Climate change refers to long-term alterations in Earth's climate patterns, encompassing changes in temperature, precipitation, wind patterns, and other atmospheric conditions on a global or regional scale. It is primarily driven by human activities, particularly the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and others.
The combustion of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), deforestation, industrial processes, agriculture, and other human activities have significantly increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, preventing it from escaping into space, and lead to the warming of the planet, a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect.
Climate change refers to the long-term alteration in Earth's climate patterns, encompassing changes in temperature, precipitation, wind patterns, and other elements of the Earth's climate system. It is driven primarily by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial processes, and agricultural practices, which release greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. The most common greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and fluorinated gases.
The accumulation of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere traps heat and leads to the greenhouse effect, causing the Earth's surface and lower atmosphere to warm. This phenomenon is often referred to as global warming, and it has wide-ranging impacts on various environmental and ecological systems.
Key features of climate change include:
Rising global temperatures: Average global temperatures have been steadily increasing over the past century, with recent years experiencing record-breaking warmth.
Melting ice and rising sea levels: Higher temperatures lead to the melting of glaciers and polar ice caps, contributing to sea-level rise, which poses significant risks to coastal areas and low-lying islands.
Extreme weather events: Climate change intensifies extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, and heavy rainfall, leading to more frequent and severe disasters.
Ocean acidification: The increased absorption of CO2 by the oceans causes them to become more acidic, threatening marine life and ecosystems.
Disruption of ecosystems: Changing climate conditions can impact ecosystems and biodiversity, affecting species distribution, migration patterns, and the timing of natural events like flowering and hibernation.
Impacts on human society: Climate change can result in various socio-economic consequences, including threats to food security, water availability, public health, and displacement of communities due to rising sea levels or extreme weather events.
To combat climate change and its negative impacts, global efforts are being made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, transition to renewable energy sources, promote sustainable land use and transportation, and implement climate adaptation strategies. International agreements like the Paris Agreement aim to unite countries in their commitment to limiting global warming and mitigating climate change.
Climate change refers to the long-term alteration of Earth's climate patterns, particularly the rise in global temperatures and the associated impacts on weather conditions, ecosystems, and human societies. It is primarily driven by human activities, especially the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere, which trap heat and lead to a warming effect known as the greenhouse effect.
Key aspects of defining climate change include:
Long-Term Nature: Climate change involves changes in climate patterns over an extended period, typically decades to centuries, rather than short-term fluctuations in weather.
Global Scope: Climate change affects the entire planet, leading to shifts in weather patterns, sea-level rise, melting ice caps, and changes in ocean currents worldwide.
Greenhouse Gas Effect: The main cause of modern-day climate change is the excessive release of GHGs, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and fluorinated gases. These gases trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the Earth's average temperature to rise, leading to global warming.
Human Impact: While natural factors, such as volcanic eruptions and solar radiation, have influenced climate change in the past, the current warming trend is primarily attributed to human activities. Activities like burning fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial processes, and agriculture release significant amounts of GHGs, intensifying the greenhouse effect.
Environmental and Societal Consequences: Climate change has far-reaching effects on various environmental and societal aspects, including rising sea levels, extreme weather events, shifts in precipitation patterns, disruption of ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, water scarcity, and impacts on agriculture and food security.
Global Mitigation and Adaptation Efforts: Addressing climate change requires global efforts to reduce GHG emissions and transition to sustainable energy sources (mitigation). Additionally, adaptation measures are needed to cope with the current and anticipated impacts of climate change.
Climate change is a complex and multifaceted issue that demands collective action and a commitment to sustainable practices and policies to minimize its adverse effects on the environment and human well-being. International agreements, such as the Paris Agreement, aim to foster global cooperation in mitigating climate change and building resilience to its impacts.
It is written: periodic modification of Earth’s climate brought about as a result of changes in the atmosphere as well as interactions between the atmosphere and various other geologic, chemical, biological, and geographic factors within the Earth system.
Climate change can only be expressed via changes in weather conditions (solar radiation, wind speed, rainfall, cloud cover,...), no?
Carbon has been accumulated and stored for millions of years on planet Earth and then released in the Earth atmosphere during a period of 100 years, therefore drastically changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, no?
