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Global Warming

The document discusses global warming and climate change based on findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report. The report found that global surface temperatures have increased about 1.07°C since 1850 due to human activities like burning fossil fuels. If greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate, the global temperature increase may exceed 2°C by 2100, causing significant damage from rising sea levels and shifts in agriculture. Most countries have begun plans to reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

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Oscar Masinde
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24 views2 pages

Global Warming

The document discusses global warming and climate change based on findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report. The report found that global surface temperatures have increased about 1.07°C since 1850 due to human activities like burning fossil fuels. If greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate, the global temperature increase may exceed 2°C by 2100, causing significant damage from rising sea levels and shifts in agriculture. Most countries have begun plans to reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Uploaded by

Oscar Masinde
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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global warming, the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near the surface of Earth over

the past one to two centuries. Climate scientists have since the mid-20th century gathered detailed
observations of various weather phenomena (such as temperatures, precipitation, and storms) and of
related influences on climate (such as ocean currents and the atmosphere’s chemical composition).
These data indicate that Earth’s climate has changed over almost every conceivable timescale since the
beginning of geologic time and that human activities since at least the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution have a growing influence over the pace and extent of present-day climate change.

Giving voice to a growing conviction of most of the scientific community, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the
United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), published in
2021, noted that the best estimate of the increase in global average surface temperature between 1850
and 2019 was 1.07 °C (1.9 °F). An IPCC special report produced in 2018 noted that human beings and
their activities have been responsible for a worldwide average temperature increase between 0.8 and
1.2 °C (1.4 and 2.2 °F) since preindustrial times, and most of the warming over the second half of the
20th century could be attributed to human activities.

AR6 produced a series of global climate predictions based on modeling five greenhouse gas emission
scenarios that accounted for future emissions, mitigation (severity reduction) measures, and
uncertainties in the model projections. Some of the main uncertainties include the precise role of
feedback processes and the impacts of industrial pollutants known as aerosols, which may offset some
warming. The lowest-emissions scenario, which assumed steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions
beginning in 2015, predicted that the global mean surface temperature would increase between 1.0 and
1.8 °C (1.8 and 3.2 °F) by 2100 relative to the 1850–1900 average. This range stood in stark contrast to
the highest-emissions scenario, which predicted that the mean surface temperature would rise between
3.3 and 5.7 °C (5.9 and 10.2 °F) by 2100 based on the assumption that greenhouse gas emissions would
continue to increase throughout the 21st century. The intermediate-emissions scenario, which assumed
that emissions would stabilize by 2050 before declining gradually, projected an increase of between 2.1
and 3.5 °C (3.8 and 6.3 °F) by 2100.

Many climate scientists agree that significant societal, economic, and ecological damage would result if
the global average temperature rose by more than 2 °C (3.6 °F) in such a short time. Such damage would
include increased extinction of many plant and animal species, shifts in patterns of agriculture, and rising
sea levels. By 2015 all but a few national governments had begun the process of instituting carbon
reduction plans as part of the Paris Agreement, a treaty designed to help countries keep global warming
to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels in order to avoid the worst of the predicted effects. Whereas
authors of the 2018 special report noted that should carbon emissions continue at their present rate,
the increase in average near-surface air temperature would reach 1.5 °C sometime between 2030 and
2052, authors of the AR6 report suggested that this threshold would be reached by 2041 at the latest.

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