environment global warming research paper

The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature

This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought. Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1°C warming reduces world GDP by 12%. Global temperature correlates strongly with extreme climatic events unlike country-level temperature used in previous work, explaining our larger estimate. We use this evidence to estimate damage functions in a neoclassical growth model. Business-as-usual warming implies a 29% present welfare loss and a Social Cost of Carbon of $1,065 per ton. These impacts suggest that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.

We thank Marios Angeletos, Marshall Burke, Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Simon Dietz, Stephane Hallegatte, Jim Hamilton, Xavier Jaravel, Ben Jones, Eben Lazarus, Pooya Molavi, Ishan Nath, Ben Olken, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Jon Steinsson, Jeffrey Shrader, Jim Stock and Chris Wolf for helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Ramya Raghavan, Lilian Hartmann and Cathy Wang for outstanding research assistance. Adrien Bilal gratefully acknowledges support from the Chae Family Economics Research Fund at Harvard University. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature

Mark Lynas 4,1 , Benjamin Z Houlton 2 and Simon Perry 3

Published 19 October 2021 • © 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd Environmental Research Letters , Volume 16 , Number 11 Citation Mark Lynas et al 2021 Environ. Res. Lett. 16 114005 DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

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1 Visiting Fellow, Cornell University, Global Development, Alliance for Science, B75 Mann Library, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States of America

2 Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Department of Global Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States of America

3 Alliance for Science, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States of America

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4 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed.

• Received 7 June 2021
• Accepted 23 September 2021
• Published 19 October 2021

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Method : Double-anonymous Revisions: 2 Screened for originality? Yes

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While controls over the Earth's climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.

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1. Introduction

The extent of the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is of great interest to society. If there remains substantial genuine scientific doubt about whether modern climate change is human-caused, then the case for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is weakened. By contrast, a widely-held consensus view in the peer-reviewed literature invalidates alternative arguments which claim that there is still significant debate in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change (ACC).

The question of the cause of observed and predicted global warming and precipitation change is still highly politically salient. A Gallup poll published in April 2021 found that there has been a deepening of the partisan divide in American politics on whether observed increases in the planet's temperature since the Industrial Revolution are primarily caused by humans [ 1 ]. Among elected U.S. politicians the divide is similarly stark: according to the Center for American Progress there were 139 elected officials in the 117th Congress (sitting in 2021), including 109 representatives and 30 senators, 'who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change' [ 2 ]. In 2016 Pew Research found that only 27% of U.S. adults believed that 'almost all' scientists agreed that climate change is due to human activity [ 3 ].

Many efforts have been made over the years to quantify the extent of the scientific consensus on ACC [ 4 , 5 ]. These are comprehensively reviewed in a paper published in 2016 entitled 'Consensus on consensus' [ 6 ]. It has additionally been argued that perception of scientific consensus is a 'gateway belief' motivating wider public support for mitigation of climate change [ 7 ]. While scientific consensus does not sensu stricto prove a statement about the physical world, science-based anlaysis and hypothesis testing is capable of disproving alternative constructs, which could explain a given observation, either absolutely or relatively [ 8 ]. Hence, quantifying the scientific consensus clarifies the extent of any dissent in the scientific community in the process of disproval, and the plausible validity of alternative hypotheses in the face of scientific scrutiny, observations, and testing over time.

The most recent well-known effort to quantify the consensus was published in 2013, encompassing papers appearing in the peer-reviewed literature between 1991 and 2012, and sparked the famous headline that 97% of the world's science supported the climate change consensus [ 9 ]. The '97% consensus' view (published by Cook et al 2013, referred to hereafter as C13) had a big impact on global awareness of the scientific consensus on the role of greenhouse gases in causing climate change and was extensively covered in the media. Our primary motivation for this current study was to re-examine the literature published since 2012 to ascertain whether any change in the scientific consensus on climate change is discernible.

Previous attempts to quantify the consensus on climate change have employed many different methodologies, varying from expert elicitation to examination of abstracts returned by a keyword search. We base our methodology on C13 with some important refinements. We searched the Web of Science for English language 'articles' added between the dates of 2012 and November 2020 with the keywords 'climate change', 'global climate change' and 'global warming'. C13 used the latter two phrases but not 'climate change' without the preceding 'global'. (As discussed below, this was justified post-facto in our study because the majority of sceptical papers we found would not have been returned had we used the same search phrases as C13.) This wider set of search terms yielded a total of 88125 papers, whereas C13 identified a total of 11944 abstracts from papers published over the years 1991 and 2011. (Using our expanded search terms over the same 1991–2011 time period as C13 would have yielded 30627 results.)

Given the large number of papers found using our approach we randomly sub-sampled 3000 abstracts out of the 88125 total papers identified in our search, and subsequently categorized them in accordance with C13 (See table 1 ).

Table 1.  Categorization of climate papers, as per C13.

As per C13 we rated the abstracts of papers, assigning them numbers according to their level of implicit or explicit endorsement or rejection of ACC (table 2 ). Abstracts were rated with only the title and abstract visible; information about authors, date and journal were hidden at this stage.

Table 2.  Rating of climate papers, as per C13.

To further extend our approach for identifying as many sceptical papers as possible within the full dataset, we created an algorithm to identify keywords within the papers rated by C13 as sceptical that had appeared more often in sceptical papers than consensus papers. The software counted the appearance of every word in the title, author list and abstract of every sceptical paper. For each word that appeared in at least two papers, the algorithm counted the number of sceptical and consensus papers it appeared in to calculate its predictive power. We took the 150 most predictive words, then manually reviewed them to remove words that appeared to be there by chance (e.g. 'walk' and 'nearest') leaving those we believed could be predictively useful (e.g. 'cosmic' and 'rays'). A second algorithm then scored all 88125 papers (including the 3000 sampled separately earlier) based on the appearance of the predictive words. (See supplementary info for precise details of this exercise (available online at stacks.iop.org/ERL/16/114005/mmedia )). We then rated and categorized the 1000 papers with the highest score using the same approaches from C13 as detailed in tables 1 and 2 . As stated earlier, this approach was taken in order to increase the chances of us finding sceptical papers in the full dataset, allowing for a robust assessment and inclusion of any dissent.

In contrast to C13, we did not perform an author elicitation survey asking authors to carry out a self-rating of their papers.

3.1. Results of random sampling

Our random sample of 3000 papers revealed a total of 282 papers that were categorized as 'not climate-related'. These false-positives occurred because, even though the climate keywords occurred in their title/abstracts, the published articles dealt with social science, education or research about people's views on climate change rather than original scientific work. Hence, we excluded these papers in accordance with C13's approach. We then assessed the remaining total of 2718 papers in the data set and found four that argued against the scientific consensus of ACC.

The ratings and categorizations for the 3000 randomly sampled papers are shown in table 3 . Note that 'not climate-related' papers are displayed in table 3 for completeness. Figure 1 shows the same data, but with 'not climate-related' papers excluded.

Figure 1.   Ratings and categorizations given to 2718 randomly-sampled climate abstracts.

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Table 3.  Results of rating and categorization of 3000 abstracts.

Our estimate of the proportion of consensus papers was 1 − (4/2718) = 99.85%. The 95% confidence limits for this proportion are 99.62%–99.96% (see R code in supplementary info), therefore it is likely that the proportion of climate papers that favour the consensus is at least 99.62%.

Recalculating at the 99.999% confidence level gives us the interval 99.212%–99.996%, therefore it is virtually certain that the proportion of climate papers that do not dispute that the consensus is above 99.212%.

If we repeat the methods of C13 and further exclude papers that take no position on AGW (i.e. those rated 4a), we estimate the proportion of consensus papers to be 99.53% with the 95% confidence interval being 98.80%–99.87%.

3.2. Keywords indicating scepticism

We reviewed the 1000 studies that our keyword matching software identified as most likely to be sceptical out of the entire 88125 dataset. After manual review, 28 sceptical papers within the most likely 1000 papers were identified, with the majority being in the top rows of the dataset. The first paper was sceptical, as were 12 out of the first 50, and 16 out of the first 100. (See supplementary data for the full list.) Table 4 shows how the 1000 studies that the keywords found to be most likely to be sceptical were rated.

Table 4.  Ratings and categorizations for the 1000 abstracts most likely to be sceptical.

In other words, the predictive keywords successfully allowed us to identify a total of 28 papers from the full dataset of 88125 which appeared implicitly or explicitly sceptical of ACC. Only one of these papers had already appeared in the first 3000 randomized sample. While we are aware that this approach does not reveal all sceptical papers that exist in the full dataset, it provides an absolute upper bound to the percentage of papers that agree with the consensus. Knowing that at least 31 (including the 3 additional papers found in the random sample) out of the full 88125 dataset are sceptical, we can say the consensus on ACC is at most 99.966%.

4. Discussion

Our analysis demonstrates >99% agreement in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on the principal role of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activities in driving modern climate change (i.e. since the Industrial Revolution). This result further advances our understanding of the scientific consensus view on climate change as evidenced by the peer reviewed scientific literature, and provides additional evidence that the statements made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see below) accurately reflect the overwhelming view of the international scientific community. We conclude that alternative explanations for the dominant cause of modern (i.e., post-industrial) climate change beyond the role of rising GHG emissions from human activities are exceedingly rare in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Previous researchers have debated how to define and therefore quantify 'consensus' in the scientific literature on an array of issues. While C13 define consensus rather narrowly as explicit or implicit agreement, a broader definition can be employed which defines consensus as lack of objection to a prevailing position or worldview. In 2015 James Powell argued for this broader definition, pointing out that the C13 methodology, if applied to other scientific research areas such as plate tectonics or evolution, would fail to find consensus because few authors of papers in the expert literature feel the need to re-state their adherence in both cases to what has long been universally-accepted theory [ 10 ].

In a rejoinder to this critique, several C13 authors argued that their narrower definition of consensus was still relevant in other well-established fields if both implicit and explicit agreement was included [ 11 ]. Therefore in plate tectonics, for example, sea-floor spreading, mountain-building by means of continental collision, subduction etc, could be implicitly supportive of a consensus on the reality of the theory of plate tectonics without this necessarily being explicitly stated.

In our paper, for the sake of clarity and comparability with previous literature, we present results using both approaches. However, having reviewed, rated and categorized several thousand papers we believe that there is now a stronger case for the broader approach given how widely accepted ACC has become in the peer-reviewed literature. For example, a majority of the papers we categorized as being about 'impacts' of climate change did not state a position on whether the phenomenon they were studying—the changing climate—was human-caused. It seems highly unlikely that if researchers felt sceptical about the reality of ACC they would publish numerous studies of its impacts without ever raising the question of attribution.

In other words, given that most 4a ('no position') ratings do not either explicitly or implicitly differ from the consensus view of GHG emissions as the principal driver of climate change it does not follow in our view that these analyses should be a priori excluded from the consensus. In another example, we gave rating '2' ('explicit endorsement without quantification') to all papers referencing future emissions scenarios in their abstracts, because emissions scenarios by definition imply an evaluation of humanity's role in GHG emissions and their subsequent impact on climate. Thus the authors choice of wording on emissions scenarios or other issues implying human causation to climate change in the abstracts of their climate impact studies might lead to arbitrariness if these were taken as the sole indicators of the authors' adherence to the consensus on ACC.

In addition, decisions about whether to give rating '3' ('implicit endorsement') are subjective in that the rating of a position on ACC is considered to be implied by the authors without this being explicitly stated in the abstract of a paper. Thus subjective judgements by those doing the ratings about the implicit meanings communicated by abstract wording choices of paper authors are critical to the numerical consensus result obtained using C13's method, potentially introducing a source of bias. It is unclear to us why this is preferable to defining consensus in a clearer and more objectively transparent way as simply the absence of clearly-stated rejection or disagreement.

We also note that our keyword choices, in particular not requiring the word 'global' in front of 'climate change' led to our discovery of many sceptical papers that would not have been identified by searches only of 'global warming' and 'global climate change'. This suggests—but does not prove—that a number of sceptical papers may have been missed in the original C13 study. However, these minor disagreements aside, we are indebted to C13 for the rigor of their methodology, much of which we re-employ directly here.

4.1. Review of sceptical papers

In supplementary table 1 we present the full list of all 31 sceptical papers we found in our dataset. An in-depth evaluation of their merits is outside the scope of this paper, and could be an interesting area for further work. We note some recurring themes however, such as the hypothesis that changes in cosmic rays are significantly influencing the Earth's changes in climate, that the Sun is driving modern climate change, or that natural fluctuations are somehow involved. An additional area of research might investigate how far these themes in the published literature are reflected in popular discourse outside of the scientific community.

5. Conclusion

Our results confirm, as has been found in numerous other previous studies of this question, that there is no significant scientific debate among experts about whether or not climate change is human-caused. This issue has been comprehensively settled, and the reality of ACC is no more in contention among scientists than is plate tectonics or evolution. The tiny number of papers that have been published during our time period which disagree with this overwhelming scientific consensus have had no discernible impact, presumably because they do not provide any convincing evidence to refute the hypothesis that—in the words of IPCC AR5—'it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century' [ 12 ], and, most recently in IPCC AR6—'it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land' [ 13 ].

Our finding is that the broadly-defined scientific consensus likely far exceeds 99% regarding the role of anthropogenic GHG emissions in modern climate change, and may even be as high as 99.9%. Of course, the prevalence of mis/disinformation about the role of GHG emissions in modern climate change is unlikely to be driven purely by genuine scientific illiteracy or lack of understanding [ 14 ]. Even so, in our view it remains important to continue to inform society on the state of the evidence. According to the IPCC AR6 summary and many other previous studies, mitigating future warming requires urgent efforts to eliminate fossil fuels combustion and other major sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Our study helps confirm that there is no remaining scientific uncertainty about the urgency and gravity of this task.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank David Colquhoun for helpful discussions about the statistical methodology. We would also like to thank John Cook for useful comments on an early draft, and Sarah Evanega at the Alliance for Science. Support for the Alliance for Science is provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Data availability statement

All data that support the findings of this study are included within the article (and any supplementary files).

Author contributions

M L conceived the paper. S P wrote software and algorithms for data extraction and performed data analysis. M L performed ratings and categorizations. B H, S P and M L wrote the paper.

Supplementary information

Random sample of 3000 papers

Initial data with random order added.xlsx

wordAnalysis-flagged

Studies predicted to be sceptical by manually selected predictive keywords

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Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying – ipcc.

GENEVA, Aug 9 – Scientists are observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.

However, strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While benefits for air quality would come quickly, it could take 20-30 years to see global temperatures stabilize, according to the IPCC Working Group I report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis , approved on Friday by 195 member governments of the IPCC, through a virtual approval session that was held over two weeks starting on July 26.

The Working Group I report is the first instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which will be completed in 2022.

“This report reflects extraordinary efforts under exceptional circumstances,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC. “The innovations in this report, and advances in climate science that it reflects, provide an invaluable input into climate negotiations and decision-making.”

Faster warming

The report provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades, and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.

The report shows that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming. This assessment is based on improved observational datasets to assess historical warming, as well progress in scientific understanding of the response of the climate system to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

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Every region facing increasing changes

Many characteristics of climate change directly depend on the level of global warming, but what people experience is often very different to the global average. For example, warming over land is larger than the global average, and it is more than twice as high in the Arctic.

“Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth, in multiple ways. The changes we experience will increase with additional warming,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Panmao Zhai.

The report projects that in the coming decades climate changes will increase in all regions. For 1.5°C of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons. At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows.

But it is not just about temperature. Climate change is bringing multiple different changes in different regions – which will all increase with further warming. These include changes to wetness and dryness, to winds, snow and ice, coastal areas and oceans. For example:

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• Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns. In high latitudes, precipitation is likely to increase, while it is projected to decrease over large parts of the subtropics. Changes to monsoon precipitation are expected, which will vary by region.
• Coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding in low-lying areas and coastal erosion. Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.
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• Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels have been clearly linked to human influence. These changes affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of this century.
• For cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea level rise in coastal cities.

For the first time, the Sixth Assessment Report provides a more detailed regional assessment of climate change, including a focus on useful information that can inform risk assessment, adaptation, and other decision-making, and a new framework that helps translate physical changes in the climate – heat, cold, rain, drought, snow, wind, coastal flooding and more – into what they mean for society and ecosystems.

This regional information can be explored in detail in the newly developed Interactive Atlas interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch as well as regional fact sheets, the technical summary, and underlying report.

Human influence on the past and future climate

“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed,” said Masson-Delmotte. Yet the new report also reflects major advances in the science of attribution – understanding the role of climate change in intensifying specific weather and climate events such as extreme heat waves and heavy rainfall events.

The report also shows that human actions still have the potential to determine the future course of climate. The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is the main driver of climate change, even as other greenhouse gases and air pollutants also affect the climate.

“Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO 2 emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate,” said Zhai.

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Notes for Editors

Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Working Group I report addresses the most updated physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, global and regional climate simulations. It shows how and why climate has changed to date, and the improved understanding of human influence on a wider range of climate characteristics, including extreme events. There will be a greater focus on regional information that can be used for climate risk assessments.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) as well as additional materials and information are available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

Note : Originally scheduled for release in April 2021, the report was delayed for several months by the COVID-19 pandemic, as work in the scientific community including the IPCC shifted online. This is first time that the IPCC has conducted a virtual approval session for one of its reports.

AR6 Working Group I in numbers

234 authors from 66 countries

• 31 – coordinating authors
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• 36 – review editors
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Over 14,000 cited references

A total of 78,007 expert and government review comments

(First Order Draft 23,462; Second Order Draft 51,387; Final Government Distribution: 3,158)

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About the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide political leaders with periodic scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. In the same year the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by the WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC. It has 195 member states.

Thousands of people from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC. For the assessment reports, IPCC scientists volunteer their time to assess the thousands of scientific papers published each year to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks.

The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I , dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II , dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III , dealing with the mitigation of climate change. It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals. As part of the IPCC, a Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) provides guidance to the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) on curation, traceability, stability, availability and transparency of data and scenarios related to the reports of the IPCC.

IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency. An IPCC assessment report consists of the contributions of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. The Synthesis Report integrates the findings of the three working group reports and of any special reports prepared in that assessment cycle.

About the Sixth Assessment Cycle

At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015 it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and the Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle.

Global Warming of 1.5°C , an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty was launched in October 2018.

Climate Change and Land , an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems was launched in August 2019, and the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate was released in September 2019.

In May 2019 the IPCC released the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories , an update to the methodology used by governments to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions and removals.

The other two Working Group contributions to the AR6 will be finalized in 2022 and the AR6 Synthesis Report will be completed in the second half of 2022.

For more information go to www.ipcc.ch

The website includes outreach materials including videos about the IPCC and video recordings from outreach events conducted as webinars or live-streamed events.

Most videos published by the IPCC can be found on our YouTube and Vimeo channels.

Climate Change: Evidence and Causes: Update 2020 (2020)

Chapter: conclusion, c onclusion.

This document explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It discusses the evidence that the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of the recent change is almost certainly due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. Further climate change is inevitable; if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, future changes will substantially exceed those that have occurred so far. There remains a range of estimates of the magnitude and regional expression of future change, but increases in the extremes of climate that can adversely affect natural ecosystems and human activities and infrastructure are expected.

