What’s Causing the Recent Spike in Global Temperatures?
For example, increased temperatures cause more moisture from the earth’s surface to evaporate into the atmosphere. As a result, there are more droughts around the world, more wildfires, and more flooding in areas already in danger of being consumed by water. Already, 20 to 30 percent of Bangladesh is underwater on a regular basis. This problem will... See more
Bill Gates • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (Random House Large Print)
Because of the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, the planet has been, for generations, re-radiating slightly less energy that it has been receiving from the Sun. By 2020, the net value of this difference was about 2 watts per square meter compared to the 1850 baseline.[53] Because oceans have an enormous capacity to absorb atmospheric heat
... See moreVaclav Smil • How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
The reason for this rapid increase in temperature is that we’re currently pumping around 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. And while efforts are underway to improve the situation, this number isn’t going down; in fact, it’s only getting bigger.
Bill Gates • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (Random House Large Print)
Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroi
... See moreElizabeth Kolbert • Under a White Sky
No one can say exactly how hot the world can get before out-and-out disaster—the inundation of a populous country like Bangladesh, say, or the collapse of crucial ecosystems like coral reefs—becomes inevitable. Officially, the threshold of catastrophe is an average global temperature rise of 2°C (3.6°F). Virtually every nation signed on to this fig
... See moreElizabeth Kolbert • Under a White Sky
while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.