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Apr 2, 2024 · April 2, 2024. Although leap seconds are minor adjustments to our time systems, they can have a big impact on systems like GPS. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University. The effects of climate change can be seen everywhere, in the global refugee crisis, an even worse allergy season and, now, even in the very concept of time.
- Setting The Stage
- Carbon Floods in
- The Keeling Curve
- Evidence Piles Up
- Worrisome Predictions
- Backlash
- Facing The Future
One day in the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and a women’s rights activist living in upstate New York, put two glass jars in sunlight. One contained regular air — a mix of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases including carbon dioxide — while the other contained just carbon dioxide. Both had thermometers in them. As the sun’s rays bea...
Humans began substantially affecting the atmosphere around the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain. Factories burned tons of coal; fueled by fossil fuels, the steam engine revolutionized transportation and other industries. Since then, fossil fuels including oil and natural gas have been harnessed to drive a...
One major effort was the International Geophysical Year, or IGY, an 18-month push in 1957–1958 that involved a wide array of scientific field campaigns including exploration in the Arctic and Antarctica. Climate change wasn’t a high research priority during the IGY, but some scientists in California, led by Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution ...
Observational data collected throughout the second half of the 20th century helped researchers gradually build their understanding of how human activities were transforming the planet. Ice cores pulled from ice sheets, such as that atop Greenland, offer some of the most telling insights for understanding past climate change. Each year, snow falls a...
By the 1960s, there was no denying that the planet was warming. But understanding the consequences of those changes — including the threat to human health and well-being — would require more than observational data. Looking to the future depended on computer simulations: complex calculations of how energy flows through the planetary system. A first...
The rising public awareness of climate change, and battles over what to do about it, emerged alongside awareness of other environmental issues in the 1960s and ’70s. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which condemned the pesticide DDT for its ecological impacts, catalyzed environmental activism in the United States and led to the first Earth ...
In many cases, changes are coming faster than scientists had envisioned a few decades ago. The oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb CO2, harming tiny marine organisms that build protective calcium carbonate shells and are the base of the marine food web. Warmer waters are bleaching coral reefs. Higher temperatures are driving animal and p...
Sep 26, 2016 · There is a linear relationship of 0.61 °C (0.43–0.85 °C, 95% interval) change in GAST for every 1 °C change in Antarctic temperature that does not significantly change over the past 800 kyr ...
- Carolyn W. Snyder
- carolyn.snyder@gmail.com
- 2016
Apr 4, 2024 · Chart by Carbon Brief. The chart shows how the warming rate of 0.18C per decade seen since 1970 has almost doubled to roughly 0.3C per decade over the past 15 years. Researchers have proposed a number of potential contributors to the increased rate of warming seen in recent years. One is the significant decline in global air pollution over the ...
Jun 28, 2021 · According to the WMO's State of the Global Climate 2020 report, the average temperature that year was 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels. This refers to the...
Nov 10, 2023 · NEWS. 10 November 2023. Earth just had its hottest year on record — climate change is to blame. Around 7.3 billion people faced temperatures strongly influenced by global warming over the...
Dec 26, 2023 · Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years, and very likely the past 125,000. Unyielding heat waves broiled Phoenix and Argentina. Wildfires raged across Canada. Flooding in ...