Citizens and governments can choose among several options (or a mixture of those options) in response to this information: they can change their pattern of energy production and usage in order to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and hence the magnitude of climate changes; they can wait for changes to occur and accept the losses, damage, and suffering that arise; they can adapt to actual and expected changes as much as possible; or they can seek as yet unproven “geoengineering” solutions to counteract some of the climate changes that would otherwise occur. Each of these options has risks, attractions and costs, and what is actually done may be a mixture of these different options. Different nations and communities will vary in their vulnerability and their capacity to adapt. There is an important debate to be had about choices among these options, to decide what is best for each group or nation, and most importantly for the global population as a whole. The options have to be discussed at a global scale because in many cases those communities that are most vulnerable control few of the emissions, either past or future. Our description of the science of climate change, with both its facts and its uncertainties, is offered as a basis to inform that policy debate.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following individuals served as the primary writing team for the 2014 and 2020 editions of this document:

• Eric Wolff FRS, (UK lead), University of Cambridge
• Inez Fung (NAS, US lead), University of California, Berkeley
• Brian Hoskins FRS, Grantham Institute for Climate Change
• John F.B. Mitchell FRS, UK Met Office
• Tim Palmer FRS, University of Oxford
• Benjamin Santer (NAS), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• John Shepherd FRS, University of Southampton
• Keith Shine FRS, University of Reading.
• Susan Solomon (NAS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Walsh, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
• Don Wuebbles, University of Illinois

Staff support for the 2020 revision was provided by Richard Walker, Amanda Purcell, Nancy Huddleston, and Michael Hudson. We offer special thanks to Rebecca Lindsey and NOAA Climate.gov for providing data and figure updates.

The following individuals served as reviewers of the 2014 document in accordance with procedures approved by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences:

• Richard Alley (NAS), Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University
• Alec Broers FRS, Former President of the Royal Academy of Engineering
• Harry Elderfield FRS, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
• Joanna Haigh FRS, Professor of Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London
• Isaac Held (NAS), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
• John Kutzbach (NAS), Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin
• Jerry Meehl, Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London
• John Pyle FRS, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
• Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey
• Gabrielle Walker, Journalist
• Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia

The Support for the 2014 Edition was provided by NAS Endowment Funds. We offer sincere thanks to the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Endowment for NAS Missions for supporting the production of this 2020 Edition.

F OR FURTHER READING

For more detailed discussion of the topics addressed in this document (including references to the underlying original research), see:

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019: Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate [ https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc ]
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2019: Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259 ]
• Royal Society, 2018: Greenhouse gas removal [ https://raeng.org.uk/greenhousegasremoval ]
• U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), 2018: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States [ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov ]
• IPCC, 2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C [ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 ]
• USGCRP, 2017: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume I: Climate Science Special Reports [ https://science2017.globalchange.gov ]
• NASEM, 2016: Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21852 ]
• IPCC, 2013: Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group 1. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 ]
• NRC, 2013: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373 ]
• NRC, 2011: Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12877 ]
• Royal Society 2010: Climate Change: A Summary of the Science [ https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2010/climate-change-summary-science ]
• NRC, 2010: America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12782 ]

Much of the original data underlying the scientific findings discussed here are available at:

• https://data.ucar.edu/
• https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu
• https://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu
• https://ess-dive.lbl.gov/
• https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
• https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
• http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu
• http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth's climate. The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, with their similar missions to promote the use of science to benefit society and to inform critical policy debates, produced the original Climate Change: Evidence and Causes in 2014. It was written and reviewed by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists. This new edition, prepared by the same author team, has been updated with the most recent climate data and scientific analyses, all of which reinforce our understanding of human-caused climate change.

Scientific information is a vital component for society to make informed decisions about how to reduce the magnitude of climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. This booklet serves as a key reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and others seeking authoritative answers about the current state of climate-change science.

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A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures

• Review Article
• Published: 04 April 2022
• Volume 29 , pages 42539–42559, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

• Kashif Abbass 1 ,
• Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim 2 ,
• Huaming Song 1 ,
• Muntasir Murshed   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9872-8742 3 , 4 ,
• Haider Mahmood   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6474-4338 5 &
• Ijaz Younis 1  

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Climate change is a long-lasting change in the weather arrays across tropics to polls. It is a global threat that has embarked on to put stress on various sectors. This study is aimed to conceptually engineer how climate variability is deteriorating the sustainability of diverse sectors worldwide. Specifically, the agricultural sector’s vulnerability is a globally concerning scenario, as sufficient production and food supplies are threatened due to irreversible weather fluctuations. In turn, it is challenging the global feeding patterns, particularly in countries with agriculture as an integral part of their economy and total productivity. Climate change has also put the integrity and survival of many species at stake due to shifts in optimum temperature ranges, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss by progressively changing the ecosystem structures. Climate variations increase the likelihood of particular food and waterborne and vector-borne diseases, and a recent example is a coronavirus pandemic. Climate change also accelerates the enigma of antimicrobial resistance, another threat to human health due to the increasing incidence of resistant pathogenic infections. Besides, the global tourism industry is devastated as climate change impacts unfavorable tourism spots. The methodology investigates hypothetical scenarios of climate variability and attempts to describe the quality of evidence to facilitate readers’ careful, critical engagement. Secondary data is used to identify sustainability issues such as environmental, social, and economic viability. To better understand the problem, gathered the information in this report from various media outlets, research agencies, policy papers, newspapers, and other sources. This review is a sectorial assessment of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches worldwide in the aforementioned sectors and the associated economic costs. According to the findings, government involvement is necessary for the country’s long-term development through strict accountability of resources and regulations implemented in the past to generate cutting-edge climate policy. Therefore, mitigating the impacts of climate change must be of the utmost importance, and hence, this global threat requires global commitment to address its dreadful implications to ensure global sustenance.

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Introduction

Worldwide observed and anticipated climatic changes for the twenty-first century and global warming are significant global changes that have been encountered during the past 65 years. Climate change (CC) is an inter-governmental complex challenge globally with its influence over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines (Adger et al.  2005 ; Leal Filho et al.  2021 ; Feliciano et al.  2022 ). Climate change involves heightened temperatures across numerous worlds (Battisti and Naylor  2009 ; Schuurmans  2021 ; Weisheimer and Palmer  2005 ; Yadav et al.  2015 ). With the onset of the industrial revolution, the problem of earth climate was amplified manifold (Leppänen et al.  2014 ). It is reported that the immediate attention and due steps might increase the probability of overcoming its devastating impacts. It is not plausible to interpret the exact consequences of climate change (CC) on a sectoral basis (Izaguirre et al.  2021 ; Jurgilevich et al.  2017 ), which is evident by the emerging level of recognition plus the inclusion of climatic uncertainties at both local and national level of policymaking (Ayers et al.  2014 ).

Climate change is characterized based on the comprehensive long-haul temperature and precipitation trends and other components such as pressure and humidity level in the surrounding environment. Besides, the irregular weather patterns, retreating of global ice sheets, and the corresponding elevated sea level rise are among the most renowned international and domestic effects of climate change (Lipczynska-Kochany  2018 ; Michel et al.  2021 ; Murshed and Dao 2020 ). Before the industrial revolution, natural sources, including volcanoes, forest fires, and seismic activities, were regarded as the distinct sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and H 2 O into the atmosphere (Murshed et al. 2020 ; Hussain et al.  2020 ; Sovacool et al.  2021 ; Usman and Balsalobre-Lorente 2022 ; Murshed 2022 ). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) struck a major agreement to tackle climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments required for a sustainable low-carbon future at Conference of the Parties (COP-21) in Paris on December 12, 2015. The Paris Agreement expands on the Convention by bringing all nations together for the first time in a single cause to undertake ambitious measures to prevent climate change and adapt to its impacts, with increased funding to assist developing countries in doing so. As so, it marks a turning point in the global climate fight. The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to improve the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C (Sharma et al. 2020 ; Sharif et al. 2020 ; Chien et al. 2021 .

Furthermore, the agreement aspires to strengthen nations’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and align financing flows with low GHG emissions and climate-resilient paths (Shahbaz et al. 2019 ; Anwar et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2022a ). To achieve these lofty goals, adequate financial resources must be mobilized and provided, as well as a new technology framework and expanded capacity building, allowing developing countries and the most vulnerable countries to act under their respective national objectives. The agreement also establishes a more transparent action and support mechanism. All Parties are required by the Paris Agreement to do their best through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the coming years (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2020 ). It includes obligations that all Parties regularly report on their emissions and implementation activities. A global stock-take will be conducted every five years to review collective progress toward the agreement’s goal and inform the Parties’ future individual actions. The Paris Agreement became available for signature on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On November 4, 2016, it went into effect 30 days after the so-called double threshold was met (ratification by 55 nations accounting for at least 55% of world emissions). More countries have ratified and continue to ratify the agreement since then, bringing 125 Parties in early 2017. To fully operationalize the Paris Agreement, a work program was initiated in Paris to define mechanisms, processes, and recommendations on a wide range of concerns (Murshed et al. 2021 ). Since 2016, Parties have collaborated in subsidiary bodies (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) and numerous formed entities. The Conference of the Parties functioning as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) convened for the first time in November 2016 in Marrakesh in conjunction with COP22 and made its first two resolutions. The work plan is scheduled to be finished by 2018. Some mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the emission in the prospective of Paris agreement are following firstly, a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, secondly, to aim to limit the rise to 1.5 °C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change, thirdly, on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognizing that this will take longer for developing countries, lastly, to undertake rapid reductions after that under the best available science, to achieve a balance between emissions and removals in the second half of the century. On the other side, some adaptation strategies are; strengthening societies’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and to continue & expand international assistance for developing nations’ adaptation.

However, anthropogenic activities are currently regarded as most accountable for CC (Murshed et al. 2022 ). Apart from the industrial revolution, other anthropogenic activities include excessive agricultural operations, which further involve the high use of fuel-based mechanization, burning of agricultural residues, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, national and domestic transportation sectors, etc. (Huang et al.  2016 ). Consequently, these anthropogenic activities lead to climatic catastrophes, damaging local and global infrastructure, human health, and total productivity. Energy consumption has mounted GHGs levels concerning warming temperatures as most of the energy production in developing countries comes from fossil fuels (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2022 ; Usman et al. 2022b ; Abbass et al. 2021a ; Ishikawa-Ishiwata and Furuya  2022 ).

This review aims to highlight the effects of climate change in a socio-scientific aspect by analyzing the existing literature on various sectorial pieces of evidence globally that influence the environment. Although this review provides a thorough examination of climate change and its severe affected sectors that pose a grave danger for global agriculture, biodiversity, health, economy, forestry, and tourism, and to purpose some practical prophylactic measures and mitigation strategies to be adapted as sound substitutes to survive from climate change (CC) impacts. The societal implications of irregular weather patterns and other effects of climate changes are discussed in detail. Some numerous sustainable mitigation measures and adaptation practices and techniques at the global level are discussed in this review with an in-depth focus on its economic, social, and environmental aspects. Methods of data collection section are included in the supplementary information.

Review methodology

Related study and its objectives.

Today, we live an ordinary life in the beautiful digital, globalized world where climate change has a decisive role. What happens in one country has a massive influence on geographically far apart countries, which points to the current crisis known as COVID-19 (Sarkar et al.  2021 ). The most dangerous disease like COVID-19 has affected the world’s climate changes and economic conditions (Abbass et al. 2022 ; Pirasteh-Anosheh et al.  2021 ). The purpose of the present study is to review the status of research on the subject, which is based on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures” by systematically reviewing past published and unpublished research work. Furthermore, the current study seeks to comment on research on the same topic and suggest future research on the same topic. Specifically, the present study aims: The first one is, organize publications to make them easy and quick to find. Secondly, to explore issues in this area, propose an outline of research for future work. The third aim of the study is to synthesize the previous literature on climate change, various sectors, and their mitigation measurement. Lastly , classify the articles according to the different methods and procedures that have been adopted.

Review methodology for reviewers

This review-based article followed systematic literature review techniques that have proved the literature review as a rigorous framework (Benita  2021 ; Tranfield et al.  2003 ). Moreover, we illustrate in Fig.  1 the search method that we have started for this research. First, finalized the research theme to search literature (Cooper et al.  2018 ). Second, used numerous research databases to search related articles and download from the database (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus Index Journals, Emerald, Elsevier Science Direct, Springer, and Sciverse). We focused on various articles, with research articles, feedback pieces, short notes, debates, and review articles published in scholarly journals. Reports used to search for multiple keywords such as “Climate Change,” “Mitigation and Adaptation,” “Department of Agriculture and Human Health,” “Department of Biodiversity and Forestry,” etc.; in summary, keyword list and full text have been made. Initially, the search for keywords yielded a large amount of literature.

Source : constructed by authors

Methodology search for finalized articles for investigations.

Since 2020, it has been impossible to review all the articles found; some restrictions have been set for the literature exhibition. The study searched 95 articles on a different database mentioned above based on the nature of the study. It excluded 40 irrelevant papers due to copied from a previous search after readings tiles, abstract and full pieces. The criteria for inclusion were: (i) articles focused on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures,” and (ii) the search key terms related to study requirements. The complete procedure yielded 55 articles for our study. We repeat our search on the “Web of Science and Google Scholars” database to enhance the search results and check the referenced articles.

In this study, 55 articles are reviewed systematically and analyzed for research topics and other aspects, such as the methods, contexts, and theories used in these studies. Furthermore, this study analyzes closely related areas to provide unique research opportunities in the future. The study also discussed future direction opportunities and research questions by understanding the research findings climate changes and other affected sectors. The reviewed paper framework analysis process is outlined in Fig.  2 .

Framework of the analysis Process.

Natural disasters and climate change’s socio-economic consequences

Natural and environmental disasters can be highly variable from year to year; some years pass with very few deaths before a significant disaster event claims many lives (Symanski et al.  2021 ). Approximately 60,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year on average over the past decade (Ritchie and Roser  2014 ; Wiranata and Simbolon  2021 ). So, according to the report, around 0.1% of global deaths. Annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades are shown in Fig.  3 . The number of fatalities can be meager—sometimes less than 10,000, and as few as 0.01% of all deaths. But shock events have a devastating impact: the 1983–1985 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti and now recent example is COVID-19 pandemic (Erman et al.  2021 ). These events pushed global disaster deaths to over 200,000—more than 0.4% of deaths in these years. Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. Historical evidence shows that earlier disaster detection, more robust infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response programmers have substantially reduced disaster deaths worldwide. Low-income is also the most vulnerable to disasters; improving living conditions, facilities, and response services in these areas would be critical in reducing natural disaster deaths in the coming decades.

Source EMDAT ( 2020 )

Global deaths from natural disasters, 1978 to 2020.

The interior regions of the continent are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures (Dimri et al.  2018 ; Goes et al.  2020 ; Mannig et al.  2018 ; Schuurmans  2021 ). Weather patterns change due to the shortage of natural resources (water), increase in glacier melting, and rising mercury are likely to cause extinction to many planted species (Gampe et al.  2016 ; Mihiretu et al.  2021 ; Shaffril et al.  2018 ).On the other hand, the coastal ecosystem is on the verge of devastation (Perera et al.  2018 ; Phillips  2018 ). The temperature rises, insect disease outbreaks, health-related problems, and seasonal and lifestyle changes are persistent, with a strong probability of these patterns continuing in the future (Abbass et al. 2021c ; Hussain et al.  2018 ). At the global level, a shortage of good infrastructure and insufficient adaptive capacity are hammering the most (IPCC  2013 ). In addition to the above concerns, a lack of environmental education and knowledge, outdated consumer behavior, a scarcity of incentives, a lack of legislation, and the government’s lack of commitment to climate change contribute to the general public’s concerns. By 2050, a 2 to 3% rise in mercury and a drastic shift in rainfall patterns may have serious consequences (Huang et al. 2022 ; Gorst et al.  2018 ). Natural and environmental calamities caused huge losses globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein  2017 ; Ramankutty et al.  2018 ; Yu et al.  2021 ) (Table 1 ). Furthermore, in the last 3 or 4 years, the world has been plagued by smog-related eye and skin diseases, as well as a rise in road accidents due to poor visibility.

Climate change and agriculture

Global agriculture is the ultimate sector responsible for 30–40% of all greenhouse emissions, which makes it a leading industry predominantly contributing to climate warming and significantly impacted by it (Grieg; Mishra et al.  2021 ; Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Thornton and Lipper  2014 ). Numerous agro-environmental and climatic factors that have a dominant influence on agriculture productivity (Pautasso et al.  2012 ) are significantly impacted in response to precipitation extremes including floods, forest fires, and droughts (Huang  2004 ). Besides, the immense dependency on exhaustible resources also fuels the fire and leads global agriculture to become prone to devastation. Godfray et al. ( 2010 ) mentioned that decline in agriculture challenges the farmer’s quality of life and thus a significant factor to poverty as the food and water supplies are critically impacted by CC (Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Rosenzweig et al.  2014 ). As an essential part of the economic systems, especially in developing countries, agricultural systems affect the overall economy and potentially the well-being of households (Schlenker and Roberts  2009 ). According to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, i.e., CH 4, CO 2 , and N 2 O, are increased in the air to extraordinary levels over the last few centuries (Usman and Makhdum 2021 ; Stocker et al.  2013 ). Climate change is the composite outcome of two different factors. The first is the natural causes, and the second is the anthropogenic actions (Karami 2012 ). It is also forecasted that the world may experience a typical rise in temperature stretching from 1 to 3.7 °C at the end of this century (Pachauri et al. 2014 ). The world’s crop production is also highly vulnerable to these global temperature-changing trends as raised temperatures will pose severe negative impacts on crop growth (Reidsma et al. 2009 ). Some of the recent modeling about the fate of global agriculture is briefly described below.

Decline in cereal productivity

Crop productivity will also be affected dramatically in the next few decades due to variations in integral abiotic factors such as temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and CO 2 . These all factors are included in various regulatory instruments like progress and growth, weather-tempted changes, pest invasions (Cammell and Knight 1992 ), accompanying disease snags (Fand et al. 2012 ), water supplies (Panda et al. 2003 ), high prices of agro-products in world’s agriculture industry, and preeminent quantity of fertilizer consumption. Lobell and field ( 2007 ) claimed that from 1962 to 2002, wheat crop output had condensed significantly due to rising temperatures. Therefore, during 1980–2011, the common wheat productivity trends endorsed extreme temperature events confirmed by Gourdji et al. ( 2013 ) around South Asia, South America, and Central Asia. Various other studies (Asseng, Cao, Zhang, and Ludwig 2009 ; Asseng et al. 2013 ; García et al. 2015 ; Ortiz et al. 2021 ) also proved that wheat output is negatively affected by the rising temperatures and also caused adverse effects on biomass productivity (Calderini et al. 1999 ; Sadras and Slafer 2012 ). Hereafter, the rice crop is also influenced by the high temperatures at night. These difficulties will worsen because the temperature will be rising further in the future owing to CC (Tebaldi et al. 2006 ). Another research conducted in China revealed that a 4.6% of rice production per 1 °C has happened connected with the advancement in night temperatures (Tao et al. 2006 ). Moreover, the average night temperature growth also affected rice indicia cultivar’s output pragmatically during 25 years in the Philippines (Peng et al. 2004 ). It is anticipated that the increase in world average temperature will also cause a substantial reduction in yield (Hatfield et al. 2011 ; Lobell and Gourdji 2012 ). In the southern hemisphere, Parry et al. ( 2007 ) noted a rise of 1–4 °C in average daily temperatures at the end of spring season unti the middle of summers, and this raised temperature reduced crop output by cutting down the time length for phenophases eventually reduce the yield (Hatfield and Prueger 2015 ; R. Ortiz 2008 ). Also, world climate models have recommended that humid and subtropical regions expect to be plentiful prey to the upcoming heat strokes (Battisti and Naylor 2009 ). Grain production is the amalgamation of two constituents: the average weight and the grain output/m 2 , however, in crop production. Crop output is mainly accredited to the grain quantity (Araus et al. 2008 ; Gambín and Borrás 2010 ). In the times of grain set, yield resources are mainly strewn between hitherto defined components, i.e., grain usual weight and grain output, which presents a trade-off between them (Gambín and Borrás 2010 ) beside disparities in per grain integration (B. L. Gambín et al. 2006 ). In addition to this, the maize crop is also susceptible to raised temperatures, principally in the flowering stage (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). In reality, the lower grain number is associated with insufficient acclimatization due to intense photosynthesis and higher respiration and the high-temperature effect on the reproduction phenomena (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). During the flowering phase, maize visible to heat (30–36 °C) seemed less anthesis-silking intermissions (Edreira et al. 2011 ). Another research by Dupuis and Dumas ( 1990 ) proved that a drop in spikelet when directly visible to high temperatures above 35 °C in vitro pollination. Abnormalities in kernel number claimed by Vega et al. ( 2001 ) is related to conceded plant development during a flowering phase that is linked with the active ear growth phase and categorized as a critical phase for approximation of kernel number during silking (Otegui and Bonhomme 1998 ).

