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Attribution of recent climate change is the effort to scientifically ascertain mechanisms responsible for recent global warming and related climate changes on Earth. The effort has focused on changes observed during the period of instrumental temperature record, particularly in the last 50 years. This is the period when human activity has grown fastest and observations of the atmosphere above the surface have become available.
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in an area, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude/longitude, terrain, altitude, land use and nearby water bodies and their currents.
The global warming controversy concerns the public debate over whether global warming is occurring, how much has occurred in modern times, what has caused it, what its effects will be, whether any action can or should be taken to curb it, and if so what that action should be. In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view, though a few organizations with members in extractive industries hold non-committal positions, and some have attempted to convince the public that climate change is not happening, or if the climate is changing it is not because of human influence, attempting to sow doubt in the scientific consensus.
Extreme weather or extreme climate events includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather; weather at the extremes of the historical distribution—the range that has been seen in the past. Often, extreme events are based on a location's recorded weather history and defined as lying in the most unusual ten percent. The main types of extreme weather include heat waves, cold waves and tropical cyclones. The effects of extreme weather events are seen in rising economic costs, loss of human lives, droughts, floods, landslides and changes in ecosystems.
The instrumental temperature record is a record of temperatures within Earth's climate based on direct, instrument-based measurements of air temperature and ocean temperature. Instrumental temperature records are distinguished from indirect reconstructions using climate proxy data such as from tree rings and ocean sediments. Instrument-based data are collected from thousands of meteorological stations, buoys and ships around the globe. Whilst many heavily-populated areas have a high density of measurements, observations are more widely spread in sparsely populated areas such as polar regions and deserts, as well as over many parts of Africa and South America. Measurements were historically made using mercury or alcohol thermometers which were read manually, but are increasingly made using electronic sensors which transmit data automatically. The longest-running temperature record is the Central England temperature data series, which starts in 1659. The longest-running quasi-global records start in 1850.
The United States National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), previously known as the National Weather Records Center (NWRC), in Asheville, North Carolina, was the world's largest active archive of weather data. Starting as a tabulation unit in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1934, the climate records were transferred to Asheville in 1951, becoming named the National Weather Records Center (NWRC). It was later renamed the National Climatic Data Center, with relocation occurring in 1993. In 2015, it was merged with the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and the National Oceanic Data Center (NODC) into the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.
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.
The global temperature record shows the fluctuations of the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans through various spans of time. There are numerous estimates of temperatures since the end of the Pleistocene glaciation, particularly during the current Holocene epoch. Some temperature information is available through geologic evidence, going back millions of years. More recently, information from ice cores covers the period from 800,000 years before the present time until now. A study of the paleoclimate covers the time period from 12,000 years ago to the present. Tree rings and measurements from ice cores can give evidence about the global temperature from 1,000-2,000 years before the present until now. The most detailed information exists since 1850, when methodical thermometer-based records began.
The State of the Climate is an annual report that is primarily led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center (NOAA/NCDC), located in Asheville, North Carolina, but whose leadership and authorship spans roughly 100 institutions in about 50 countries.
Contemporary climate change includes both global warming and its impacts on Earth's weather patterns. There have been previous periods of climate change, but the current changes are distinctly more rapid and not due to natural causes. Instead, they are caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide and methane. Burning fossil fuels for energy production creates most of these emissions. Certain agricultural practices, industrial processes, and forest loss are additional sources. Greenhouse gases are transparent to sunlight, allowing it through to heat the Earth's surface. When the Earth emits that heat as infrared radiation the gases absorb it, trapping the heat near the Earth's surface and causing global warming.
David Russell Legates is an American professor of geography at the University of Delaware. He is the former Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the same university and a former Delaware state climatologist. In September 2020, the Trump administration appointed him as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The climate of California varies widely from hot desert to alpine tundra, depending on latitude, elevation, and proximity to the coast. California's coastal regions, the Sierra Nevada foothills, and much of the Central Valley have a Mediterranean climate, with warmer, drier weather in summer and cooler, wetter weather in winter. The influence of the ocean generally moderates temperature extremes, creating warmer winters and substantially cooler summers in coastal areas.
Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a popular 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 has invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.
Microwave Sounding Unit temperature measurements refers to temperature measurement using the Microwave Sounding Unit instrument and is one of several methods of measuring Earth atmospheric temperature from satellites. Microwave measurements have been obtained from the troposphere since 1979, when they were included within NOAA weather satellites, starting with TIROS-N. By comparison, the usable balloon (radiosonde) record begins in 1958 but has less geographic coverage and is less uniform.
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 with the goal of addressing 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.
The 1994 North American cold wave occurred over the midwestern and eastern regions of The United States, and southern Canada in the month of January 1994. Two notable cold air events took place from January 18–19 and January 21–22. There were 67 minimum temperature records set on January 19. Indiana and Kentucky both set state records on January 19. The United States experienced its coldest temperatures since February 1934, although much of the West experienced mild temperatures. Washington and Idaho experienced the second-warmest January recorded in the previous 100 years.
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 National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), an agency of the United States government, manages one of the world's largest archives of atmospheric, coastal, geophysical, and oceanic data, containing information that ranges from the surface of the sun to Earth's core, and from ancient tree ring and ice core records to near-real-time satellite images.
Warming stripes are data visualization graphics that use a series of coloured stripes chronologically ordered to visually portray long-term temperature trends. Warming stripes reflect a "minimalist" style, conceived to use colour alone to avoid technical distractions and intuitively convey global warming trends to non-scientists.
References
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- ↑ "Tom Karl Retires After Nearly 41 Years of Service". National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) formerly known as National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). 4 August 2016. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
- ↑ Karl, Thomas R.; Arguez, Anthony; Huang, Boyin; Lawrimore, Jay H.; McMahon, James R.; Menne, Matthew J.; Peterson, Thomas C.; Vose, Russell S.; Zhang, Huai-Min (26 June 2015). "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus". Science. 348 (6242): 1469–1472. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa5632 . PMID 26044301. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- 1 2 "The Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus". NOAA. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
- ↑ "Scientists Cast Doubt On An Apparent 'Hiatus' In Global Warming". National Public Radio. June 4, 2015. Retrieved June 13, 2015.
- ↑ "Global warming 'pause' didn't happen, study finds". The Guardian. 2015-06-04. Retrieved June 13, 2015.
- ↑ Johnson, Scott K. (24 January 2016). "Thorough, not thoroughly fabricated: The truth about global temperature data". Ars Technica UK. Retrieved 29 January 2016.
- ↑ "US scientists: Global warming pause 'no longer valid'". BBC News. 2015-06-04. Retrieved June 13, 2015.
- ↑ "New study confirms NOAA finding of faster global warming". The Guardian. 4 January 2017. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
- ↑ "New analysis shows Lamar Smith's accusations on climate data are wrong". Arstechnica. 4 January 2017. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
- ↑ Hausfather, Zeke; et al. (2017). "Assessing recent warming using instrumentally homogeneous sea surface temperature records". Science Advances . 3 (1): e1601207. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1601207. PMC 5216687 . PMID 28070556.
- ↑ "Thomas R. Karl Honored by American Meteorological Society". Archived from the original on 2004-08-23. Retrieved 2004-09-11.