You will find predictions about climate change in a report from 1972. For instance, on page 73 you will find following statement: Atmospheric waste heat around cities causes the formation of urban "heat islands," within which many meteorological anomalies occur. Thermal pollution may have serious climatic effects, worldwide, ....
"Examination of 420,000 years old ice cores shows a close relation between temperature increase and CO2-concentration increase. During the industrial era a new energy component appears, Anthropogenic Heat Flux, and a part of that energy will accumulate in Earth climate system and become an essential part of global warming;" One could suppose that this idea, expressed in this simplicity, would be common sense! However, it is, neither more nor less than the abstract of the article "Anthropogenic Heat Flux Will Affect Global Warming" by Mats Lindgren, from the KTH "Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm", published in "Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, Vol .11 No.3, July 2021"
Available on:
Article Anthropogenic Heat Flux Will Affect Global Warming
On Climate Models: From General Circulation Models (GCMs) and Earth System Models (ESMs). General Circulation Models (GCMs)which are the core of weather forecasting Models appeared in the 1960s with the pioneer's work of Manabe (2021 Nobel Prize in Physics). A fundamental point is that is difficult to speak about GCMs and even less of Climate Models without a minimum review starting from Atmosphere Dynamics Models genesis in the 1960s to the actual Earth System Models (ESMs) that participated in the last "CMIP6". These represent the State-of-art of universal knowledge about Climate and its modeling. The results published in 2021 covers 80 ESMs from as many research teams throughout the world. Nowadays, Climate Science and Modelling have attained an international critic-mass never reached in any other domain.
ESMs include a number of components that try to describe the evolution of intercoupled phenomena that govern Climate Phenomena. To understand how this works, one has to know about the progress achieved and still-opened questions related to Climate Models. Mathematically the resolution of the dynamic and the transport equations of physical quantities on more or less important scales provide accurate predetermination in a relatively short time. This is what meteorologists do to deliver us every day their newsletter. This is what the same meteorologists are trying to do with scientists from all sides to build climate models in the long term, sure inaccurate today, exactly as was the 1960s weather model of Manabe, Nobel Prize in Physics 2021, the pioneer of general circulation modeling. The very first general circulation models were based on atmosphere-only physical models (Manabe et al., 1965, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2021), which were quickly improved to take into account the hydrologic cycle and its role in the general circulation of the atmosphere (Smagorinsky et al. 1965). From there, climate modeling has made considerable progress by gradually integrating the many positive or negative feedback processes that occur at different scales between the different components of the system: ocean circulation (Manabe and Bryan, 1969), land hydrological processes (Sellers et al., 1986), sea ice dynamics (Meehl and Washington, 1995), and aerosols (Takemura et al., 2000), biophysical and biogeochemical processes (Cox et al., 2000). Models with these latter components are often called Earth System Models (ESMs) and more recent such models include land and ocean carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, dynamic vegetation, and other biogeochemical cycles (Watanabe et al., 2011, Collins et al., 2011). It should be noted that as a whole and for the same reasons, the horns of ESMs, which are based on physical formulations similar to those employed in general circulation models applied in meteorology, have not evolved much, except for the increase in the resolution of the calculations made possible thanks to the increase in the computing capacity or their capacity to assimilate increasingly abundant and precise data; in particular global satellite data, which complements and connects measurements on the ground or at low altitude.
Manabe, S., Smagorinsky, J., & Strickler, R. F. (1965). Simulated climatology of a general circulation model with a hydrologic cycle. Monthly Weather Review, 93(12), 769-798.
Smagorinsky, S. Manabe, and J. L. Holloway, “Numericd Results From a Nine-Level General Circulation Model of the Atmosphere,” Monthly Weather Review, vol. 93, No. 12, Dec. 1965, pp. 727-768.
Manabe, S., & Bryan, K. (1969). Climate calculations with a combined ocean-atmosphere model. J. Atmos. Sci, 26(4), 786-789.
Sellers, P. J., Mintz, Y. C. S. Y., Sud, Y. E. A., & Dalcher, A. (1986). A simple biosphere model (SiB) for use within general circulation models. Journal of the atmospheric sciences, 43(6), 505-531.
