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The scientific community has been investigating the causes of climate change for decades. After thousands of studies, it came to a consensus, where it is "unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land since pre-industrial times." This consensus is supported by around 200 scientific organizations worldwide, The dominant role in this climate change has been played by the direct emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Indirect CO2 emissions from land use change, and the emissions of methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases play major supporting roles.
Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation, due to the cooling effects of aerosols or orbital forcing. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
There is a nearly unanimous scientific consensus that the Earth has been consistently warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution, that the rate of recent warming is largely unprecedented, and that this warming is mainly the result of a rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by human activities. The human activities causing this warming include fossil fuel combustion, cement production, and land use changes such as deforestation, with a significant supporting role from the other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. This human role in climate change is considered "unequivocal" and "incontrovertible".
Global dimming is a decline in the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. It is caused by atmospheric particulate matter, predominantly sulfate aerosols, which are components of air pollution. Global dimming was observed soon after the first systematic measurements of solar irradiance began in the 1950s. This weakening of visible sunlight proceeded at the rate of 4–5% per decade until the 1980s. During these years, air pollution increased due to post-war industrialization. Solar activity did not vary more than the usual during this period.
Roy Warren Spencer is an American meteorologist. He is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He is known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society's Special Award. Spencer disagrees with the scientific consensus that most global warming in the past 50 years is the result of human activity, instead believing that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have caused some warming, but that influence is small compared to natural variations in global average cloud cover.
John Raymond Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) whose chief interests are satellite remote sensing of global climate and global climate change. He is best known, jointly with Roy Spencer, for the first successful development of a satellite temperature record.
James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years, he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of global warming, on a few occasions leading to his arrest.
The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), also known as Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV), is the theorized variability of the sea surface temperature (SST) of the North Atlantic Ocean on the timescale of several decades.
Reid Bryson was an American atmospheric scientist, geologist and meteorologist. He was a professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He completed a B.A. in geology at Denison University in 1941 and a Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Chicago in 1948. In 1946 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and in 1948 he became the founder and first chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Meteorology and Center for Climatic Research. He was the first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies in 1970.
Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.
Veerabhadran "Ram" Ramanathan is Edward A. Frieman Endowed Presidential Chair in Climate Sustainability Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He has contributed to many areas of the atmospheric and climate sciences including developments to general circulation models, atmospheric chemistry, and radiative transfer. He has been a part of major projects such as the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) and the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), and is known for his contributions to the areas of climate physics, Climate Change and atmospheric aerosols research. He is now the Chair of Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions education project of University of California. He has received numerous awards, and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has spoken about the topic of global warming, and written that "the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming is, in my opinion, the most important environmental issue facing the world today."
Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the gases in the atmosphere that raise the surface temperature of planets such as the Earth. What distinguishes them from other gases is that they absorb the wavelengths of radiation that a planet emits, resulting in the greenhouse effect. The Earth is warmed by sunlight, causing its surface to radiate heat, which is then mostly absorbed by greenhouse gases. Without greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the average temperature of Earth's surface would be about −18 °C (0 °F), rather than the present average of 15 °C (59 °F).
Atmospheric methane is the methane present in Earth's atmosphere. The concentration of atmospheric methane is increasing due to methane emissions, and is causing climate change. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Methane's radiative forcing (RF) of climate is direct, and it is the second largest contributor to human-caused climate forcing in the historical period. Methane is a major source of water vapour in the stratosphere through oxidation; and water vapour adds about 15% to methane's radiative forcing effect. The global warming potential (GWP) for methane is about 84 in terms of its impact over a 20-year timeframe, and 28 in terms of its impact over a 100-year timeframe.
The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy balance and climate. The existence of the greenhouse effect, while not named as such, was proposed as early as 1824 by Joseph Fourier. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838. In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air, and the effect is even greater with carbon dioxide.
Nicola Scafetta is a research scientist and at the University of Napoli Federico II. He was formerly at the ACRIM Lab group and an adjunct assistant professor in the physics department at Duke University. His research interests are in theoretical and applied statistics and nonlinear models of complex processes. He is notable for having controversial views on climate change.