The retort of rice output to high temperature presents disparities in flowering patterns, and seed set lessens and lessens grain weight (Qasim et al. 2020 ; Qasim, Hammad, Maqsood, Tariq, & Chawla). During the daytime, heat directly impacts flowers which lessens the thesis period and quickens the earlier peak flowering (Tao et al. 2006 ). Antagonistic effect of higher daytime temperature d on pollen sprouting proposed seed set decay, whereas, seed set was lengthily reduced than could be explicated by pollen growing at high temperatures 40◦C (Matsui et al. 2001 ).

The decline in wheat output is linked with higher temperatures, confirmed in numerous studies (Semenov 2009 ; Stone and Nicolas 1994 ). High temperatures fast-track the arrangements of plant expansion (Blum et al. 2001 ), diminution photosynthetic process (Salvucci and Crafts‐Brandner 2004 ), and also considerably affect the reproductive operations (Farooq et al. 2011 ).

The destructive impacts of CC induced weather extremes to deteriorate the integrity of crops (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ), e.g., Spartan cold and extreme fog cause falling and discoloration of betel leaves (Rosenzweig et al. 2001 ), giving them a somehow reddish appearance, squeezing of lemon leaves (Pautasso et al. 2012 ), as well as root rot of pineapple, have reported (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001 ). Henceforth, in tackling the disruptive effects of CC, several short-term and long-term management approaches are the crucial need of time (Fig.  4 ). Moreover, various studies (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ; Patz et al. 2005 ; Pautasso et al. 2012 ) have demonstrated adapting trends such as ameliorating crop diversity can yield better adaptability towards CC.

Schematic description of potential impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector and the appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures to overcome its impact.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity

Global biodiversity is among the severe victims of CC because it is the fastest emerging cause of species loss. Studies demonstrated that the massive scale species dynamics are considerably associated with diverse climatic events (Abraham and Chain 1988 ; Manes et al. 2021 ; A. M. D. Ortiz et al. 2021 ). Both the pace and magnitude of CC are altering the compatible habitat ranges for living entities of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial regions. Alterations in general climate regimes influence the integrity of ecosystems in numerous ways, such as variation in the relative abundance of species, range shifts, changes in activity timing, and microhabitat use (Bates et al. 2014 ). The geographic distribution of any species often depends upon its ability to tolerate environmental stresses, biological interactions, and dispersal constraints. Hence, instead of the CC, the local species must only accept, adapt, move, or face extinction (Berg et al. 2010 ). So, the best performer species have a better survival capacity for adjusting to new ecosystems or a decreased perseverance to survive where they are already situated (Bates et al. 2014 ). An important aspect here is the inadequate habitat connectivity and access to microclimates, also crucial in raising the exposure to climate warming and extreme heatwave episodes. For example, the carbon sequestration rates are undergoing fluctuations due to climate-driven expansion in the range of global mangroves (Cavanaugh et al. 2014 ).

Similarly, the loss of kelp-forest ecosystems in various regions and its occupancy by the seaweed turfs has set the track for elevated herbivory by the high influx of tropical fish populations. Not only this, the increased water temperatures have exacerbated the conditions far away from the physiological tolerance level of the kelp communities (Vergés et al. 2016 ; Wernberg et al. 2016 ). Another pertinent danger is the devastation of keystone species, which even has more pervasive effects on the entire communities in that habitat (Zarnetske et al. 2012 ). It is particularly important as CC does not specify specific populations or communities. Eventually, this CC-induced redistribution of species may deteriorate carbon storage and the net ecosystem productivity (Weed et al. 2013 ). Among the typical disruptions, the prominent ones include impacts on marine and terrestrial productivity, marine community assembly, and the extended invasion of toxic cyanobacteria bloom (Fossheim et al. 2015 ).

The CC-impacted species extinction is widely reported in the literature (Beesley et al. 2019 ; Urban 2015 ), and the predictions of demise until the twenty-first century are dreadful (Abbass et al. 2019 ; Pereira et al. 2013 ). In a few cases, northward shifting of species may not be formidable as it allows mountain-dwelling species to find optimum climates. However, the migrant species may be trapped in isolated and incompatible habitats due to losing topography and range (Dullinger et al. 2012 ). For example, a study indicated that the American pika has been extirpated or intensely diminished in some regions, primarily attributed to the CC-impacted extinction or at least local extirpation (Stewart et al. 2015 ). Besides, the anticipation of persistent responses to the impacts of CC often requires data records of several decades to rigorously analyze the critical pre and post CC patterns at species and ecosystem levels (Manes et al. 2021 ; Testa et al. 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the availability of such long-term data records is rare; hence, attempts are needed to focus on these profound aspects. Biodiversity is also vulnerable to the other associated impacts of CC, such as rising temperatures, droughts, and certain invasive pest species. For instance, a study revealed the changes in the composition of plankton communities attributed to rising temperatures. Henceforth, alterations in such aquatic producer communities, i.e., diatoms and calcareous plants, can ultimately lead to variation in the recycling of biological carbon. Moreover, such changes are characterized as a potential contributor to CO 2 differences between the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods (Kohfeld et al. 2005 ).

Climate change implications on human health

It is an understood corporality that human health is a significant victim of CC (Costello et al. 2009 ). According to the WHO, CC might be responsible for 250,000 additional deaths per year during 2030–2050 (Watts et al. 2015 ). These deaths are attributed to extreme weather-induced mortality and morbidity and the global expansion of vector-borne diseases (Lemery et al. 2021; Yang and Usman 2021 ; Meierrieks 2021 ; UNEP 2017 ). Here, some of the emerging health issues pertinent to this global problem are briefly described.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance with corresponding economic costs

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an up-surging complex global health challenge (Garner et al. 2019 ; Lemery et al. 2021 ). Health professionals across the globe are extremely worried due to this phenomenon that has critical potential to reverse almost all the progress that has been achieved so far in the health discipline (Gosling and Arnell 2016 ). A massive amount of antibiotics is produced by many pharmaceutical industries worldwide, and the pathogenic microorganisms are gradually developing resistance to them, which can be comprehended how strongly this aspect can shake the foundations of national and global economies (UNEP 2017 ). This statement is supported by the fact that AMR is not developing in a particular region or country. Instead, it is flourishing in every continent of the world (WHO 2018 ). This plague is heavily pushing humanity to the post-antibiotic era, in which currently antibiotic-susceptible pathogens will once again lead to certain endemics and pandemics after being resistant(WHO 2018 ). Undesirably, if this statement would become a factuality, there might emerge certain risks in undertaking sophisticated interventions such as chemotherapy, joint replacement cases, and organ transplantation (Su et al. 2018 ). Presently, the amplification of drug resistance cases has made common illnesses like pneumonia, post-surgical infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., too difficult and costly to be treated or cure well (WHO 2018 ). From a simple example, it can be assumed how easily antibiotic-resistant strains can be transmitted from one person to another and ultimately travel across the boundaries (Berendonk et al. 2015 ). Talking about the second- and third-generation classes of antibiotics, e.g., most renowned generations of cephalosporin antibiotics that are more expensive, broad-spectrum, more toxic, and usually require more extended periods whenever prescribed to patients (Lemery et al. 2021 ; Pärnänen et al. 2019 ). This scenario has also revealed that the abundance of resistant strains of pathogens was also higher in the Southern part (WHO 2018 ). As southern parts are generally warmer than their counterparts, it is evident from this example how CC-induced global warming can augment the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains within the biosphere, eventually putting additional economic burden in the face of developing new and costlier antibiotics. The ARG exchange to susceptible bacteria through one of the potential mechanisms, transformation, transduction, and conjugation; Selection pressure can be caused by certain antibiotics, metals or pesticides, etc., as shown in Fig.  5 .

Source: Elsayed et al. ( 2021 ); Karkman et al. ( 2018 )

A typical interaction between the susceptible and resistant strains.

Certain studies highlighted that conventional urban wastewater treatment plants are typical hotspots where most bacterial strains exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer (Fig.  5 ). Although at present, the extent of risks associated with the antibiotic resistance found in wastewater is complicated; environmental scientists and engineers have particular concerns about the potential impacts of these antibiotic resistance genes on human health (Ashbolt 2015 ). At most undesirable and worst case, these antibiotic-resistant genes containing bacteria can make their way to enter into the environment (Pruden et al. 2013 ), irrigation water used for crops and public water supplies and ultimately become a part of food chains and food webs (Ma et al. 2019 ; D. Wu et al. 2019 ). This problem has been reported manifold in several countries (Hendriksen et al. 2019 ), where wastewater as a means of irrigated water is quite common.

Climate change and vector borne-diseases

Temperature is a fundamental factor for the sustenance of living entities regardless of an ecosystem. So, a specific living being, especially a pathogen, requires a sophisticated temperature range to exist on earth. The second essential component of CC is precipitation, which also impacts numerous infectious agents’ transport and dissemination patterns. Global rising temperature is a significant cause of many species extinction. On the one hand, this changing environmental temperature may be causing species extinction, and on the other, this warming temperature might favor the thriving of some new organisms. Here, it was evident that some pathogens may also upraise once non-evident or reported (Patz et al. 2000 ). This concept can be exemplified through certain pathogenic strains of microorganisms that how the likelihood of various diseases increases in response to climate warming-induced environmental changes (Table 2 ).

A recent example is an outburst of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Republic of China, causing pneumonia and severe acute respiratory complications (Cui et al. 2021 ; Song et al. 2021 ). The large family of viruses is harbored in numerous animals, bats, and snakes in particular (livescience.com) with the subsequent transfer into human beings. Hence, it is worth noting that the thriving of numerous vectors involved in spreading various diseases is influenced by Climate change (Ogden 2018 ; Santos et al. 2021 ).

Psychological impacts of climate change

Climate change (CC) is responsible for the rapid dissemination and exaggeration of certain epidemics and pandemics. In addition to the vast apparent impacts of climate change on health, forestry, agriculture, etc., it may also have psychological implications on vulnerable societies. It can be exemplified through the recent outburst of (COVID-19) in various countries around the world (Pal 2021 ). Besides, the victims of this viral infection have made healthy beings scarier and terrified. In the wake of such epidemics, people with common colds or fever are also frightened and must pass specific regulatory protocols. Living in such situations continuously terrifies the public and makes the stress familiar, which eventually makes them psychologically weak (npr.org).

CC boosts the extent of anxiety, distress, and other issues in public, pushing them to develop various mental-related problems. Besides, frequent exposure to extreme climatic catastrophes such as geological disasters also imprints post-traumatic disorder, and their ubiquitous occurrence paves the way to developing chronic psychological dysfunction. Moreover, repetitive listening from media also causes an increase in the person’s stress level (Association 2020 ). Similarly, communities living in flood-prone areas constantly live in extreme fear of drowning and die by floods. In addition to human lives, the flood-induced destruction of physical infrastructure is a specific reason for putting pressure on these communities (Ogden 2018 ). For instance, Ogden ( 2018 ) comprehensively denoted that Katrina’s Hurricane augmented the mental health issues in the victim communities.

Climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Forests are the global regulators of the world’s climate (FAO 2018 ) and have an indispensable role in regulating global carbon and nitrogen cycles (Rehman et al. 2021 ; Reichstein and Carvalhais 2019 ). Hence, disturbances in forest ecology affect the micro and macro-climates (Ellison et al. 2017 ). Climate warming, in return, has profound impacts on the growth and productivity of transboundary forests by influencing the temperature and precipitation patterns, etc. As CC induces specific changes in the typical structure and functions of ecosystems (Zhang et al. 2017 ) as well impacts forest health, climate change also has several devastating consequences such as forest fires, droughts, pest outbreaks (EPA 2018 ), and last but not the least is the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. The rising frequency and intensity of another CC product, i.e., droughts, pose plenty of challenges to the well-being of global forests (Diffenbaugh et al. 2017 ), which is further projected to increase soon (Hartmann et al. 2018 ; Lehner et al. 2017 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ). Hence, CC induces storms, with more significant impacts also put extra pressure on the survival of the global forests (Martínez-Alvarado et al. 2018 ), significantly since their influences are augmented during higher winter precipitations with corresponding wetter soils causing weak root anchorage of trees (Brázdil et al. 2018 ). Surging temperature regimes causes alterations in usual precipitation patterns, which is a significant hurdle for the survival of temperate forests (Allen et al. 2010 ; Flannigan et al. 2013 ), letting them encounter severe stress and disturbances which adversely affects the local tree species (Hubbart et al. 2016 ; Millar and Stephenson 2015 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ).

Climate change impacts on forest-dependent communities

Forests are the fundamental livelihood resource for about 1.6 billion people worldwide; out of them, 350 million are distinguished with relatively higher reliance (Bank 2008 ). Agro-forestry-dependent communities comprise 1.2 billion, and 60 million indigenous people solely rely on forests and their products to sustain their lives (Sunderlin et al. 2005 ). For example, in the entire African continent, more than 2/3rd of inhabitants depend on forest resources and woodlands for their alimonies, e.g., food, fuelwood and grazing (Wasiq and Ahmad 2004 ). The livings of these people are more intensely affected by the climatic disruptions making their lives harder (Brown et al. 2014 ). On the one hand, forest communities are incredibly vulnerable to CC due to their livelihoods, cultural and spiritual ties as well as socio-ecological connections, and on the other, they are not familiar with the term “climate change.” (Rahman and Alam 2016 ). Among the destructive impacts of temperature and rainfall, disruption of the agroforestry crops with resultant downscale growth and yield (Macchi et al. 2008 ). Cruz ( 2015 ) ascribed that forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the Philippines face the enigma of delayed fruiting, more severe damages by insect and pest incidences due to unfavorable temperature regimes, and changed rainfall patterns.

Among these series of challenges to forest communities, their well-being is also distinctly vulnerable to CC. Though the detailed climate change impacts on human health have been comprehensively mentioned in the previous section, some studies have listed a few more devastating effects on the prosperity of forest-dependent communities. For instance, the Himalayan people have been experiencing frequent skin-borne diseases such as malaria and other skin diseases due to increasing mosquitoes, wild boar as well, and new wasps species, particularly in higher altitudes that were almost non-existent before last 5–10 years (Xu et al. 2008 ). Similarly, people living at high altitudes in Bangladesh have experienced frequent mosquito-borne calamities (Fardous; Sharma 2012 ). In addition, the pace of other waterborne diseases such as infectious diarrhea, cholera, pathogenic induced abdominal complications and dengue has also been boosted in other distinguished regions of Bangladesh (Cell 2009 ; Gunter et al. 2008 ).

Pest outbreak

Upscaling hotter climate may positively affect the mobile organisms with shorter generation times because they can scurry from harsh conditions than the immobile species (Fettig et al. 2013 ; Schoene and Bernier 2012 ) and are also relatively more capable of adapting to new environments (Jactel et al. 2019 ). It reveals that insects adapt quickly to global warming due to their mobility advantages. Due to past outbreaks, the trees (forests) are relatively more susceptible victims (Kurz et al. 2008 ). Before CC, the influence of factors mentioned earlier, i.e., droughts and storms, was existent and made the forests susceptible to insect pest interventions; however, the global forests remain steadfast, assiduous, and green (Jactel et al. 2019 ). The typical reasons could be the insect herbivores were regulated by several tree defenses and pressures of predation (Wilkinson and Sherratt 2016 ). As climate greatly influences these phenomena, the global forests cannot be so sedulous against such challenges (Jactel et al. 2019 ). Table 3 demonstrates some of the particular considerations with practical examples that are essential while mitigating the impacts of CC in the forestry sector.

Climate change impacts on tourism

Tourism is a commercial activity that has roots in multi-dimensions and an efficient tool with adequate job generation potential, revenue creation, earning of spectacular foreign exchange, enhancement in cross-cultural promulgation and cooperation, a business tool for entrepreneurs and eventually for the country’s national development (Arshad et al. 2018 ; Scott 2021 ). Among a plethora of other disciplines, the tourism industry is also a distinct victim of climate warming (Gössling et al. 2012 ; Hall et al. 2015 ) as the climate is among the essential resources that enable tourism in particular regions as most preferred locations. Different places at different times of the year attract tourists both within and across the countries depending upon the feasibility and compatibility of particular weather patterns. Hence, the massive variations in these weather patterns resulting from CC will eventually lead to monumental challenges to the local economy in that specific area’s particular and national economy (Bujosa et al. 2015 ). For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report demonstrated that the global tourism industry had faced a considerable decline in the duration of ski season, including the loss of some ski areas and the dramatic shifts in tourist destinations’ climate warming.

Furthermore, different studies (Neuvonen et al. 2015 ; Scott et al. 2004 ) indicated that various currently perfect tourist spots, e.g., coastal areas, splendid islands, and ski resorts, will suffer consequences of CC. It is also worth noting that the quality and potential of administrative management potential to cope with the influence of CC on the tourism industry is of crucial significance, which renders specific strengths of resiliency to numerous destinations to withstand against it (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). Similarly, in the partial or complete absence of adequate socio-economic and socio-political capital, the high-demanding tourist sites scurry towards the verge of vulnerability. The susceptibility of tourism is based on different components such as the extent of exposure, sensitivity, life-supporting sectors, and capacity assessment factors (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). It is obvious corporality that sectors such as health, food, ecosystems, human habitat, infrastructure, water availability, and the accessibility of a particular region are prone to CC. Henceforth, the sensitivity of these critical sectors to CC and, in return, the adaptive measures are a hallmark in determining the composite vulnerability of climate warming (Ionescu et al. 2009 ).

Moreover, the dependence on imported food items, poor hygienic conditions, and inadequate health professionals are dominant aspects affecting the local terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Meanwhile, the greater dependency on ecosystem services and its products also makes a destination more fragile to become a prey of CC (Rizvi et al. 2015 ). Some significant non-climatic factors are important indicators of a particular ecosystem’s typical health and functioning, e.g., resource richness and abundance portray the picture of ecosystem stability. Similarly, the species abundance is also a productive tool that ensures that the ecosystem has a higher buffering capacity, which is terrific in terms of resiliency (Roscher et al. 2013 ).

Climate change impacts on the economic sector

Climate plays a significant role in overall productivity and economic growth. Due to its increasingly global existence and its effect on economic growth, CC has become one of the major concerns of both local and international environmental policymakers (Ferreira et al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Abbass et al. 2021b ; Lamperti et al. 2021 ). The adverse effects of CC on the overall productivity factor of the agricultural sector are therefore significant for understanding the creation of local adaptation policies and the composition of productive climate policy contracts. Previous studies on CC in the world have already forecasted its effects on the agricultural sector. Researchers have found that global CC will impact the agricultural sector in different world regions. The study of the impacts of CC on various agrarian activities in other demographic areas and the development of relative strategies to respond to effects has become a focal point for researchers (Chandioet al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Mosavi et al. 2020 ).

