in spring, and thousands of animal species have been permanently moving to cooler areas.
Differences by region
Different regions of the world warm at different rates. The pattern is independent of where greenhouse gases are emitted, because the gases persist long enough to diffuse across the planet. Since the pre-industrial period, the average surface temperature over land regions has increased almost twice as fast as the global average surface temperature. This is because oceans lose more heat by evaporation and oceans can store a lot of heat. The thermal energy in the global climate system has grown with only brief pauses since at least 1970, and over 90% of this extra energy has been stored in the ocean. The rest has heated the atmosphere, melted ice, and warmed the continents.The Northern Hemisphere and the North Pole have warmed much faster than the South Pole and Southern Hemisphere. The Northern Hemisphere not only has much more land, but also more seasonal snow cover and sea ice. As these surfaces flip from reflecting a lot of light to being dark after the ice has melted, they start absorbing more heat. Local black carbon deposits on snow and ice also contribute to Arctic warming. Arctic surface temperatures are increasing between three and four times faster than in the rest of the world. Melting of ice sheets near the poles weakens both the Atlantic and the Antarctic limb of thermohaline circulation, which further changes the distribution of heat and precipitation around the globe.
Future global temperatures
The World Meteorological Organization estimates there is almost a 50% chance of the five-year average global temperature exceeding +1.5 °C between 2024 and 2028. The IPCC expects the 20-year average to exceed +1.5 °C in the early 2030s.The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report included projections that by 2100 global warming is very likely to reach 1.0–1.8 °C under a scenario with very low emissions of greenhouse gases, 2.1–3.5 °C under an intermediate emissions scenario,
or 3.3–5.7 °C under a very high emissions scenario. The warming will continue past 2100 in the intermediate and high emission scenarios, with future projections of global surface temperatures by year 2300 being similar to millions of years ago.
The remaining carbon budget for staying beneath certain temperature increases is determined by modelling the carbon cycle and climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. According to UNEP, global warming can be kept below 2.0 °C with a 50% chance if emissions after 2023 do not exceed 900 gigatonnes of. This carbon budget corresponds to around 16 years of current emissions.