Berkeley Earth is a Berkeley, California-based independent 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on land temperature data analysis for climate science. Berkeley Earth was founded in early 2010 to address the major concerns from outside the scientific community regarding global warming and the instrumental temperature record. The project's stated aim was a "transparent approach, based on data analysis." In February 2013, Berkeley Earth became an independent non-profit. In August 2013, Berkeley Earth was granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by the US government. The primary product is air temperatures over land, but they also produce a global dataset resulting from a merge of their land data with HadSST.
Global surface temperature (GST) is the average temperature of Earth's surface. More precisely, it is the weighted average of the temperatures over the ocean and land. The former is also called sea surface temperature and the latter is called surface air temperature. Temperature data comes mainly from weather stations and satellites. To estimate data in the distant past, proxy data can be used for example from tree rings, corals, and ice cores. Observing the rising GST over time is one of the many lines of evidence supporting the scientific consensus on climate change, which is that human activities are causing climate change. Alternative terms for the same thing are global mean surface temperature (GMST) or global average surface temperature.
A global warming hiatus, also sometimes referred to as a global warming pause or a global warming slowdown, is a period of relatively little change in globally averaged surface temperatures. In the current episode of global warming many such 15-year periods appear in the surface temperature record, along with robust evidence of the long-term warming trend. Such a "hiatus" is shorter than the 30-year periods that climate is classically averaged over.
The field of complex networks has emerged as an important area of science to generate novel insights into nature of complex systems The application of network theory to climate science is a young and emerging field. To identify and analyze patterns in global climate, scientists model climate data as complex networks.
Little Ice Age volcanism refers to the massive volcanic activities during the Little Ice Age. Scientists suggested a hypothesis that volcanism was the major driving force of the global cooling among the other natural factors, i.e. the sunspot activities by orbital forcing and greenhouse gas. The Past Global Change (PAGES), a registered paleo-science association for scientific research and networking on past global changes in the University of Bern, Switzerland, suggested that from 1630 to 1850, a total of 16 major eruptions and cooling events had taken place. When a volcano erupts, ashes burst out of the vent together with magma and forms a cloud in the atmosphere. The ashes act as an isolating layer that block out a proportion of solar radiation, causing global cooling. The global cooling effect impacts ocean currents, atmospheric circulation and cause social impacts such as drought and famine. Wars and rebellions were therefore triggered worldwide in the Little Ice Age. It was suggested that the crisis on Ottoman Empire and Ming-Qing Transition in China were typical examples that closely correlated with Little Ice Age.
References
- ↑ "Anastasios Tsonis". University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Website. Archived from the original on 15 October 2014. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
- ↑ Tsonis, Anastasios (June 1988). "The weather attractor over very short timescales". Nature. 333 (6173): 545–547. Bibcode:1988Natur.333..545T. doi:10.1038/333545a0. S2CID 1389811.
- ↑ Irion, Robert (29 June 1988). "A Calculated Guess On Weather". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved 10 October 2014.
- 1 2 Swanson, Kyle L.; Tsonis, Anastasios A. (31 March 2009). "Has the climate recently shifted?". Geophysical Research Letters. 36 (6). Bibcode:2009GeoRL..36.6711S. doi: 10.1029/2008GL037022 .
- ↑ Solomon, Lawrence (15 August 2007). "From chaos, coherence". National Post. Retrieved 3 January 2019.
- ↑ "Roundup: Climate science in 2009". The Guardian. 29 December 2009. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
- ↑ Swaffar, Gar (17 March 2009). "Climate Change - Who's[sic] Fault? Or No-Fault?". Digital Journal. Archived from the original on 27 April 2009. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
- ↑ "UW-Milwaukee Professor Predicts 50 Years of Global Cooling". MacIver Institute. 13 January 2010. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
Tsonis published a paper last March that found the world goes through periods of warming and cooling that tend to last thirty years. In contrast to the vast majority of climate scientists, he says we are now in a period of cooling that could last up to fifty years.
- ↑ Dixon, Hayley (8 September 2013). "Global warming? No, actually we're cooling, claim scientists". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 9 September 2013. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
- ↑ Roberts, John (30 September 2013). "UN's massive new climate report adds little explanation for 'pause' in warming". Fox News. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