With the rapid growth of global warming since the 1980s, the temperature has started increasing globally, which resulted in the incredible transformation of rain and evaporation in the countries. The agricultural development of many countries has been reliant, delicate, and susceptible to CC for a long time, and it is on the development of agriculture total factor productivity (ATFP) influence different crops and yields of farmers (Alhassan 2021 ; Wu  2020 ).

Food security and natural disasters are increasing rapidly in the world. Several major climatic/natural disasters have impacted local crop production in the countries concerned. The effects of these natural disasters have been poorly controlled by the development of the economies and populations and may affect human life as well. One example is China, which is among the world’s most affected countries, vulnerable to natural disasters due to its large population, harsh environmental conditions, rapid CC, low environmental stability, and disaster power. According to the January 2016 statistical survey, China experienced an economic loss of 298.3 billion Yuan, and about 137 million Chinese people were severely affected by various natural disasters (Xie et al. 2018 ).

Mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate changes

Adaptation and mitigation are the crucial factors to address the response to CC (Jahanzad et al. 2020 ). Researchers define mitigation on climate changes, and on the other hand, adaptation directly impacts climate changes like floods. To some extent, mitigation reduces or moderates greenhouse gas emission, and it becomes a critical issue both economically and environmentally (Botzen et al. 2021 ; Jahanzad et al. 2020 ; Kongsager 2018 ; Smit et al. 2000 ; Vale et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2021 ; Verheyen 2005 ).

Researchers have deep concern about the adaptation and mitigation methodologies in sectoral and geographical contexts. Agriculture, industry, forestry, transport, and land use are the main sectors to adapt and mitigate policies(Kärkkäinen et al. 2020 ; Waheed et al. 2021 ). Adaptation and mitigation require particular concern both at the national and international levels. The world has faced a significant problem of climate change in the last decades, and adaptation to these effects is compulsory for economic and social development. To adapt and mitigate against CC, one should develop policies and strategies at the international level (Hussain et al. 2020 ). Figure  6 depicts the list of current studies on sectoral impacts of CC with adaptation and mitigation measures globally.

Sectoral impacts of climate change with adaptation and mitigation measures.

Conclusion and future perspectives

Specific socio-agricultural, socio-economic, and physical systems are the cornerstone of psychological well-being, and the alteration in these systems by CC will have disastrous impacts. Climate variability, alongside other anthropogenic and natural stressors, influences human and environmental health sustainability. Food security is another concerning scenario that may lead to compromised food quality, higher food prices, and inadequate food distribution systems. Global forests are challenged by different climatic factors such as storms, droughts, flash floods, and intense precipitation. On the other hand, their anthropogenic wiping is aggrandizing their existence. Undoubtedly, the vulnerability scale of the world’s regions differs; however, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures can aid the decision-making bodies in developing effective policies to tackle its impacts. Presently, modern life on earth has tailored to consistent climatic patterns, and accordingly, adapting to such considerable variations is of paramount importance. Because the faster changes in climate will make it harder to survive and adjust, this globally-raising enigma calls for immediate attention at every scale ranging from elementary community level to international level. Still, much effort, research, and dedication are required, which is the most critical time. Some policy implications can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change, especially the most affected sectors like the agriculture sector;

Seasonal variations and cultivation practices

Warming might lengthen the season in frost-prone growing regions (temperate and arctic zones), allowing for longer-maturing seasonal cultivars with better yields (Pfadenhauer 2020 ; Bonacci 2019 ). Extending the planting season may allow additional crops each year; when warming leads to frequent warmer months highs over critical thresholds, a split season with a brief summer fallow may be conceivable for short-period crops such as wheat barley, cereals, and many other vegetable crops. The capacity to prolong the planting season in tropical and subtropical places where the harvest season is constrained by precipitation or agriculture farming occurs after the year may be more limited and dependent on how precipitation patterns vary (Wu et al. 2017 ).

New varieties of crops

The genetic component is comprehensive for many yields, but it is restricted like kiwi fruit for a few. Ali et al. ( 2017 ) investigated how new crops will react to climatic changes (also stated in Mall et al. 2017 ). Hot temperature, drought, insect resistance; salt tolerance; and overall crop production and product quality increases would all be advantageous (Akkari 2016 ). Genetic mapping and engineering can introduce a greater spectrum of features. The adoption of genetically altered cultivars has been slowed, particularly in the early forecasts owing to the complexity in ensuring features are expediently expressed throughout the entire plant, customer concerns, economic profitability, and regulatory impediments (Wirehn 2018 ; Davidson et al. 2016 ).

Changes in management and other input factors

To get the full benefit of the CO 2 would certainly require additional nitrogen and other fertilizers. Nitrogen not consumed by the plants may be excreted into groundwater, discharged into water surface, or emitted from the land, soil nitrous oxide when large doses of fertilizer are sprayed. Increased nitrogen levels in groundwater sources have been related to human chronic illnesses and impact marine ecosystems. Cultivation, grain drying, and other field activities have all been examined in depth in the studies (Barua et al. 2018 ).

The technological and socio-economic adaptation

The policy consequence of the causative conclusion is that as a source of alternative energy, biofuel production is one of the routes that explain oil price volatility separate from international macroeconomic factors. Even though biofuel production has just begun in a few sample nations, there is still a tremendous worldwide need for feedstock to satisfy industrial expansion in China and the USA, which explains the food price relationship to the global oil price. Essentially, oil-exporting countries may create incentives in their economies to increase food production. It may accomplish by giving farmers financing, seedlings, fertilizers, and farming equipment. Because of the declining global oil price and, as a result, their earnings from oil export, oil-producing nations may be unable to subsidize food imports even in the near term. As a result, these countries can boost the agricultural value chain for export. It may be accomplished through R&D and adding value to their food products to increase income by correcting exchange rate misalignment and adverse trade terms. These nations may also diversify their economies away from oil, as dependence on oil exports alone is no longer economically viable given the extreme volatility of global oil prices. Finally, resource-rich and oil-exporting countries can convert to non-food renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, coal, wind, wave, and tidal energy. By doing so, both world food and oil supplies would be maintained rather than harmed.

IRENA’s modeling work shows that, if a comprehensive policy framework is in place, efforts toward decarbonizing the energy future will benefit economic activity, jobs (outweighing losses in the fossil fuel industry), and welfare. Countries with weak domestic supply chains and a large reliance on fossil fuel income, in particular, must undertake structural reforms to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the energy transition. Governments continue to give major policy assistance to extract fossil fuels, including tax incentives, financing, direct infrastructure expenditures, exemptions from environmental regulations, and other measures. The majority of major oil and gas producing countries intend to increase output. Some countries intend to cut coal output, while others plan to maintain or expand it. While some nations are beginning to explore and execute policies aimed at a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuel production, these efforts have yet to impact major producing countries’ plans and goals. Verifiable and comparable data on fossil fuel output and assistance from governments and industries are critical to closing the production gap. Governments could increase openness by declaring their production intentions in their climate obligations under the Paris Agreement.

It is firmly believed that achieving the Paris Agreement commitments is doubtlful without undergoing renewable energy transition across the globe (Murshed 2020 ; Zhao et al. 2022 ). Policy instruments play the most important role in determining the degree of investment in renewable energy technology. This study examines the efficacy of various policy strategies in the renewable energy industry of multiple nations. Although its impact is more visible in established renewable energy markets, a renewable portfolio standard is also a useful policy instrument. The cost of producing renewable energy is still greater than other traditional energy sources. Furthermore, government incentives in the R&D sector can foster innovation in this field, resulting in cost reductions in the renewable energy industry. These nations may export their technologies and share their policy experiences by forming networks among their renewable energy-focused organizations. All policy measures aim to reduce production costs while increasing the proportion of renewables to a country’s energy system. Meanwhile, long-term contracts with renewable energy providers, government commitment and control, and the establishment of long-term goals can assist developing nations in deploying renewable energy technology in their energy sector.

Availability of data and material

Data sources and relevant links are provided in the paper to access data.

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Kashif Abbass, Huaming Song & Ijaz Younis

Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Chemical Pollution Control and Resources Reuse, School of Environmental and Biological Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Xiaolingwei 200, Nanjing, 210094, People’s Republic of China

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KA: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Study design, Formal analysis, Visualization, Revised draft, Writing-review, and editing. MZQ: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Writing-review, and editing. HS: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, literature review, Revised drapt, and writing review and editing. MM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. HM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. IY: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, literature review, and writing review and editing.

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Abbass, K., Qasim, M.Z., Song, H. et al. A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29 , 42539–42559 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19718-6

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Climate change: Does international research fulfill global demands and necessities?

• Doris Klingelhöfer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0716-9872 1 ,
• Ruth Müller 1 , 2 ,
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Climate change is safe to be one of the biggest challenges of mankind. Human activities, especially the combustion of fossil fuels, contribute to the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thus to the pace of climate change. The effects of climate change are already being felt, and the resulting damage will most likely be enormous worldwide. Because global impacts vary widely and will lead to very different national vulnerability to climate impacts, each country, depending on its economic background, has different options to ward off negative impacts. Decisions have to be made to mitigate climate consequences according to the preparedness and the vulnerability of countries against the presumed impacts. This requires a profound scientific basis. To provide sound background information, a bibliometric study was conducted to present global research on climate change using established and specific parameters. Bibliometric standard parameters, established socioeconomic values, and climate change specific indices were used for the analyses. This allowed us to provide an overall picture of the global research pattern not only in terms of general aspects, but also in terms of climate change impacts, its effects and regional differences. For this purpose, we choose representative indices, such as the CO 2 emissions for the responsibility of countries, the global climate risk index as a combination value for the different types of damage that countries can expect, the increase in sea level as a specific parameter as a measure of the huge global environmental impacts, and the readiness and vulnerability index for the different circumstances of individual countries under which climate change will take place. We hope to have thus made a comprehensive and representative selection of specific parameters that is sufficient to map the global research landscape. We have supplemented the methodology accordingly.

In terms of absolute publication numbers, the USA was the leading country, followed by the UK, and China in 3rd place. The steep rise in Chinese publication numbers over time came into view, while their citation numbers are relatively low. Scandinavian countries were leading regarding their publication numbers related to CO 2 emission and socioeconomic indices. Only three developing countries stand out in all analyses: Costa Rica, the Fiji Atoll, and Zimbabwe, although it is here that the climate impact will be greatest. A positive correlation between countries’ preparedness for the impacts of climate change and their publication numbers could be shown, while the correlation between countries’ vulnerability and their publication numbers was negative.

Conclusions

We could show that there exists an inequity between national research efforts according to the publication output and the demands and necessities of countries related to their socioeconomic status. This inequity calls for a rethink, a different approach, and a different policy to improve countries' preparedness and mitigation capacity, which requires the inclusion of the most affected regions of the world in a strengthened international cooperation network.

Particularly in the western world, public awareness of the consequences of climate change has reached a high level. Before the appearance of the coronavirus pandemics (SARS-CoV 2), hardly any news broadcast in the western world could do without commentary on climate change. Every week millions of pupils and students around the world demonstrated all for a strict ecological regimen of all governments to ensure the 2 °C target of the Paris Agreement [ 42 ]. In “Corona times” the effects of climate change seem almost forgotten by the public, although many scientists have already explained the connection between climate change and the increase in zoonoses [ 24 , 36 ]. Besides, the negative effects of climate change will certainly be more permanent and severe than the temporary damage of a pandemic; however, severe it may be.

Climate change will undoubtedly affect the entire planet and calls for international collective action. Shifts in wind patterns, the average temperature, or the amount of precipitation and frequency of extreme weather events will endanger the health, the food, and the water supply for humans. Those risks are directly linked to the reduction in biological diversity and the extinction of species that challenge most parts of the world. The impacts of climate change will lead to socioeconomic and political instability, which will change the living conditions of many communities.

The global climate has always been changing. However, the enormous problems are caused by the speed with which changes due to human intervention are progressing, and greenhouse gas concentrations have reached levels never before experienced by mankind. Although climate change has officially been considered the most hazardous global risk so far, the recent Conference of Parties (COP) in Madrid failed to achieve binding measures for nations.

But time is running. Solutions must be found to mitigate the consequences of climate change. Governments must react and be prepared for the worst future scenarios that require strategies without national borders. Climate change affects every country in different ways, and the ways in which countries can prepare for it or mitigate its impacts vary widely.

But what has actually happened so far? Anthropogenic activities, in particular the combustion of fossil fuels, have accelerated the rise in carbon dioxide emissions and thus the increase in global warming, with tangible impacts on humans, animals, and the ecological balance around the world [ 45 ]. The immediate environmental consequence of global warming is the increase in natural disasters, e.g., melting glaciers, more extreme and more frequent floods, wildfires, storms, and droughts or heatwaves. The indirect consequences include threats to human health, and the reduction of biodiversity and habitable areas, leading to migration and deterioration of community, public health, and socioeconomic conditions in most countries of the world [ 45 ].

Reliable estimation of the extent of these impacts is at the heart of research and forms the basis for all mitigation strategies at governmental, economic, scientific, or personal levels.

A sound research database is necessary for sustainable approaches for assessing and mitigating climate change impacts. The research on the climate change focuses on a wide range of areas and modeling approaches to consider different future carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emission scenarios to assess local and regional global warming. CO 2 is a major component of the global carbon cycle and both a natural part of the atmosphere and an essential greenhouse gas. It is mainly through the combustion of fossil fuel that humans influence the amount of CO 2 emission and thus contributes to global warming.

For this, experts who cover all areas of climate change are in demand. These areas range from ecology, life sciences, meteorology, health care, social, and economic sciences, mathematics and computer science to energy, food, and transport. Interdisciplinary approaches deliver huge amounts of data to create reliable future scenarios. They should provide a comprehensive understanding of the problem and possible measures at all levels. All models show significant geographical differences and illustrate the enormous burden on many developing countries. However, there is no in-depth analysis evaluating global research efforts on climate change including climate change-specific parameters, that provides a comprehensive picture with specific geographical and chronological patterns of scientific publications and the resulting needs and requirements for scientific action. Therefore, the present study focuses on the evaluation of the global and national publication output on climatic change to depict structures and international developments using bibliometric analyses. Metadata analysis allows a comprehensive assessment of the global scientific landscape because all countries are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change to varying degrees because of their natural and socioeconomic conditions.

Building on other bibliometric studies [ 2 , 35 ], which also show the publication output of countries in the field of climate change, this analysis interprets global scientific output using country-specific indices relevant to climate change to present the world map accordingly [ 9 , 13 , 33 ]. The resulting implications help to answer the question of whether international research and networking on climate change meet global requirements and necessities given the current and predicted impacts on all regions and all areas of life. Thus, the interpretation of the results can enable decision makers, funders, scientists, and other stakeholders to develop concepts for future research based on carefully evaluated metadata.

Methodological platform

A representative and qualitative database has been built up, providing comprehensive metadata on the past and present scientific landscape of climate change research, its incentives, its benchmarks, and its challenges and requirements. The applied method is integrated into the bibliometric platform New Quality and Quantity Indices in Science (NewQIS), which was initiated in 2009 to provide in-depth data of the publication output on a variety of life science and biomedical topics [ 14 , 17 ]. The approach combines the application of publication and contextual factors with state-of-the-art visualization techniques. The Core Collection Indices of Web of Science (WoS), which represent one of the most important scientific literature databases, are used as data sources. In addition, WoS provides citation parameters for advanced data interpretation and quality assessment via the Journal Citation Report (JCR) and the Journal Impact Factor (JIF).

Search strategy, data acquisition, and correction

The quality of the database depends on the appropriateness of the search strategy applied. The search term must involve all important synonyms. For this study the terms: “climat* change”, “global warming”, and “greenhouse effect” were applied. The asterisk acts as a wild card and was used to search for terms with different endings. To retrieve only the original research publications, only data from the publication type “Articles” was downloaded. The Art and Humanity entries were excluded. No limitation of the evaluation period was made so that all articles from 1900 to 2020 were included in the analysis (Fig.  1 ).

Procedure for generating the analysis database

The aim was to decimate thematically incorrect entries and maximize correct ones. The risk of an unrepresentative database has been reduced by searching in the title of the manuscripts, even if e-data resulting from the search strategy cannot include all indexed articles. The metadata, sorted by various keyed information, was downloaded and saved as an MS-Access database. To unify different designations of data, e.g., the names of authors and their institutional affiliation, a standardization had to be carried out with the help of a specially developed application. For the standardization of institutions, a quantity of at least 200 articles in a regional context must be achieved. A threshold of at least 20 articles on climate change was set for authors. By applying those thresholds, it was possible to completely adjust all entries for institutions and authors above this value. Also, the names of the assigned subject areas had to be adapted and standardized due to missing spaces or typing errors. In doing so, all entries could be corrected without using a threshold value.

Analysis parameters

The resulting database consists of a large number of bibliometric parameters. The research topics were clustered based on the keywords that occur at least 650 times (threshold) using the application VOSviewer [ 44 ].

Chronological analyses were carried out to evaluate the development of research (number of articles), research incentives (number of citations). In addition, geographical analyses were conducted to identify the main actors (countries with the most cited publications, most publishing institutions), and their international networking. The average citation rate of the countries is calculated by dividing the number of citations received by the number of the publication on climate change.

However, the evaluation of the absolute numbers does not allow an assessment of the development of publication shares and the current distribution of countries’ research output on climate change issues. Therefore, the evaluation period of the last 30 years was divided into 5-year intervals for further analysis, and the ten most publishing countries were analyzed.

By linking socioeconomic characteristics and citation parameters, important additional statements on country-specific publication activities on climate change can be made.

The country-specific number of articles was put in relation to (1) Demography: total population in million inhabitants ( R POP ) [ 39 ], (2) Socioeconomic status: gross domestic product (GDP) in billion US-Dollars ( R GDP ) [ 38 ], and (3) Research investment parameters: number of researchers in FTE (full-time equivalents) [ 40 ], expenditures on research and development (R&D) (personnel in FTE) [ 40 ], and gross expenditures for R&D (GERD) in PPP$ (purchasing power parity in US-Dollars) [ 40 ]. For all ratios, a minimum threshold of at least 30 articles was applied to avoid distortions due to extreme values.

For a more specific assessment of the national research contribution, it seems appropriate to include relevant country-specific indicators related to climate change. For this purpose, we select representative indices to put them in relation to the research output of the countries. CO 2 emissions represent the responsibility of countries, the Global Climate Risk Index acts as a composite value for the different types of damage that countries can expect, the rise in sea level as a measure of the enormous global environmental impact, and the readiness and vulnerability index for the different circumstances of the individual countries under which climate change will occur.

Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emission in tons per year [ 33 ]: The integration of the CO 2 emissions of the countries was done by calculating the relation of the number of articles to CO 2 emissions in billions of tons (threshold = 300).

The Global Climate Risk Index (CRI): The CRI was launched by German Watch and published in its 15th edition 2020. It assesses the extent to which countries have been suffering from weather incidences [ 9 ]. The CRI provides data for the last 20 years as an average value and also for individual years. The existing data on the weather vulnerability, measured in fatalities per country, and losses in US dollars could indicate the expected increase in extreme events due to climate change and help to mitigate the impacts.

Sea-level rise: For the analysis of the number of people living on vulnerable land due to prognosticated sea level rise [ 19 ], we have taken the values of the average number of fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants from 1999 to 2018 as reference quantity. To estimate the resulting sea-level rise, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) created the digital elevation model (DEM) SRTM ( Shuttle Radar Topography Mission ). The here utilized CoastalDEM is a development based on the neural networks to reduce SRTM errors resulting from its limitation with respect to terrain elevations (important for densely populated areas) by regression analysis [ 19 ]. There are several prospective scenarios, based on the 5th IPCC report [ 15 ], which are based on the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) models 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 leading to different degrees of global temperature rise. These scenarios presuppose different greenhouse gas concentrations. RCP 8.5 would lead to a rise of 4 °C, while RCP 4.5 would lead to a rise of 2.6 °C, and the target limit of 2 °C set by the Paris Agreement can be realized by the RCP 2.6 scenario—always as compared to pre-industrial times [ 10 ]. In addition, the Sea Level Rise Modell K17 is a nonprobabilistic projection that incorporates physical models of ice sheet dynamics [ 18 ]. Furthermore, the applied model data refer to the forecast for the year 2100 and include the local 1-year coastal flood return level [ 19 ]. For our analysis, we chose the K17 model, CoastalDEM, RCP 4.5 for the year 2100.

