Average temperatures on Earth are rising faster than at any time in the past 2,000 years, and the last five of them have been the hottest in the history of meteorological observations since 1850. Climatologists agree that the planet has warmed up so much because of human activity (Hausfather, 2017). A recent study also showed that the probability that the current global warming is due to humans is more than 99% (Hausfather, 2017). Transport, industry, and energy annually emit about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – ten times more than volcanoes (Wang et al., 2017). Compared to 1750, when there was no industry yet, carbon dioxide in the air has increased by about 50% (Hausfather, 2017). This is a record level for the last 14 million years.
Agriculture, incineration of garbage, deforestation produce a considerable amount of methane, which traps tens of times more heat than CO2. True, there is relatively little methane in the atmosphere, but its concentration has increased 2.5 times since 1750 and reached a maximum over the past 800 thousand years. More than half of the emissions of this gas are due to human activity.
Over the past 170 years, the global temperature on Earth has increased by 1.23 ° C and reached a maximum in 125 thousand years (Wang et al., 2017). According to various estimates, this was enough to increase the probability of heat waves by 20-150 times (Wang et al., 2017). The more the planet heats up, the more often droughts, fires, and hurricanes occur. Extreme heat by 2100 will come every few years under the most likely scenario of warming, and in the worst cases – every summer.
Many of the effects of climate change, such as ice melting and ocean heating, are irreversible on the scale of hundreds and thousands of years. Warming especially threatens temperate and northern regions — for example, the Arctic and Antarctica are warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet (Tebaldi et al., 2021). Because of this, glaciers are melting, releasing hundreds of billions of tons of water every year.
References
Hausfather, Z. (2017). Analysis: Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans. CarbonBrief. Web.
Tebaldi, C., Ranasinghe, R., Vousdoukas, M., Rasmussen, D. J., Vega-Westhoff, B., Kirezci, E., & Mentaschi, L. (2021). Extreme sea levels at different global warming levels. Nature Climate Change, 11(9), 746-751.
Wang, X., Jiang, D., & Lang, X. (2017). Future extreme climate changes linked to global warming intensity. Science Bulletin, 62(24), 1673-1680. Web.