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. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is "extremely likely" that human influence was the dominant cause of global warming between 1951 and 2010. Likely human contribution is 93%–123% of the observed 1951–2010 temperature change.
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.
Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EarthDay.org including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries.
Patrick J. ("Pat") Michaels is an American former agricultural climatologist. Michaels was a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute until Spring 2019. Until 2007, he was research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, where he had worked from 1980.
There is a strong scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that this warming is mainly caused by human activities. This consensus is supported by various studies of scientists' opinions and by position statements of scientific organizations, many of which explicitly agree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis reports.
Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.
Roy Warren Spencer is a meteorologist, 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.
Earth's energy budget accounts for the balance between the energy that Earth receives from the Sun and the energy the Earth loses back into outer space. Smaller energy sources, such as Earth's internal heat, are taken into consideration, but make a tiny contribution compared to solar energy. The energy budget also accounts for how energy moves through the climate system. Because the Sun heats the equatorial tropics more than the polar regions, received solar irradiance is unevenly distributed. As the energy seeks equilibrium across the planet, it drives interactions in Earth's climate system, i.e., Earth's water, ice, atmosphere, rocky crust, and all living things. The result is Earth's climate.
The effects of climate change span the effects on physical environment, ecosystems and human societies which result from living in a human-induced change in climate. Many physical impacts of climate change are already visible, including extreme weather events, glacier retreat, changes in the timing of seasonal events, sea level rise, and declines in Arctic sea ice. The ocean has taken up between 20% and 30% of human-induced atmospheric carbon dioxide since the 1980s, leading to ocean acidification. Since 1970 the ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system, raising temperatures and damaging coral reefs. Even if global surface temperature is stabilized, sea levels will continue to rise and the ocean will continue to absorb excess heat from the atmosphere for many centuries.
An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 American concert/documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate people about global warming. The film features a slide show that, by Gore's own estimate, he has presented over 1,000 times to audiences worldwide.
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 use creates most of these emissions. Agriculture, steelmaking, cement production, 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. As the planet heats up it causes changes like the loss of sunlight-reflecting snow cover, amplifying global warming.
Joseph J. Romm is an American author, editor, physicist and climate expert, who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency, green energy technologies and green transportation technologies. Romm is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America", and Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment (2009)", calling him "The Web's most influential climate-change blogger".
Live Earth was an event developed to increase environmental awareness through entertainment.
"Hey You" is a charity song written and recorded by American singer Madonna. She co-produced the song with Pharrell Williams for the Live Earth campaign. It was released digitally on May 24, 2007 and was available on the CD and DVD of the Live Earth concerts on December 4, 2007. Musically it is a stripped-down, folksy ballad with straightforward, anthem-like lyrics talking about how to save the world from destruction. The song received generally mixed reviews, with one group of reviewers commenting that the modest message of the song was uninspiring while others called the song sweet and commended Madonna's commitment to charity.
Nunatak was the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Rothera Research Station’s house band. The five person indie rock band was part of a science team investigating climate change and evolutionary biology on the Antarctic Peninsula. They are chiefly known for their participation in Live Earth in 2007, where they were the only band to play in the event's Antarctica concert.
Al Gore is a United States politician and environmentalist. He is the former Vice President of the United States (1993–2001), the 2000 Democratic Party presidential nominee, and the co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has been involved with the environmental activist movement for a number of decades, and has had full participation since he left the vice-presidency in 2001.
Kenneth Caldeira is an American atmospheric scientist. His areas of research include ocean acidification, climate effects of trees, intentional climate modification, interactions in the global carbon cycle/climate system, and sustainable energy.
Live Earth was a one-off event developed to combat climate change. The first series of benefit concerts were held on July 7, 2007. The concerts brought together more than 150 musical acts in eleven locations around the world which were broadcast to a mass global audience through televisions, radio, and streamed via the Internet.
Planetary boundaries is a concept involving Earth system processes that contain environmental boundaries. It was proposed in 2009 by a group of Earth system and environmental scientists, led by Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Will Steffen from the Australian National University. The group wanted to define a "safe operating space for humanity" for the international community, including governments at all levels, international organizations, civil society, the scientific community and the private sector, as a precondition for sustainable development. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have become the main driver of global environmental change.
Earth Strike is an international grassroots movement that called for a global general strike for climate action. Their aim was a global general strike lasting from 20 until 27 September 2019. The movement has had public support from organizations including Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, as well as public figures including Noam Chomsky. The Earth Strikes were part of the worldwide September 2019 climate strikes, which gathered millions of protesters.