Readiness and vulnerability index: To assess the differences between the individual countries, the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN) developed a country index that provides data on countries’ vulnerability to climate disruption and their readiness to improve resilience by “leverage of private and public sector investments”. The index combines 74 variables to define the ranking for 192 countries [ 27 ].

Visualization of results

The results of the keyword cluster analysis were presented using the VOSviewer software developed by van Eck and Waltman [ 44 ]. The occurrence of keywords was visualized by a network of nodes and connecting lines representing the different colored clusters and their combinations.

The geographical findings of this study were partially visualized by the creation of anamorphic cartograms using Gastner and Newman’s method of density equalizing map projections (DEMP) [ 12 ]. Methodically, these DEMPs reduce or enlarge the country sizes according to the value of the evaluation parameter, following the physical principle of density compensation by diffusion balance in each country. To maintain the basic structure of the world map, mean values are calculated and assigned to oceans and Antarctica. With an ArcGIS tool (mapping software for geographic information systems), which is based on the algorithms of the DEMP method, geographic data can be visualized by generating distorted maps. The DEMPs generated in this way allow a quick visual acquisition of the extensive data and concentration on the essential.

Methodological limitations and strengths

Although being a sophisticated and widely applied method, some limiting points need to be recognized and discussed.

The quality and representativeness of the retrieved metadata depend on the one hand on the technical and bibliographic conditions of the source database and on the other hand on the care taken in generating the search strategy. In this case, WoS was used as a data source. It should be noted that WoS is English biased, as most of the indexed journals are English-language journals. Furthermore, the citation number given is prone to various errors, e.g., incorrect citation behavior or self-citation, so that its significance for the quality of research needs to be discussed. Although the strategy of searching only in the title of the publications resulted in a reduced data quantity, this is justified by the higher representativeness of the data sets. The additional search in the abstracts and keywords would lead to the inclusion of a large number of false entries that would not provide valid figures. Therefore, choosing a title search strategy allows the creation of a valid, albeit not all-encompassing, database.

Some data records had to be corrected manually, e.g., institutions and subject areas. Although the unification of the subject areas in the overall database could be carried out exactly, the merging of different labeled affiliations belonging together was not 100% possible. Therefore, a threshold has been applied in a geographical approach, so that only those geographical entity, e.g., cities, with at least 200 articles on climate change were subject to in-depth corrections. However, the exact number of publishing institutions could not be determined.

The visualization of the results utilizing DEMPs is limited by the physical principles of the technique so that some small island countries could not be represented in the respective figures.

All the results are based on the evaluation database, which consists of a total of 40,062 articles on climate change identified and extracted from WoS.

Research focal points

In total, 45 keywords from three main clusters could be identified (Fig.  2 a). First, articles relating to environmental and ecological issues can be grouped together, with "impacts" being the most commonly used term in the cluster. Secondly, all articles dealing with modeling and simulation can be grouped. In this second keyword cluster, the terms “temperature”, “model”, and “variability” appeared most frequently. Thirdly, all articles on social, political, and management issues can be grouped in one cluster. The umbrella term “climate change” was assigned to this group and is the most frequently used keyword in the analysis. In addition, the terms “adaption” and “vulnerability” have been used most frequently in the third keyword cluster.

Research foci. a Clusters of author’s keywords with at least 650 occurrences. Red: environmental and ecological issues, green: modeling and simulation issues, blue: social and management issues. b Most assigned subject areas according to Web of Science categories with number of articles and average citation rate (number of citations / number of articles)

The main subject areas (WoS research areas) are shown in figure Fig.  2 b with the numbers of articles ( n ) assigned to them and their average citation rates. By far the most assigned subject area was Environmental Science and Ecology ( n  = 15,741). Meteorology and Atmospheric Science ( n  = 6522) followed with less than half of assigned articles. Ranks 3 to 5 were occupied by Geology ( n  = 3806), Water Resources ( n  = 3247), and Science and Technology—Other Topics ( n  = 2916). Apart from ecological issues, the most frequently assigned subject areas ( Business and Economics: n  =  1710 , Government and Law: n  =  1493 , Public Administration: n  =  936 ) focus on economics and political issues, which represent the blue cluster in Fig.  1 a. In principle, the articles are distributed over the three main subject areas clusters that distinguish between scenario modeling, risk analysis, and mitigation, respectively, adaption measurements. From these results, the main foci of climate change research can be identified. In summary, articles on modeling and simulation of scenarios for consequences of climate change under different conditions have been developed resulting in ecological and socioeconomic impacts, which in turn form the basis for mitigation and adaption measures on climate change.

It is noteworthy concerning the average citation rate (cr) of the research areas that the highest rates reached the areas Science and Technology—Other Topics (cr = 59.37), Biodiversity and Conservation (cr = 39.01), Geography (cr = 38.85), and Meteorology and Atmospheric Science (cr = 35.54), while the most assigned area Environmental Science and Ecology achieved an average of only cr = 26.80. Among the ten most frequently assigned subject areas, Public Administration (cr = 13.49) and Government and Law ranked last (cr = 10.69).

Evolution of publication output over time

The vast majority of articles on climate change (92.17%) has been published since the year 2000 ( n  = 36,925) (Fig.  3 ). However, the first publication that meets the search criteria was published as early as 1910. Annual publication numbers remained in single digits until the mid-1970s. Only at the end of the 1980s, the numbers reach yearly amounts above n  = 100. A steep increase in research activity can be observed from 2003 onwards when the trend followed an exponential course, which reached a small peak in 2011 and is still rising exponentially until today (Fig.  3 a). This development can be illustrated even more clearly by looking at the numbers in relation to the absolute number of articles indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) (Fig.  2 b). The gradual increase in research interest is also reflected in the steep relative increases in these years, calculated with the annual number of articles on climate change per 10,000 articles listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) (Fig.  3 b). Until 1988 and between 1992 and 2003, the upward trend of climate change research is similar to that for all articles indexed in the SCI.

Chronological development of articles on climate change from 1970 to 2018. a Number of articles on climate change and their citations. Dashed line: Cited Half-Life. b Number of all indexed SCI articles (Science Citation Index of Web of Science) and number of articles on climate change per 10,000 SCI articles

Analog to the development of the number of articles, the number of citations (c) also increased significantly since 1988, with peaks in the years 1991 ( c  = 10,106), 2000 ( c  = 32,612), 2004 ( c  = 45,177), and the preliminary maximum of c  = 88,747 in 2010. Afterward, the citation numbers dropped again significantly. This is because little time has elapsed since the articles were published to generate citations. This effect is known as Cited Half-Life (CHL) and refers to a period of about eight years for the life sciences, which is needed for the articles to reach half of the total number of citations (Fig.  3 a) [ 21 ].

Among the ten most frequently cited articles in the database, 80% stem can from the USA ( n  = 8) and 20% from the UK ( n  = 2). All of those ten articles were published after 2000, and mainly in the renowned journals Nature ( n  = 5) and Science ( n  = 2) (Tables 1 , 2 ). The publication years 2000, 2003, and 2010 can be logically associated with the research increase shown in Fig.  2 a.

Leading institutions

The 15 most publishing institutions on climate change are located exclusively in the northern hemisphere (Table 2 ). Almost half of the most publishing institutions are US-American (7 institutions), 3 others are British, 2 are Dutch, and 1 institution is located in China, Switzerland, and Germany respectively. The Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) was the most publishing institution on climate change with n  = 1333 articles, followed by the University of London ( n  = 680), which published only half the amount. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) followed with n  = 588 articles. In 4th place was the British University of Oxford ( n  = 452), followed by the Dutch Wageningen University ( n  = 442) and the US University of Washington ( n  = 426). When looking at the average citation rate of the most publishing institutions, the order is different. With the highest value of almost 100, the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (cr = 98.94) led the ranking, followed by the British University of East Anglia (cr = 89.16), and the US Columbia University (cr = 75.16). The articles of the CAS ranked last among the leading 15 institutions (cr = 21.29).

Global landscape of publication output

Not all articles out of the entire database could be assigned to a country of origin due to missing metadata before 1973. Coming from 186 countries or autonomous regions, n  = 38,917 articles could thus be included in the database and analyzed in terms of geographical parameters.

The most publishing country was the USA with n  = 12,637 articles on climate change, followed by the United Kingdom (UK) with less than half as many articles ( n  = 5524). China was placed 3 rd with n = 3508, followed by Australia ( n  = 3349), Germany ( n  = 3238, and Canada ( n  = 3126) (Fig.  4 a).

The most publishing countries. a Density equalizing map projection of the number of articles. b Relative share of the most publishing countries in 5-year intervals from 1998 to 2019

Looking at the share of the most publishing countries in 5-year intervals (Fig.  4 b), the USA conducted more than 50% of the research on climate change in the first evaluation interval from 1989 to 1994. In the last interval from 2015 to 2019, the share of US articles decreased to 30%, whereas the absolute numbers increased almost tenfold. The relative share of the UK fell also from 20.64% to 12.42% between 1995 and 2019, during which time it lost its second rank to China that contributed an increasing share from 1.23% to 13.27% throughout the whole evaluation period. The share of Australian, German, Spanish, and Indian articles also increased slightly over time, while the shares of Canadian, French, and Netherlandic articles remained more or less the same.

The distribution of the number of citations follows a similar pattern with the exception of China, which here falls to rank 8 ( c  = 66,844). The USA received by far the most citations ( c  = 513,888), followed by the UK ( c  = 243,261), Australia ( c  = 108,054), Canada (c = 107,713), and Germany ( c  = 107,335) (Fig.  5 a).

Citation-specific parameters for articles on climate change. a Number of citations per country. b Articles/Citation rate of articles on climate change per country (threshold 30 articles)

When evaluating the average citation rate (cr) per country with more than 30 articles on climate change (threshold), Costa Rica was in first place (cr = 93.89, n  = 67), followed by Estonia (cr = 55, n  = 66), Iceland (cr = 50.15, n  = 47), Austria (cr = 46.77, n  = 668), and Switzerland (cr = 45.94, n = 1126). The UK ranked 16th (cr = 44.04), the USA 21st (cr = 40.66), Canada 35th (cr = 34.46), Germany 40th (cr = 33.15), and Australia 41st (cr = 32.26) (Fig.  5 b).

Inclusion of socioeconomic parameters

The analysis of socioeconomic parameters of the publishing countries on climate change showed a divergent ranking.

In terms of the inclusion of the countries’ population size [ 39 ] (number of articles/population in million inhabitants =  R POP ) the following order emerged: Norway ( R POP  = 174.16), Australia ( R POP  = 145.65), Denmark ( R POP  = 142.12), Iceland ( R POP  = 139.93), Switzerland ( R POP  = 137.66). The most publishing countries were ranked lower: the USA ranked 20th ( R POP  = 39.00), the UK ranked 13th ( R POP  = 85.73), China ranked 67th ( R POP  = 2.55), and Germany ranked 18th ( R POP  = 40.11) (Fig.  6 a).

Ratio of socio-economic parameters (threshold 30 articles). a Country-specific ratios of the number of articles on climate change and the countries’ population size in million inhabitants [39]. B) Country-specific ratios of the number of articles on climate change and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1000 billion US-Dollars [38]

In terms of the economic status, the South Pacific island state Fiji led the range of countries with more than 30 articles on climate change (threshold) with a ratio of the numbers of articles and the GDP in billion US-Dollars [ 38 ] ( R GDP ) with R GDP  = 6329.11, followed by Denmark ( R GDP  = 3002.26), New Zealand ( R GDP  = 2991.99), Iceland ( R GDP  = 2910.22), and Australia ( R GDP  = 2816.65) (Fig.  6 b). It was also surprising that the African country Zimbabwe was placed among the top ten countries and reached 7th place ( R GDP  = 2541.48). In terms of socioeconomic analysis, other developing countries such as Nepal and some African countries (Kenya, Benin) achieved also ranks among the leading 20 countries.

Besides Australia, the UK reached the second highest ratio of the most publishing countries and ranked 11th, Canada ranked 13th, Germany 30th. The USA was only in 37th position.

The inclusion of science-related parameters [ 40 ]. listed New Zealand first (Table 3 ) with R GERD (number of articles/gross expenditure for research and development in current PPP (purchasing power parity) US dollars) = 244.34. Australia ranked 2nd ( R GERD  = 157.98), followed by Norway ( R GERD  = 133.77), South Africa ( R GERD  = 120.36), and UK ( R GERD  = 115.54). Germany only achieved rank 22nd ( R GERD  = 25.47), and the USA ranked 23rd ( R GERD  = 23.26).

New Zealand published also the highest number of articles per researcher (full-time equivalent FTE/1000) with R RES  = 27.92, followed by Norway, South Africa, and Switzerland. Here the USA ranked 16th ( R RES  = 9.22) and Germany 19th ( R RES  = 7.83). Unfortunately, the data for Australia was not available.

Inclusion of climate change indices

Carbon dioxide emission.

The linkage of country-specific number of publications on climate change with the countries’ CO 2 emission shown in Table 4 discloses Sweden as the leading country ( R CO2  = 29.28), followed by Switzerland ( R CO2  = 28.10), Denmark ( R CO2  = 23.01), Norway ( R CO2  = 20.47) and New Zealand ( R CO2  = 14.52). In this analysis, the most publishing countries fell sharply behind. UK ranked 6 th ( R CO2  = 14.36), Germany 17th ( R CO2  = 4.05), and the USA 19th ( R CO2  = 14.52).

Global climate risk index

For reasons of comparison, reference is made here to the results of the Global Climate Risk Index (CRI) [ 9 ]: The average ranking shows Puerto Rico, Myanmar, and Haiti as the most affected countries, while the assessment for 2018 ranked Japan, the Philippines, and Germany as the most affected countries [ 9 ]. The figures for the average number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants from 1999 to 2018 as a reference point put some small island developing states (SIDS), such as St. Kitts and Nevis, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Seychelles, Marshall Islands, and the Maldives in the first place. Armenia, Iceland, Singapore, and Qatar also held leading positions. (Fig.  7 a).

Global Climate Risk Index (1999–2018) [ 9 ]. a Average number of fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants. b Number of articles on climate change pro average number of fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants

The linkage of the number of publications on climate change to the expected increase in extreme events due to climate change discloses France as the leading country ( R CRI  = 215.50), followed by the USA ( R CRI  = 162.01), Spain ( R CRI  = 145.80), Italy ( R CRI  = 144.44), Germany ( R CRI  = 140.78), and UK ( R CRI  = 215.01). Of the countries most affected by climate change, Myanmar ranked 17th ( R CRI  = 12.00), followed by Japan on rank 18 ( R CRI  = 11.89), and the Philippines on rank 20 ( R CRI  = 8.19) (Fig.  7 b). There was no correlation between the number of articles and the average number of fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants on average.

Sea-level rise

For reasons of comparison, reference is made here to the results of Kulp and Strauss [ 19 ]: According to their findings of the working group, China is by far the country with the highest number of people living on vulnerable land in million according to the CoastalDEM scenario (we here label it: P vul  = 151.6) (Fig.  8 a). With P vul  = 73, Bangladesh’s population is the second most affected, followed by India ( P vul  = 151.6), Vietnam, and Indonesia ( P vul  = 151.6). In addition to these absolute figures, the working group of Kulp and Strauss [ 19 ] put the number of affected people in relation to the total population. This results in a different picture (Fig.  8 b), with the small island states (Maldives, Marshall Islands, Tokelau, and Tuvalu) most affected, where more than 70% of the population will live on vulnerable land in 2100. In the South-American countries of Suriname and Guyana, more than 60% will live on vulnerable land, followed by Kiribati, Cayman Islands, and the Bahamas with more than 50% affected people. The Netherlands is the first European country in the ranking, where 55% of the inhabitants will be exposed to vulnerable land. The here determined most publishing countries on climate change, were following far behind: USA (2.3%), UK (9%), China (11%), Australia (4%), and Germany (2.5%) [ 19 ].

Estimated number of people exposed to vulnerable land in 2100 (CoastalDEM scenario: Sea Level Rise Modell K17, RCP 4.5, 95 percentile) [ 19 ]. a Number of people living on vulnerable land in mill. b Relative number of people (per 1000 inhabitants) living on vulnerable land. c Relation of the number of articles on climate change and the number of people living on vulnerable land in mill. High values of SIDS (Small Island Developing States) cannot be shown. The highest values have Maldives (87%), Marshall Island (85%), Tokelau (78%), Tuvalu (73%). d Relation of the number of articles on climate change and the relative number of people (per 1000 inhabitants) living on vulnerable land in mill

Here we have calculated the ratio of countries’ publication performance on climate change in relation to Kulp et al.’s absolute ( R absolute ) and relative figures ( R relative ) of Kulp and Strauss [ 19 ] (Fig.  7 c, d). In terms of the relation of articles on climate change to the absolute numbers, Sweden was leading ( R absolute  = 15,187), followed by Canada ( R absolute  = 4597), Romania ( R absolute  = 4366), Australia ( R absolute  = 3940), South Africa ( R absolute  = 3054), and Lithuania ( R absolute  = 3050). The most publishing countries ranked as follows: The USA ranked 11th ( R absolute  = 1805), Germany 14th ( R absolute  = 1619), and UK 17th ( R absolute  = 986), while China followed far behind on rank 88 ( R absolute  = 23).

The analysis of the relative ratios led to the following ranking: Finland ( R relative  = 2123), USA ( R relative  = 549), Russia ( R relative  = 157), South Africa ( R relative  = 150), Canada ( R relative  = 149). In terms of most publishing countries, Germany was ranked 8th ( R relative  = 130), UK 18th ( R relative  = 61), and China 25th ( R relative  = 32).

A significant correlation could be shown between the absolute numbers of people living on vulnerable land and the number of articles ( p  < 0.001), while the relative numbers did not correlate with the number of articles ( p  < 0.53).

Vulnerability and readiness

Correlation analysis of the two ND-GAIN indices (readiness and vulnerability) of 2017 and the number of articles were both significant ( p  < 0.0001), but with different slopes. The correlation of the readiness index and the number of articles was significantly positive (Fig.  9 a), and the correlation of the vulnerability index and the number of articles was significantly negatively correlated ( p  < 0.001) (Fig.  9 b).

Correlation of the number of articles and indices of the ND-GAIN 2017 (Notre Dame Global Adaption Initiative) [27] regarding countries. a Readiness index, positive correlation ( p  < 0.001). b Vulnerability index, negative correlation ( p  < 0.001)

International networking

A total of n  = 11,626 (29%) international cooperation articles were identified. Of these, n  = 7995 were bilateral and n  = 3165 trilateral collaborations, respectively. Four articles were worked out with at least 20 collaboration countries.

The first international cooperation in our database was published in 1975. Over time, the number of international partnerships increased exponentially, similar to the total number of articles, until it reached its maximum in 2014 with n  = 1425 international collaboration articles.

The USA as core country of the international networking participated in the 5 strongest partnerships (Fig.  10 ): USA/UK ( n  = 905), USA/China ( n  = 830), USA/Canada ( n  = 722), USA/Australia ( n  = 563), and USA/Germany ( n  = 534). Of the US articles, 37% were international collaborations, while more than half of the British articles and almost half of the Canadian and Australian articles were developed in international collaboration. Germany even conducted more than 60% of its studies with another country.