Meehl, G. A., & Washington, W. M. (1995). Cloud albedo feedback and the super greenhouse effect in a global coupled GCM. Climate dynamics, 11(7), 399-411.
Takemura, T., Okamoto, H., Maruyama, Y., Numaguti, A., Higurashi, A., & Nakajima, T. (2000). Global three‐dimensional simulation of aerosol optical thickness distribution of various origins. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 105(D14), 17853-17873.
Cox, P. M., Betts, R. A., Jones, C. D., Spall, S. A., & Totterdell, I. J. (2000). Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model. Nature, 408(6809), 184-187.
Watanabe, S., Hajima, T., Sudo, K., Nagashima, T., Takemura, T., Okajima, H., ... & Kawamiya, M. (2011). MIROC-ESM 2010: Model description and basic results of CMIP5-20c3m experiments. Geoscientific Model Development, 4(4), 845-872.
Collins, W. J., Bellouin, N., Doutriaux-Boucher, M., Gedney, N., Halloran, P., Hinton, T., ... & Woodward, S. (2011). Development and evaluation of an Earth-System model–HadGEM2. Geoscientific Model Development, 4(4), 1051-1075.
See Also:
Besbes, M., & Chahed, J. (2023). Predictability of water resources with global climate models. Case of Northern Tunisia. Comptes Rendus. Géoscience, 355(S1), 1-22. Available on:
Article Predictability of water resources with global climate models...
The famous article [1] by Solanki et al. 2004, on the Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades (1132 citations), reported that the Sun was responsible for all the global warming prior to 1970, at the most 30% of the strong warming since then can be of solar origin". This means that less than a third of global warming can be attributed to the Sun activity. What about the two remaining thirds?
To understand the question let's consider that the climatic parameter T (temperature), depends on Sun Activity (SA), GHG (so on Partial Pressures of all gases that compose the atmosphere, say for simplification x) and on a set of other climate parameters T(x,y, z...), (y, z...) being, for example, seismic activity, photosynthesis (all elements of carbon Nitrogen, phosphorus Cycles ..), etc. What is accessible to measurement is the total differential DT, which is written as a function of the partial differentials (dT) in the form:
The authors of the paper have achieved reconstructions of solar total and spectral irradiance as well as of cosmic ray fluxes. Let's consider that the parameter (SA) evolves and the calculation of its effect on (T) is DTSA we have thus:
DTSA=(dT/d(SA))D(SA)
By comparing with surface temperature records DT, the authors found that DTSA is at the most 30% of DT. So the 70% of DT which corresponds to DT-DTSA is given by:
DT-DTSA=(dT/dx)Dx+(dT/dy)Dy+(dT/dz)Dz+.....
Further research is needed in order to determine as much as possible the remaining partial derivatives. At the state of our knowledge, it is almost impossible to close the equation because some of the partial derivatives are not even understood.
[1] Solanki, S., Usoskin, I., Kromer, B. et al. Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years. Nature 431, 1084–1087 (2004).
Iceland volcano erupts on Reykjanes peninsula (BBC, 4 hours ago). Volcanic eruptions, always Fascinating in Beauty and Majesty, remind us in a spectacular way of essential factors in the heat balance of the globe: the transfers at the Visible Lithosphere-Atmosphere Interface in the form of Seismic and Volcanic Activities and the transfers at the Lithosphere-Hydrosphere interface, Invisible because they occur at the bottom of the oceans. Unlike the GHE, the effects of these activities on Climate Change are not well analyzed, at least in Climate Models, including those used in IPCC projections.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Climate_Change_and_Climate_Models_Progress_and_LimitsArticle Predictability of water resources with global climate models...
In these festive days, I would like to mention this 30 year old Paper, "Joy A. Palmer (1993) From Santa Claus to sustainability: emerging understanding of concepts and issues in environmental science, International Journal of Science Education, 15:5 , 487-495", in which the author discusses the nature and development of children's early knowledge and awareness of environmental issues. as strange as it may seem, we learn that "pre‐school children may well have a strong base of accurate scientific knowledge upon which early years environmental teaching may build." Happy Holidays For All