Network of internationally co-authored articles on climate change with numbers in brackets (number of articles/number of cooperation articles). The width of connecting lines represents the quantity of common articles (threshold: 40 collaboration articles between countries)

Progress of publications on climate change

The first article on climate change identified by our approach was published as early as 1910. It is an article published in Nature and asked the question of whether the Indian climate changed [ 20 ]. This early publication already addressed the causal link between climate change and anthropogenic influence. The author asked whether there are causal links of increased irrigation and forest loss, also in comparison to statements by Gilbert Walker, the General Director of Indian Observatories, who made connections between the air pressure in South America and the intensity of Monsoon in India, thus negating links between climate change in India and human interference.

In 1947, an English article raised the question of whether there was a connection between the retreat of glaciers and climate change [ 4 ].

In 1956, the carbon dioxide theory was confirmed by a US-American article, which referred to a series of articles published as early as the end of the nineteenth century [ 31 ]. The authors of these articles formulated the carbon dioxide theory and thus provided the most widely accepted explanation for the climate change already recognized at that time. However, this was later denied until it turned out to be true. In his study, Gilbert N. Plass from John Hopkins University has already seen the impact of human activities on the CO 2 balance through the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and land management. In contrast to today’s threat awareness, the problem he discussed was the risk of new glacial formation due to the decrease of CO 2 caused by a changed balance in the atmosphere–ocean system [ 31 ].

A German article from 1961 also argues that "man-made effects on climate change “should not be underestimated as well as "the danger that such effects will work irreversibly against human benefit” [ 11 ].

A study on the astronomical theory , also known as the Milankovitch hypothesis of climate change, raised in 1969 the problem awareness of the scientific world with its Barbados data [ 23 ].

In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an intergovernmental body of the United Nations (UN), was established at the first world climate conference in Geneva with the aim to provide a wide range of scientific information on climate change to support governmental decisions [ 16 ]. As of this first world climate conference, the number of publications has risen firstly to a three-digit figure, which can also be seen from the sharp increase in relative numbers per 10,000 SCI articles.

Thereafter, the numbers increased steadily until 2003, when an exponential increase could be observed that was also reflected by the steep rise in relative numbers. At the COP in Milan (Italy) in 2003, all parties agreed to the Adaption Fund, which was primarily founded to support developing countries in their capacity to respond to the consequences of climate change. In the same year, an enormous heatwave caused many thousands of deaths in Europe [ 37 ]. Since European countries, in particular, are among the most publishing nations, this regional climate catastrophe has certainly contributed to a strong increase in research interest on climate change.

Also, in 2003, the most cited article of this study was published. By analyzing more than 1700 species, the meta-analysis of C. Parmesan and G. Yohe shows that biological trends are in line with predictions of climate change [ 30 ]. This successful publication certainly contributed to the fact that the highest average citation rate per year was achieved in 2003, initiating an exponential growth in publication output.

The citation numbers increased adequately to the publication numbers with some outstanding years, e.g., 1991, 2000, 2004, and 2010, latter the year with the highest number of citations so far. Many of the high impact articles are published in these years so that an association can be assumed.

Geographical aspects of publications on climate change

The USA, the UK, China, Australia, and Germany could be identified as the most publishing countries on climate change. This is not surprising, as it shows that mostly scientifically well-structured countries conduct most of the research, not only on climate change issues, as previous studies also have shown [ 17 ]. China, in particular, was catching up in the recent years due to its targeted research policy, which is represented by the enormous increase in expenditures on R&D [ 28 ].

The USA government, which is the most publishing country on climate change so far, is not exactly famous for its climate change–conscious attitude. The rejection of binding targets and the denial to sign the Paris Agreement confirms this. The USA is still the country with the highest expenditures on R&D and certainly one of the most preferred places to work for the most renowned scientists in the world. Despite the government’s attitude, its leading position in terms of publication output is not unique for climate change research and certainly not astonishing.

The results also show a clear dominance of European countries in the publication numbers on climate change. Also, Europe has a very good scientific infrastructure at its disposal. In contrast, most European countries signed up to the binding targets of the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions by at least 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 [ 10 ]. Denmark event targeted for a 70% reduction [ 7 ].

To evaluate the scientific landscape on climate change in greater depth, we extended the analyses to other, more differentiated parameters.

The Scandinavian countries have to be highlighted due to their leading position concerning various additional evaluation parameters, e.g., socioeconomic ratios. In general, Scandinavian countries have established good conditions for researchers and spend a lot on R&D. This is why research on climate change has also proven to be no exception. Sweden and Norway were leading in the analysis of their publication numbers in terms of national CO 2 emission, with Switzerland in between in 2nd place. This parameter had been chosen for the analysis in order to establish a link with countries’ obligations under the polluter-pays principle. In 2017, the highest emissions rates were released by China, USA, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Sweden ranks first when putting the number of published articles in relation to the emission rate (threshold 300 articles), followed by Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and New Zealand.

The Scandinavian countries are known to be “early adopters of renewable energy”. The share of renewable energy in Iceland is 77%, in Sweden 63%, in Norway 51% (despite the oil production capacity), in Finland 47%, and in Denmark 33%, in contrast to the EU28 with a proportion of only 21% [ 26 ]. Also, in terms of the relation to the number of people living on exposed land to sea-level rise, Sweden led in the evaluation of absolute numbers and Finland of relative numbers. With 1215 articles, Sweden ranked 12th regarding its absolute publication numbers, Norway 15th, Denmark 16th, and Finland 20th.

Switzerland, which is ranked second in terms of inclusion of CO 2 emission, is affected to a considerable extent by climate change due to its location in the European Alps and the progressive melting of glaciers and permafrost. Especially since tourism—above all skiing—is an important economic sector. Therefore, it is not astonishing that the focus of Swiss research is mainly on problems related to the Alpine region [ 6 ].

In terms of science-related parameters, such as GERD or number of researchers, both Australia and New Zealand came into focus. Since they are located close to each other, the intensity of cooperation in climate change research is understandable. The location near Antarctica on the one hand and the immense heatwaves with extraordinary effects on ecosystems and biosphere on the other hand form the background for relatively high investments in climate change research.

Looking at the average citation rate of the publishing countries ( n  ≥ 30), Costa Rica occupied a prominent position. With 67 articles, Costa Rica is far behind in absolute terms. Nevertheless, these articles were cited 6291 times. Nearly half of the studies of Costa Rica are worked in collaboration with the USA. The Tropical Science Center (TSC) affiliated with the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve in Costa Rica participated in a US-American and Costa Rican collaboration, with the 5th most cited article of this analysis, that deals with the impacts of climate change on wildlife [ 34 ]. The Center is also taking part in two other high-profile publications, which, like the most cited article, are also published in Nature . They all deal with the risk of extinction caused by global warming. Alan Pounds, biological scientist since 1996 at the TSC and focusing on the biological impact of climate change, found, e.g., a correlation between amphibian die-offs and rising average temperatures [ 32 ]. Previously, he worked at the Department of Zoology, University of Florida, USA, where he already collaborated with colleagues from Costa Rica. The pattern of the successful partnership of international networks can be seen in this example, which stands for mutual benefit for both cooperating countries.

In terms of citation rates, Estonia also took a leading position, as it is part of a Europe-wide meta-analysis on changes in phenology using data on more than 125,000 observational series of plants and animals to assess their response to climate change [ 22 ]. The resulting article, which was published in 2006 in Global Change Biology, received almost half of the Estonian citations.

The third country that should be highlighted regarding the citation rate of its articles is Iceland. Its articles were not counted among the high-impact publications. Instead, many of its articles achieved recognition with above-average citation rates. The location far in the north, close to Greenland and the Arctic Circle, is an advantage for all climate change projects that focus on melting glaciers in these regions, and the glacial retreat is here more and more evident. It has been assumed that all Islandic glaciers will be disappeared by the year 2200 [ 26 ]. Therefore, the most cited Icelandic article is the result of an international collaboration focusing on the regional differences in the last glacial period to better understand climate dynamics [ 3 ].

The comparison of the countries’ results in relation to the GDP put the insular state of Fiji, which consists of more than 300 islands, at the top of the evaluation. Currently, almost one million people are living in an area of about 18,000 square kilometers north of New Zealand in the South Pacific. Fiji has been selected to chair the 23rd climate summit 2017 in Germany. In the same year, the number of articles from Fiji reached its maximum, which seems to be associated. Nearly half of the articles are collaboration works with Australia. One of the advantages of research cooperation on climate change is the existence of Fiji’s coral reefs, their vulnerability, and their importance for coastal protection.

Worthy to note is also the rank of Denmark in terms of socioeconomic influence. In addition to Denmark’s otherwise equally good scientific infrastructure, its position in climate change research is certainly influenced by Greenland’s affiliation and the direct and immediate effects of climate change in this region located closest to the Arctic. The direct association to Greenland or the Arctic can be found in more than 200 Danish articles mostly focusing on Geoscience . The Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen is leading in the climate change research based on ice cores. The ice core collection is considered as a “national treasure” and contains a deep drill core of more than 15 km in length [ 43 ].

In connection with the socioeconomic analysis, it is also remarkable that the African developing country Zimbabwe ranked 7th among the top 10. Unlike other African countries, it is relatively industrialized and produces twice the average amount of greenhouse gases [ 5 ]. Nevertheless, Zimbabwe—like other African countries—has to cope with droughts, freshwater and food shortages, diminished biodiversity, vector-borne diseases, and dry ups as a result of climate change. Zimbabwe was among the first countries to sign and ratify the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 [ 29 , 41 ]. In 2011, it participated in the REDD+ program ( Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ), which aims to avoid 52 million tons of CO 2 over 30 years in Zimbabwe and in return to support the communities with financial aid for agriculture, fire prevention, and production methods to preserve forest areas [ 5 ].

France, which ranks 7th in terms of absolute publication numbers, led when the ratio between publication numbers and fatalities due to climate events of the CRI index is assessed. More than half of the articles on climate change are worked out with the participation of the French state research organization Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The CNRS was ranked 4th by the Nature Index in 2017 regarding the largest contributors, behind the CAS (in this study identified as most publishing institute on climate change), Harvard University USA, and Max Planck Society Germany [ 25 ]. Plus, the majority of its articles is worked out as international collaboration (66.59%). The share of the other most publishing countries is considerably lower: USA (36.98%), UK (51.90%), China (48.97%), Australia (47.27%) Germany (61.10%), Canada (46.77%).

Nevertheless, the share of collaboration articles is relatively high in comparison to other research fields. This may be due to the majority of articles published after 2000, considering that the share of collaboration articles generally increases over time due to the international awareness of its benefits [ 1 ].

Articles on climate change focused on three main thematic groups, leading from the modeling of future scenarios to the environmental and socioeconomic impacts and the corresponding mitigation and adaptation measures. The readiness of countries and their vulnerability are inversely related to the number of articles published on climate change. Our results show the dominance of the Northern hemisphere in terms of publication output on climate change. Taking into account socioeconomic, research, and climate-specific characteristics, the order of the leading countries shifts, but the main actors remain the same with only a few exceptions. Only Costa Rica, Fiji, and Zimbabwe as developing countries came to play a role in the evaluation of the results. In principle, Africa, Asia, and South America are extremely under-represented. Many scientists are becoming aware of the advantages of international networking, which is of mutual benefit to all participating countries. However, particularly regarding climate change research, these benefits should be more frequently shared with developing countries, as the involvement of these most affected nations still is sparse.

In this context, the term “equity” is certainly familiar to all those interested in climate change research. There is a heated debate in the scientific community on whether scientific cooperation with developing countries should be called for. Many researchers see this as limiting the freedom of research. However, the principle of research responsibility should also be taken into account in this context. This should or must lead to a global risk-indexed joint planning because all scientists have only one planet to take care of. In this context, Prof. Drenth, Emeritus, Psychometrics and Organizational Psychology, Free University Amsterdam [ 8 ], asked the following questions for any scientist dealing with climate change: “Risks for whom? How far does the right to know go? What is the balance between self-determination and the interests of larger groups or the society as a whole? How certain does the scientist have to be before warning, especially in the case of irreversible developments?”.

The spread and economic impact of the current COVID 19 pandemic has reduced public and media interest in climate change issues. All the more reason to urgently press for the causes and consequences of climate change to once again become the focus of interest, while at the same time dealing with the consequences of the pandemic. Climate change must continue to be recognized as one of the most urgent global challenges. This makes it necessary to reconcile future scientific direction with the long-term environmental, social and economic consequences of the impacts of climate change that all countries are facing.

Availability of data and materials

The bibliometric data are the property of the Web of Science database and were obtained from it. Therefore, the authors are not allowed to pass on the data publicly or privately. Any researcher with access to the Web of Science database can obtain the data using the methods described in the paper. Readers who do not have access to Web of Science should contact Clarivate Analytics to obtain a license.

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Doris Klingelhöfer, Ruth Müller, Markus Braun, Dörthe Brüggmann & David A. Groneberg

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Klingelhöfer, D., Müller, R., Braun, M. et al. Climate change: Does international research fulfill global demands and necessities?. Environ Sci Eur 32 , 137 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-020-00419-1

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Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options

Glaciers serve as early indicators of climate change. Over the last 35 years, our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields from 16 countries. The ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low to middle latitudes, provides some of the strongest evidence to date that a large-scale, pervasive, and, in some cases, rapid change in Earth's climate system is underway. This paper highlights observations of 20th and 21st century glacier shrinkage in the Andes, the Himalayas, and on Mount Kilimanjaro. Ice cores retrieved from shrinking glaciers around the world confirm their continuous existence for periods ranging from hundreds of years to multiple millennia, suggesting that climatological conditions that dominate those regions today are different from those under which these ice fields originally accumulated and have been sustained. The current warming is therefore unusual when viewed from the millennial perspective provided by multiple lines of proxy evidence and the 160-year record of direct temperature measurements. Despite all this evidence, plus the well-documented continual increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, societies have taken little action to address this global-scale problem. Hence, the rate of global carbon dioxide emissions continues to accelerate. As a result of our inaction, we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.

Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization ( “Climate Change,” 2010 ).

That bold statement may seem like hyperbole, but there is now a very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.

THE EVIDENCE

Figure 1 shows northern hemisphere temperature profiles for the last 1,000 years from a variety of high-resolution climate recorders such as glacier lengths ( Oerlemans, 2005 ), tree rings ( Briffa, Jones, Schwerngruber, Shiyatov, & Cook, 2002 ; Esper, Cook, & Schweingruber, 2002 ), and combined sources that include some or all of the following: tree rings, sediment cores, ice cores, corals, and historical records ( Crowley & Lowery, 2000 ; Jones, Briffa, Barnett, & Tett, 1998 ; Mann, Bradley, & Hughes, 1999 ; Moberg, Sonechkin, Holmgrem, Datsenko, & Karlen, 2005 ). The heavy gray line is a composite of all these temperatures ( Mann & Jones, 2003 ), and the heavy black line depicts actual thermometer readings back to 1850 (see National Research Council, 2006 , for a review of surface temperature reconstructions). Although the various curves differ from one another, their general shapes are similar. Each data source shows that average northern hemisphere temperatures remained relatively stable until the late 20th century. It is the agreement of these diverse data sets and the pattern that make climatologists confident that the warming trend is real.

A variety of temperature records over the last 1,000 years, based on a variety of proxy recorders such as tree rings, ice cores, historical records, instrumental data, etc., shows the extent of the recent warming. The range of temperature projected by Meehl et al. (2007) to 2100 AD is shown by the shaded region, and the average of the range is depicted by the filled circle.

Because these temperature numbers are based on northern hemisphere averages, they do not reflect regional, seasonal, and altitudinal variations. For example, the average temperature in the western United States is rising more rapidly than in the eastern part of the country, and on average winters are warming faster than summers ( Meehl, Arblaster, & Tebaldi, 2007 ). The most severe temperature increases appear to be concentrated in the Arctic and over the Antarctic Peninsula as well as within the interior of the large continents. This variability complicates matters, and adds to the difficulty of convincing the public, and even scientists in other fields, that global warming is occurring. Because of this, it may be useful to examine another kind of evidence: melting ice.

Retreat of Mountain Glaciers

The world's mountain glaciers and ice caps contain less than 4% of the world's ice cover, but they provide invaluable information about changes in climate. Because glaciers are smaller and thinner than the polar ice sheets, their ratio of surface area to volume is much greater; thus, they respond more quickly to temperature changes. In addition, warming trends are amplified at higher altitudes where most glaciers are located ( Bradley, Keimig, Diaz, & Hardy, 2009 ; Bradley, Vuille, Diaz, & Vergara, 2006 ). Thus, glaciers provide an early warning system of climate change; they are our “canaries in the coal mine.”

Consider the glaciers of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro ( Figure 2 ). Using a combination of terrestrial photogrammetric maps, satellite images, and aerial photographs, we have determined that the ice fields on Kibo, the highest crater on Kilimanjaro, have lost 85% of their coverage since 1912 ( Thompson, Brecher, Mosley-Thompson, Hardy, & Mark, 2009 ).

The retreat of glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro can be seen in the photographs from 1912, 1970, 2000, and 2006; from 1912 to 2006, 85% of the ice has disappeared.

Figure 3 shows a series of aerial photographs of Furtwängler glacier, in the center of Kibo crater, taken between 2000 and 2007, when the glacier split into two sections. As Furtwängler recedes, it is also thinning rapidly, from 9.5 m in 2000 to 4.7 m in 2009 (for more images of Furtwängler's retreat, see http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-10722-Orlando-Science-Policy-Examiner∼y2009m11d2-Mt-Kilimanjaros-Furtwängler-Glacier-in-retreat ). If you connect the dots on the changes seen to date and assume the same rate of loss in the future, within the next decade many of the glaciers of Kilimanjaro, a Swahili word meaning “shining mountain,” will have disappeared.

Deterioration of the Furtwängler glacier in the center of Kibo crater on Mount Kilimanjaro. Since 2000 the ice field has decreased in size and thickness and has divided in two.

The Quelccaya ice cap, which is located in southern Peru adjacent to the Amazon Basin, is the largest tropical ice field on Earth. Quelccaya has several outlet glaciers, glaciers that extend from the edges of an ice cap like fingers from a hand. The retreat of one of these, Qori Kalis, has been studied and photographed since 1963. At the beginning of this study, Qori Kalis extended 1,200 m out from the ice cap, and there was no melt water at the end ( Figure 4 , map top left). By the summer of 2008, Qori Kalis had retreated to the very edge of Quelccaya, leaving behind an 84-acre lake, 60 m deep. Over the years, a boulder near the base camp has served as a benchmark against which to record the changes in the position of the edge of the ice. In 1977 the ice was actually pushing against the boulder ( Figure 5 , top), but by 2006 a substantial gap had appeared and been filled by a lake ( Figure 5 , bottom). Thus, the loss of Quelccaya's ice is not only on the Qori Kalis glacier but also on the margin of the ice cap itself. Since 1978, about 25% of this tropical ice cap has disappeared.

Retreat of the Qori Kalis outlet glacier on the Quelccaya ice cap. Each line shows the extent of the ice. The photos along the bottom provide a pictorial history of the melting of the Qori Kalis outlet glacier and the formation of a lake. The retreat of Qori Kalis is similar to the loss of several Peruvian glaciers, as shown in the graph insert.

Top: photo taken in 1978 shows a margin of the Quelccaya ice cap pushing against a boulder. Bottom: the same margin is shown in a 2005 photo. The ice has receded and has been replaced by a small lake. The boulder shown in the top photo is located in the center of the white circle to the right.

The Himalayan Mountains are home to more than 15,000 glaciers. Unfortunately, only a few of these glaciers have been monitored over an extended period, so reliable ground observations that are crucial for determining regional retreat rates do not yet exist. However, a recent study of an ice core from the Naimona'nyi glacier in the southwestern Himalayas ( Kehrwald et al., 2008 ) shows that ice is disappearing from the top of the glacier, as shown by the lack of the radioactive bomb layers from the 1950s and early 1960s that appear in all Tibetan and Himalayan ice core records ( Thompson, 2000 ; Thompson et al., 1990 , 1997 , 2006 ).

Glaciologists at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing have been monitoring 612 glaciers across the High Asian region since 1980. These scientists found that from 1980 to 1990, 90% of these glaciers were retreating; from 1990 to 2005, the proportion of retreating glaciers increased to 95% ( Yao, Pu, Lu, Wang, & Yu, 2007 ).

A study of 67 glaciers in Alaska from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s shows that all are thinning ( Arendt, Echelmeyer, Harrison, Lingle, & Valentine, 2002 ). In northern Alaska's Brooks Range, 100% of the glaciers are in retreat, and in southeastern Alaska 98% are shrinking ( Molnia, 2007 ). Glacier National Park in Montana contained more than 100 glaciers when it was established in 1910. Today, just 26 remain, and at the current rate of decrease it is estimated that by 2030 there will be no glaciers in Glacier National Park ( Hall & Fagre, 2003 ). The oldest glacier photos come from the Alps. Ninety-nine percent of the glaciers in the Alps are retreating, and 92% of Chile's Andean glaciers are retreating ( Vince, 2010 ).

The pattern described here is repeated around the world. Mountain glaciers nearly everywhere are retreating.

Loss of Polar Ice

Satellite documentation of the area covered by sea ice in the Arctic Ocean extends back three decades. This area, measured each September, decreased at a rate of about 8.6% per decade from 1979 to 2007. In 2007 alone, 24% of the ice disappeared. In 2006 the Northwest Passage was ice free for the first time in recorded history.

As noted earlier, polar ice sheets are slower to respond to temperature rise than the smaller mountain glaciers, but they, too, are melting. The Greenland ice sheet has also experienced dramatic ice melt in recent years. There has been an increase in both the number and the size of lakes in the southern part of the ice sheet, and crevices can serve as conduits (called moulins) that transport meltwater rapidly into the glacier. Water has been observed flowing through these moulins down to the bottom of the ice sheet where it acts as a lubricant that speeds the flow of ice to the sea ( Das et al., 2008 ; Zwally et al., 2002 ).

The ice in Antarctica is also melting. The late John Mercer, a glacial geologist at The Ohio State University, long ago concluded that the first evidence of global warming due to increasing carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) would be the breakup of the Antarctic ice shelves ( Mercer, 1978 ). Mean temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have risen 2.5° C (4.5° F) in the last 50 years, resulting in the breakup of the ice shelves in just the way Mercer predicted. One of the most rapid of these shelf deteriorations occurred in 2002, when the Larsen B, a body of ice over 200 m deep that covered an area the size of Rhode Island, collapsed in just 31 days (see images http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id = 2351). An ice shelf is essentially an iceberg attached to land ice. Just as an ice cube does not raise the water level in a glass when it melts, so a melting ice shelf leaves sea levels unchanged. But ice shelves serve as buttresses to glaciers on land, and when those ice shelves collapse it speeds the flow of the glaciers they were holding back into the ocean, which causes sea level to rise rapidly.

Just days before this paper went to press, a giant ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off the Petermann glacier in Greenland. This event alone does not prove global climate change, because half of the ice loss from Greenland each year comes from icebergs calving from the margins. It is the fact that this event is part of a long-term trend of increasing rates of ice loss, coupled with the fact that temperature is increasing in this region at the rate of 2° C (3.6° F) per decade, that indicates that larger scale global climate change is underway.

The loss of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions is especially troubling because these are the locations of the largest ice sheets in the world. Of the land ice on the planet, 96% is found on Greenland and Antarctica. Should all this ice melt, sea level would rise over 64 m ( Church et al., 2001 ; Lemke et al., 2007 ), and of course the actual sea level would be much higher due to thermal expansion of the world's oceans as they warm.

Although research shows some variability in the rate of ice loss, it is clear that mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets are melting, and there is no plausible explanation for this but global warming. Add to this the laboratory evidence and the meteorological measurements, and the case for global warming cannot be denied. So what causes global temperatures to rise?

CAUSES OF GLOBAL WARMING

Climatologists strive to reconstruct past climate variations on regional and global scales, but they also try to determine the mechanisms, called forcers , that drive climate change. Climatologists recognize two basic categories of forcers. Natural forcers are recurring processes that have been around for millions of years; anthropogenic forcers are more recent processes caused by human activity.

One familiar natural forcer is the earth's orbit around the sun, which gives us our seasons. In the northern hemisphere, June is warm because the sun's rays fall more directly on it, and the sun appears high in the sky; in the southern hemisphere, June is cool because the sun's rays hit the earth at a deep angle, and the sun appears low in the sky.

Less obvious natural forcers include short- and long-term changes in the atmosphere and ocean. For example, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed millions of tons of sulfuric gases and ash particles high into the atmosphere, blocking the sun's rays. This lowered global temperatures for the next few years. Another natural forcer is the linked oceanic and atmospheric system in the equatorial Pacific Ocean known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO occurs every 3 to 7 years in the tropical Pacific and brings warm, wet weather to some regions and cool, dry weather to other areas.

Other natural forcers include periodic changes in energy from the sun. These include the 11- to 12-year sunspot cycle and the 70- to 90-year Wolf-Gleissberg cycle, a modulation of the amplitude of the 11-year solar cycle. These changes in solar energy can affect atmospheric temperature across large regions for hundreds of years and may have caused the “medieval climate anomaly” in the northern hemisphere that lasted from about 1100 AD to 1300 AD. Solar cycles may also have played a role in the cause of the “little ice age” in North America and Europe during the 16th to 19th centuries. These changes in climate, which are often cited by those who dismiss global warming as a normal, cyclical event, affected large areas, but not the Earth as a whole. The medieval climate anomaly showed warmth that matches or exceeds that of the past decade in some regions, but it fell well below recent levels globally ( Mann et al., 2009 ).

The most powerful natural forcers are variations in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, which last from 22,000 to 100,000 years. These “orbital forcings” are partly responsible for both the ice ages (the glacial periods during which large regions at high and midddle latitudes are covered by thick ice sheets), and for the warm interglacial periods such as the present Holocene epoch which began about 10,000 years ago.

There is consensus among climatologists that the warming trend we have been experiencing for the past 100 years or so cannot be accounted for by any of the known natural forcers. Sunspot cycles, for example, can increase the sun's output, raising temperatures in our atmosphere. We are seeing a temperature increase in the troposphere, the lower level of our atmosphere, and a temperature decrease in the stratosphere, the upper level. But this is the exact opposite of what we would get if increased solar energy were responsible. Similarly, global temperatures have increased more at night than during the day, again the opposite of what would occur if the sun were driving global warming. In addition, temperatures have risen more in winter than in summer. This, too, is the opposite of what would be expected if the sun were responsible for the planet's warming. High latitudes have warmed more than low latitudes, and because we get more radiation from the sun at low latitudes, we again would expect the opposite if the sun were driving these changes. Thus, changes in solar output cannot account for the current period of global warming ( Meehl et al., 2007 ). ENSO and other natural forcers also fail to explain the steady, rapid rise in the earth's temperature. The inescapable conclusion is that the rise in temperature is due to anthropogenic forces, that is, human behavior.

The relatively mild temperatures of the past 10,000 years have been maintained by the greenhouse effect, a natural phenomenon. As orbital forcing brought the last ice age to an end, the oceans warmed, releasing CO 2 into the atmosphere, where it trapped infrared energy reflected from the earth's surface. This warmed the planet. The greenhouse effect is a natural, self-regulating process that is absolutely essential to sustain life on the planet. However, it is not immutable. Change the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the planet heats up or cools down.

Greenhouse gases are captured in ice, so ice cores allow us to see the levels of greenhouse gases in ages past. The longest ice core ever recovered (from the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) takes us 800,000 years back in time, and includes a history of CO 2 and methane levels preserved in bubbles in the ice ( Loulergue et al., 2008 ; Lüthi et al., 2008 ). The CO 2 and methane curves illustrated in Figure 6 show that the modern levels of these gases are unprecedented in the last 800 millennia.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ) over the last 800,000 years (eight glacial cycles) from East Antarctic ice cores. Data from Loulergue et al. (2008) and Lüthi et al. (2008) . The current concentrations of CO 2 and CH 4 are also shown ( Forster et al., 2007 ).

Globally, CO 2 concentrations have varied between 180 and 190 parts per million per volume (ppmv) during glacial (cold) periods and between 270 and 290 ppmv during interglacial (warm) periods. However, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when fossil fuel use (chiefly coal and oil) began to burgeon, CO 2 concentration has increased about 38% over the natural interglacial levels ( Forster et al., 2007 ). Between 1975 and 2005, CO 2 emissions increased 70%, and between 1999 and 2005 global emissions increased 3% per year ( Marland, Boden, & Andres, 2006 ). As of this writing, the CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere is 391 ppmv (Mauna Loa CO 2 annual mean data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2010 ), a level not seen at any time in 800,000 years. Climatologists have identified no natural forcers that could account for this rapid and previously unseen rise in CO 2 .

Methane raises temperature even more than CO 2 , and the amount of methane in the atmosphere, like that of CO 2 , is also at a level not seen in 800 millennia. Two thirds of current emissions of methane are by-products of human activity, things like the production of oil and natural gas, deforestation, decomposition of garbage and sewage, and raising farm animals.

Many people find it difficult to believe that human activity can affect a system as large as Earth's climate. After all, we are so tiny compared to the planet. But every day we tiny human beings drive cars; watch television; turn on lamps; heat or cool our houses and offices; eat food transported to us by planes, ships, and trucks; clear or burn forests; and behave in countless other ways that directly or indirectly release greenhouse gases into the air. Together, we humans emitted eight billion metric tons of carbon to our planet's atmosphere in 2007 alone ( Boden, Marland, & Andres, 2009 ). (CO 2 weighs 3.66 times more than carbon; that means we released 29.3 billion metric tons of CO 2 .) The evidence is overwhelming that human activity is responsible for the rise in CO 2 , methane, and other greenhouse gas levels, and that the increase in these gases is fueling the rise in mean global temperature.

A global temperature rise of a few degrees may not seem such a bad thing, especially to people living in harsh, cold climates. But global warming does not mean merely that we will trade parkas for T-shirts or turn up the air conditioning. A warming planet is a changing planet, and the changes will have profound consequences for all species that live on it, including humans. Those changes are not just something our children and grandchildren will have to deal with in the future; they are taking place now, and are affecting millions of people.

EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING

One effect of global warming that everyone has heard about is a rise in sea levels. About half of this rise is due to thermal expansion: Ocean temperatures are rising, and as water warms it expands. Put a nearly full cup of water in a microwave and heat it, and the water will spill over the cup.

In addition to thermal expansion, the oceans are rising because ice is melting, and most of that water inevitably finds its way to the sea. So far, most of that water has come from mountain glaciers and ice caps ( Meier et al., 2007 ). As global temperatures increase, sea level rise will mainly reflect polar ice melt. So far, ocean rise has been measured in millimeters, but there is enough water in the Greenland ice sheet alone to raise sea levels by about 7 m, West Antarctica over 5 m, and East Antarctica about 50 m ( Lemke et al., 2007 ). If the Earth were to lose just 8% of its ice, the consequences for some coastal regions would be dramatic. The lower part of the Florida peninsula and much of Louisiana, including New Orleans, would be submerged, and low-lying cities, including London, New York, and Shanghai, would be endangered (to see the effects of various magnitudes of sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay area, go to http://cascade.wr.usgs.gov/data/Task2b-SFBay/data.shtm ).

Low-lying continental countries such as the Netherlands and much of Bangladesh already find themselves battling flooding more than ever before. Many small island nations in the western Pacific (e.g., Vanuatu) are facing imminent destruction as they are gradually overrun by the rising ocean. Indonesia is an island nation, and many of its 17,000 islands are just above sea level. At the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesian environmental minister Rachmat Witoelar stated that 2,000 of his country's islands could be lost to sea level rise by 2030. At current rates of sea level rise, another island nation, the Republic of Maldives, will become uninhabitable by the end of the century ( http://unfcc.int/resource/docs/napa/mdv01.pdf ). In 2008, the president of that country, Mohamed Nasheed, announced that he was contemplating moving his people to India, Sri Lanka, and Australia ( Schmidle, 2009 ). One of the major effects of continued sea level rise will be the displacement of millions of people. Where millions of climate refugees will find welcome is unclear. The migration of large numbers of people to new territories with different languages and cultures will be disruptive, to say the least.

In addition to the danger of inundation, rising sea levels bring salt water into rivers, spoil drinking wells, and turn fertile farmland into useless fields of salty soil. These effects of global warming are occurring now in places like the lowlands of Bangladesh ( Church et al., 2001 ).

People on dry land need the fresh water that is running into the sea. In the spring, melting ice from mountain glaciers, ice caps, and snowfields furnish wells and rivers that provide fresh water for drinking, agriculture, and hydroelectric power. For example, in the dry season, people in large areas of India, Nepal, and southern China depend on rivers fed by Himalayan glaciers. The retreat of these glaciers threatens the water supply of millions of people in this part of the world. Peru relies on hydroelectric power for 80% of its energy ( Vergara et al., 2007 ), a significant portion of which comes from mountain streams that are fed by mountain glaciers and ice fields. In Tanzania, the loss of Mount Kilimanjaro's fabled ice cover would likely have a negative impact on tourism, which is the country's primary source of foreign currency. The glaciers and snow packs in the Rocky Mountains are essential for farming in California, one of the world's most productive agricultural areas.

Global warming is expanding arid areas of the Earth. Warming at the equator drives a climate system called the Hadley Cell. Warm, moist air rises from the equator, loses its moisture through rainfall, moves north and south, and then falls to the Earth at 30° north and south latitude, creating deserts and arid regions. There is evidence that over the last 20 years the Hadley Cell has expanded north and south by about 2° latitude, which may broaden the desert zones ( Seidel, Fu, Randel, & Reichler, 2008 ; Seidel & Randel, 2007 ). If so, droughts may become more persistent in the American Southwest, the Mediterranean, Australia, South America, and Africa.

Global warming can also have effects that seem paradoxical. Continued warming may change ocean currents that now bring warm water to the North Atlantic region, giving it a temperate climate. If this happens, Europe could experience a cooling even as other areas of the world become warmer.

Accelerating Change

It is difficult to assess the full effects of global warming, and harder still to predict future effects. Climate predictions are made with computer models, but these models have assumed a slow, steady rate of change. Our best models predict a temperature rise in this century of between 2.4° and 4.5° C (4.3° and 8.1° F), with an average of about 3° C (5.4° F; Meehl et al., 2007 ; Figure 1 ). But these models assume a linear rise in temperature. Increasingly, computer models have underestimated the trends because, in fact, the rate of global temperature rise is accelerating. The average rise in global temperature was 0.11° F per decade over the last century ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2009 ). Since the late 1970s, however, this rate has increased to 0.29° F per decade, and 11 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the last 12 years. May, 2010, was the 303rd consecutive month with a global temperature warmer than its 20th-century average ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2010 ).

The acceleration of global temperature is reflected in increases in the rate of ice melt. From 1963 to 1978, the rate of ice loss on Quelccaya was about 6 m per year. From 1991 to 2006, it averaged 60 m per year, 10 times faster than the initial rate ( Thompson et al., 2006 ). A recent paper by Matsuo and Heki (2010) reports uneven ice loss from the high Asian ice fields, as measured by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite observations between 2003 and 2009. Ice retreat in the Himalayas slowed slightly during this period, and loss in the mountains to the northwest increased markedly over the last few years. Nevertheless, the average rate of ice melt in the region was twice the rate of four decades before. In the last decade, many of the glaciers that drain Greenland and Antarctica have accelerated their discharge into the world's oceans from 20% to 100% ( Lemke et al., 2007 ).

Increasing rates of ice melt should mean an increasing rate of sea level rise, and this is in fact the case. Over most of the 20th century, sea level rose about 2 mm per year. Since 1990, the rate has been about 3 mm per year.

So, not only is Earth's temperature rising, but the rate of this change is accelerating. This means that our future may not be a steady, gradual change in the world's climate, but an abrupt and devastating deterioration from which we cannot recover.

Abrupt Climate Change Possible

We know that very rapid change in climate is possible because it has occurred in the past. One of the most remarkable examples was a sudden cold, wet event that occurred about 5,200 years ago, and left its mark in many paleoclimate records around the world.

The most famous evidence of this abrupt weather change comes from Otzi, the “Tyrolean ice man” whose remarkably preserved body was discovered in the Eastern Alps in 1991 after it was exposed by a melting glacier. Forensic evidence suggests that Otzi was shot in the back with an arrow, escaped his enemies, then sat down behind a boulder and bled to death. We know that within days of Otzi's dying there must have been a climate event large enough to entomb him in snow; otherwise, his body would have decayed or been eaten by scavengers. Radiocarbon dating of Otzi's remains revealed that he died around 5,200 years ago ( Baroni & Orombelli, 1996 ).

The event that preserved Otzi could have been local, but other evidence points to a global event of abrupt cooling. Around the world organic material is being exposed for the first time in 5,200 years as glaciers recede. In 2002, when we studied the Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru, we found a perfectly preserved wetland plant. It was identified as Distichia muscoides , which today grows in the valleys below the ice cap. Our specimen was radiocarbon dated at 5,200 years before present ( Thompson et al., 2006 ). As the glacier continues to retreat, more plants have been collected and radiocarbon dated, almost all of which confirm the original findings ( Buffen, Thompson, Mosley-Thompson, & Huh, 2009 ).

Another record of this event comes from the ice fields on Mount Kilimanjaro. The ice dating back 5,200 years shows a very intense, very sudden decrease in the concentration of heavy oxygen atoms, or isotopes, in the water molecules that compose the ice ( Thompson et al., 2002 ). Such a decrease is indicative of colder temperatures, more intense snowfall, or both.

The Soreq Cave in Israel contains speleothems that have produced continuous climate records spanning tens of thousands of years. The record shows that an abrupt cooling also occurred in the Middle East about 5,200 years ago, and that it was the most extreme climatic event in the last 13,000 years ( Bar-Matthews, Ayalon, Kaufman, & Wasserburg, 1999 ).

One way that rapid climate change can occur is through positive feedback. In the physical sciences, positive feedback means that an event has an effect which, in turn, produces more of the initial event. The best way to understand this phenomenon as it relates to climate change is through some very plausible examples:

Higher global temperatures mean dryer forests in some areas, which means more forest fires, which means more CO 2 and ash in the air, which raises global temperature, which means more forest fires, which means …

Higher global temperatures mean melting ice, which exposes darker areas (dirt, rock, water) that reflect less solar energy than ice, which means higher global temperatures, which means more melting ice, which means …

Higher global temperatures mean tundra permafrost melts, releasing CO 2 and methane from rotted organic material, which means higher global temperature, which means more permafrost melting, which means …

Positive feedback increases the rate of change. Eventually a tipping point may be reached, after which it could be impossible to restore normal conditions. Think of a very large boulder rolling down a hill: When it first starts to move, we might stop it by pushing against it or wedging chocks under it or building a barrier, but once it has reached a certain velocity, there is no stopping it. We do not know if there is a tipping point for global warming, but the possibility cannot be dismissed, and it has ominous implications. Global warming is a very, very large boulder.

Even if there is no tipping point (or we manage to avoid it), the acceleration of warming means serious trouble. In fact, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tomorrow, temperatures would continue to rise for 20 to 30 years because of what is already in the atmosphere. Once methane is injected into the troposphere, it remains for about 8 to 12 years ( Prinn et al., 1987 ). Carbon dioxide has a much longer residence: 70 to 120 years. Twenty percent of the CO 2 being emitted today will still affect the earth's climate 1,000 years from now ( Archer & Brovkin, 2008 ).

If, as predicted, global temperature rises another 3° C (5.4° F) by the end of the century, the earth will be warmer than it has been in about 3 million years ( Dowsett et al., 1994 ; Rahmstorf, 2007 ). Oceans were then about 25 m higher than they are today. We are already seeing important effects from global warming; the effects of another 3° C (5.4° F) increase are hard to predict. However, such a drastic change would, at the very least, put severe pressure on civilization as we know it.

OUR OPTIONS

Global warming is here and is already affecting our climate, so prevention is no longer an option. Three options remain for dealing with the crisis: mitigate, adapt, and suffer.

Mitigation is proactive, and in the case of anthropogenic climate change it involves doing things to reduce the pace and magnitude of the changes by altering the underlying causes. The obvious, and most hotly debated, remedies include those that reduce the volume of greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO 2 and methane. Examples include not only using compact fluorescent lightbulbs, adding insulation to our homes, and driving less, but societal changes such as shutting down coal-fired power plants, establishing a federal carbon tax (as was recently recommended by the National Academy of Sciences), and substantially raising minimum mileage standards on cars ( National Research Council, 2010 ). Another approach to mitigation that has received widespread attention recently is to enhance the natural carbon sinks (storage systems) through expansion of forests. Some have suggested various geo-engineering procedures (e.g., Govindasamy & Caldeira, 2000 ; Wigley, 2006 ). One example is burying carbon in the ocean or under land surfaces ( Brewer, Friederich, Peltzer, & Orr, 1999 ). Geo-engineering ideas are intriguing, but some are considered radical and may lead to unintended negative consequences ( Parkinson, 2010 ).

Adaptation is reactive. It involves reducing the potential adverse impacts resulting from the by-products of climate change. This might include constructing sea barriers such as dikes and tidal barriers (similar to those on the Thames River in London and in New Orleans), relocating coastal towns and cities inland, changing agricultural practices to counteract shifting weather patterns, and strengthening human and animal immunity to climate-related diseases.

Our third option, suffering, means enduring the adverse impacts that cannot be staved off by mitigation or adaptation. Everyone will be affected by global warming, but those with the fewest resources for adapting will suffer most. It is a cruel irony that so many of these people live in or near ecologically sensitive areas, such as grasslands (Outer Mongolia), dry lands (Sudan and Ethiopia), mountain glaciers (the Quechua of the Peruvian Andes), and coastal lowlands (Bangledesh and the South Sea island region). Humans will not be the only species to suffer.

Clearly mitigation is our best option, but so far most societies around the world, including the United States and the other largest emitters of greenhouse gases, have done little more than talk about the importance of mitigation. Many Americans do not even accept the reality of global warming. The fossil fuel industry has spent millions of dollars on a disinformation campaign to delude the public about the threat, and the campaign has been amazingly successful. (This effort is reminiscent of the tobacco industry's effort to convince Americans that smoking poses no serious health hazards.) As the evidence for human-caused climate change has increased, the number of Americans who believe it has decreased. The latest Pew Research Center (2010) poll in October, 2009, shows that only 57% of Americans believe global warming is real, down from 71% in April, 2008.

There are currently no technological quick fixes for global warming. Our only hope is to change our behavior in ways that significantly slow the rate of global warming, thereby giving the engineers time to devise, develop, and deploy technological solutions where possible. Unless large numbers of people take appropriate steps, including supporting governmental regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, our only options will be adaptation and suffering. And the longer we delay, the more unpleasant the adaptations and the greater the suffering will be.

Sooner or later, we will all deal with global warming. The only question is how much we will mitigate, adapt, and suffer.

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on the Presidential Scholar's Address given at the 35th annual meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, Phoenix, Arizona. I am grateful to Bill Heward for inviting me to give the address. I thank Mary Davis for her help editing the text and figures. I wish to thank all the field and laboratory team members from the Byrd Polar Research Center who have worked so diligently over the years. I am especially indebted to the hard work of our current research team: Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Henry Brecher, Mary Davis, Paolo Gabrielli, Ping-Nan Lin, Matt Makou, Victor Zagorodnov, and all of our graduate students. Funding for our research over the years has been provided by the National Science Foundation's Paleoclimate Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Paleoclimatology and Polar Programs, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, Gary Comer Foundation, and The Ohio State University's Climate, Water and Carbon Program. This is Byrd Polar Research Center Publication 1402.

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Global Warming

Long-term warming trends and increases in extreme weather events have the potential to impact all life on Earth. Even though at least 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activities have contributed to rising global temperatures, the predominance and causes of these phenomena continue to be debated and many Americans deny global warming.

Read the overview below to gain a balanced understanding of the issues and explore the previews of opinion articles that highlight many perspectives on the response to global warming and climate change.

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Global warming topic overview.

"Global Warming and Climate Change." Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection , Gale, 2023.

Though the terms global warming and climate change are often used interchangeably, they have different meanings. Climate change describes long-term shifts in Earth's weather patterns that affect temperature, humidity, wind, cloud cover, and precipitation. Global warming refers explicitly to an increase in Earth's average surface temperatures caused by human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. Anthropogenic climate change refers to changes in the climate caused by human activity, particularly industrialization and agricultural practices that release pollutants into the atmosphere.

Overwhelming scientific evidence supports the existence of both global warming and climate change. Through the United Nations' (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), thousands of scientists work together to collect and analyze the latest available research related to climate change, its effects, and potential responses. In an interim update to its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) in 2023, the IPCC estimated that global surface temperatures increased by 1.1°C (1.98°F) between the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The IPCC has linked climate change and global warming to the increased occurrence and severity of storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires, warning that such disasters will increase further if temperatures continue to rise. The scientists' group also identifies water availability and food production as well as health and wealth being as experiencing observable, widespread, and substantial changes related to climate change. These threats have led scientists to identify global warming and climate change as a climate crisis . The IPCC recognizes human activity, particularly industrialization and certain agricultural practices that release carbon dioxide (CO2), as the primary driver of global warming and climate change.

Despite substantial evidence and a consensus among the scientific community, a vocal minority continues to challenge the science behind climate change. These critics characterize climate change as a natural phenomenon and dispute assertions that human activity has contributed to rising global temperatures. This position may be referred to as climate denial , and those who reject the scientific consensus are considered climate deniers . Fossil fuel companies often provide financial support to politicians, media campaigns, and organizations that promote climate denial.

• Climate chang e refers to long-term shifts in weather patterns. Global warming is the increase in the planet's average surface temperatures caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.
• Causes of climate change related to human activity are referred to as anthropogenic . Natural causes of climate change are called naturogenic .
• Earth's atmosphere contains several gases that trap heat from the sun and prevent it from escaping into space. These gases are called greenhouse gases (GHGs).
• July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth.
• Global warming has the potential to cause disruptions in the food supply, harm ecosystems and wildlife habitats, and threaten the planet's biodiversity.
• Countries that experience the harshest effects of climate change are often low- and middle-income countries who contribute fewer greenhouse gas emissions than wealthier countries that do not experience the effects so intensely.
• The United States has joined other countries in making commitments to fight climate change, but that commitment has largely depended on the country's leadership.
• Though the administration of President Joe Biden has taken more aggressive steps to combat the climate crisis, critics question whether these steps will meet the administration's ambitious goals and whether those goals are sufficient.

CAUSES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Earth's atmosphere contains several gases that trap heat from the sun and prevent it from escaping into space. This phenomenon is known as the greenhouse effect , and the gases are called greenhouse gases (GHGs). The main GHGs in nature are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth would be too cold to support life. Over time, the amount of GHGs trapped in Earth's atmosphere has increased significantly, causing worldwide temperatures to rise.

Natural processes on Earth constantly create and destroy GHGs. For example, plant and animal matter decay produce carbon dioxide, which plants then absorb during photosynthesis. This natural cycle stabilizes atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. Climate change scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other federal and international agencies recognize that natural factors, including volcanic activity and shifts in the planet's crust, continue to play a role in climate change. However, they generally agree that these factors alone do not explain the substantial rise in Earth's temperature. Natural causes of climate change are referred to as naturogenic , while causes of climate change related to human activity are called anthropogenic .

Earth's vegetation releases and absorbs over two hundred billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, add approximately seven billion metric tons per year. Climate scientists believe the cumulative effect of this additional carbon dioxide has had a dramatic impact on the atmosphere. Deforestation has also contributed to this increase by releasing carbon dioxide stored in trees and eliminating forests that would continue to absorb many tons of carbon dioxide. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as of 2023 the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased by 50 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the eighteenth century.

Increased levels of other GHGs, such as nitrous oxide and methane, have also resulted from human activity. Several agricultural and industrial processes, such as the use of certain fertilizers in farming, produce extensive amounts nitrous oxide. Methane emissions come from fossil fuel production, landfills, and livestock. Though much smaller quantities of these gases exist in Earth's atmosphere, some scientists believe they cause more harm than carbon dioxide. Methane, for example, is about twenty-one times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat. Humans have also created and released GHGs that do not occur in nature. These include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). These gases, released during industrial processes such as aluminum production and electrical transmission, trap thousands of times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

CLIMATE CHANGE PREDICTIONS

A broad consensus exists in the scientific community that the consequences of climate change may be devastating, though the exact nature of the changes is difficult to predict. No model to chart climate patterns has had complete accuracy. For instance, most climate models failed to predict a slowdown in rising temperatures starting in 1998 and ending in 2012. The slowdown was attributed to volcanic eruptions that blocked out the sun and cooled temperatures, low levels of solar activity, and naturally occurring variability. Similarly, some predictions have underestimated threats.

In its initial assessment of rising sea levels in 1990, the IPCC initially anticipated a sea level rise of 1.9 millimeters per year from that year onward. However, as of 2023, the IPCC reports that sea levels rose at a rate of 3.7 millimeters per year between 2006 and 2018. Sea level rise contributes to increased flooding and the damage caused by extreme storms such as hurricanes in coastal cities. The IPCC predicts that sea level rise could threaten as many as one billion people living in low-lying cities and communities by 2041, noting the threats to livelihoods, cultural heritage, and the existence of many island nations.

US PUBLIC OPINION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

The effects of human activities on global warming and climate change are acknowledged and accepted by most people in the United States. According to annual polls conducted by Gallup since 2001, the public's beliefs in anthropogenic climate change has increased. In 2023, 62 percent of Americans accepted that human activities cause climate change (up from 61 percent in 2001), 60 percent believed that the effects have begun (up from 54 percent), and 46 percent stated that global warming will soon pose a serious threat (up from 31 percent).

Researchers have observed a strong correlation between Americans' political affiliations and their acceptance of climate science and levels of concern about global warming. In 2023, about 85 percent of Democrats believed the effects of global warming were already apparent, and 88 percent believed humans caused them. In comparison, only 33 percent of Republicans agreed with the first statement and 29 percent agreed with the second. Most independents believed both statements (61 and 66 percent, respectively). However, further analysis by Gallup in 2022 revealed that Republicans under age fifty-five expressed greater concern about global warming than those age fifty-five and older but still significantly fewer than Democrats or Independents of any age group.

EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING

The potential consequences of global warming remain an issue of great debate and uncertainty. However, most experts predict dramatic and severe problems for future generations. Warmer oceans could result in stronger and more frequent hurricanes. As temperatures climb, some regions could experience frequent heat waves that bring devastating droughts and wildfires. In the United States, the 2023 summer season experienced a series of heat waves that broke temperature records in different parts of the country, particularly in Washington and Oregon. In July 2023, heat waves also affected many countries in the Northern Hemisphere, including Canada, China, and some European countries. NASA has confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth by a significant margin, identifying global warming as the principal causal factor.

Climate change has been linked to severe, exceptional droughts across several western states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Climate scientists refer to this phenomenon a "megadrought," and it has contributed to massive wildfires in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

From 2018 to 2021, California and Oregon endured massive wildfires that burned millions of acres and led to the displacement of thousands of residents, widespread destruction of property, and the deaths of dozens of people. California had a record-breaking wildfire season in 2020, including the state's first gigafire —a blaze that burned over one million acres of land. By the end of the year, wildfires burned more than four million acres throughout the state. Though wildfires were less frequent throughout the United States from 2022 to 2023 than in the preceding several years, the effects of global warming and the federal and state governments' lack of emergency preparedness led to one of the deadliest wildfires in recorded history. In August 2023 a small brush fire that a broken powerline may have caused started burning just outside the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui in Hawaii. In just a few minutes, winds blew the fire toward town, devouring wooden buildings, telephone and electric power lines, and water pipes. Without enough water pressure, Lahaina's fire department failed to contain the wildfire, and with the town's communication and power systems down, residents were not immediately alerted. As of September 2023, authorities had confirmed that ninety-seven people had been killed in the wildfire and thirty-one individuals were still missing in what had become the eleventh deadliest wildfire in world history.

A megadrought could also lead to water shortages. For example, the US government issued its first Tier 1 federal water shortage declaration in August 2021 for the Colorado River. The river provides water for several US states and parts of Mexico. The first cuts to state water supplies took effect in October in Arizona and Nevada. Upon revisiting the issue in August 2022, the government intensified its alarm, raising the classification to a Tier 2 federal water shortage and issuing drastic cuts to state water allowances. In August 2023, the government announced that the Colorado River water shortage would return to Tier 1 in 2024 and that water restrictions would be eased. The government's decision came after an unusually high amount of snowpack formed on the mountains near the Colorado River during the 2022–2023 winter season.

Many coastal areas worldwide could also face severe flooding due to rising sea levels. Low-lying islands in the Pacific Ocean would eventually become uninhabitable. From 1880 to 2022, sea levels rose about eight to nine inches worldwide. The hurricane season of 2017 proved to be the costliest hurricane season since 1900, causing over $265 billion of property damage in the United States and more than three thousand deaths in Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico. The year 2020 experienced thirty named storms, the most to ever occur in a single hurricane season. The first hurricane to make landfall in 2022 was Hurricane Fiona, which struck Puerto Rico and other Caribbean Islands in September. All of Puerto Rico, which was still recovering from devastating hurricanes in 2017, lost power, and several areas suffered flooding and landslides. Though twenty tropical storms affected the United States during the 2023 hurricane season, only three made landfall. One of them, Hurricane Idalia, was the strongest hurricane to hit Florida's Big Bend region since 1950, leaving over $1 billion worth of damages.

Global warming also threatens vulnerable ecosystems and wildlife habitats. Extended periods of drought can turn fertile lands into deserts with little vegetation. Plants and animals may not survive the rapid changes caused by global warming and could become extinct. Over the long term, such changes would negatively affect Earth's biodiversity. Environmental scientists warn that some ecosystems, such as coral reefs and coastal mangrove swamps, will likely disappear entirely.

The climate crisis also threatens to disrupt the global food supply, worsen economic inequality, and create security issues. Some areas might become too dry or too wet to support agriculture. As global warming causes more places to become uninhabitable, such displacement can drive mass migration. Communities struggle to recover from climate disasters, often exacerbating existing problems in those areas. Disputes over access to water have arisen in several states, including those with areas that rely on Colorado River water. Around the world, some water disputes have developed into armed conflicts.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

• For what reasons do you think perceptions of anthropogenic climate change vary among Democrats and Republicans in the United States?
• What potential long-term consequences of climate change do you think will be the most difficult to manage? Explain your reasoning.
• In what ways, if at all, do you think the federal government could change its approach to address climate change more effectively? Explain your answer.

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE AND US POLICY

The scope and global nature of the climate crisis necessitate that countries work together. Because an effective response requires countries to make sacrifices, negotiations to develop a coordinated international response have encountered repeated obstacles. Further, industrialized countries have contributed a disproportionate amount to the crisis. In contrast, less industrialized, lower-income countries have disproportionately felt the effects of the crisis and often lack the resources and infrastructure for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Since 1995, the UN has hosted annual conferences to discuss climate change as part of its Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In 1997, delegates gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate an international treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol. This treaty required industrialized countries to reduce their GHG emissions by a certain percentage over five years. As of November 2023, 191 countries and the European Union had ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The United States has not ratified the agreement, citing concerns that it does not impose restrictions on China and India. Canada withdrew in 2011.

In 2015, world leaders set new climate goals at the UNFCCC conference (COP21) in Paris, France. The resultant Paris Agreement aimed to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2°C (3.6°F) above preindustrial levels and provide countries with the tools needed to counteract climate change. President Barack Obama played a leading role in brokering the Paris Agreement and pushed for greater environmental restrictions during his presidency. The Paris Agreement went into effect with the commitment of the United States and seventy-three other parties in November 2016. Obama's successor, Donald Trump, announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw its support. After a required period, the United States officially withdrew from the agreement in November 2020.

Upon taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden reentered the country in the Paris Agreement. Biden vowed that his administration would prioritize climate policy and issued several executive orders that made sustainability and addressing climate change important considerations across all federal government agencies. In April 2021, the president hosted a virtual climate summit attended by forty world leaders and pledged that the United States would reduce its carbon emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030. In June 2022, the Biden administration experienced a setback when the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the Clean Air Act did not grant the EPA authority to regulate GHG emissions without Congress passing additional legislation.

In August 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a law promoting a sustainable green economy by incentivizing emissions reductions, supporting clean energy projects, and requiring the wealthiest individuals and corporations to pay more taxes. Though many advocates celebrated the law as the federal government's most aggressive step to combat the climate crisis, the law has also attracted criticism. Some detractors contend that the law remains insufficient to have a meaningful impact on the climate crisis or its other targets, which include health care costs, worker protections, and inflation. Further, Republicans have framed the law as an undue empowerment of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the agency responsible for collecting taxes. Public reception of Biden's climate policies has largely split along party lines. A June 2023 Pew Research Center survey revealed that 76 percent of Democrats approved of Biden's climate policies while 82 percent of Republicans disapproved.

More Articles

Global warming and climate change can be stopped if people try harder.

“Nations need to accelerate deployment of existing technologies to lock in and build on the gains of the last three years.”

Dr. Pep Canadell is Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project, Deputy Research Director at Atmosphere and Land Observation Assessment, and a research scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research.

In the following viewpoint, Canadell argues that recent efforts to improve energy efficiency and increase the use of clean energy have contributed to a stalling in fossil fuel emissions. However, Canadell contends that governments will need to increase their efforts to meet the climate goals established in the 2015 Paris Agreement. He compares the successes and shortcomings of China, the United States, India, Australia, and the European Union in reducing emissions. He examines the practice of storing carbon dioxide underground through carbon capture and storage (CCS) and concludes that thousands of CCS facilities will be necessary to meet climate goals.

Politicians Use Climate Change as an Excuse to Limit Personal Freedom

"Repetition is precisely what we are experiencing in the major media, which have selectively interviewed people who promote the climate change myth."

Cal Thomas is a syndicated columnist and the author of several books, including What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America .

In the following viewpoint, Thomas argues that politicians use the issue of climate change as an excuse for the government to interfere in the lives of private citizens. Noting that some climate predictions have overestimated the impact of global warming, the author disputes the widely held belief that global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity. He contends that politicians and the mainstream media encourage public outrage and generate panic over climate change by promoting the opinions and predictions of alarmists while ignoring the views of skeptics.

Renewable Energy Sources Benefit Health, Climate, and the Economy

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a membership organization of citizens and scientists who work together to promote the responsible use of science to improve the world.

Renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and biomass, each come with their own set of unique costs and benefits, but overall these cleaner energy sources have overwhelmingly positive effects on the climate, human health, and the economy. Renewable energy sources represent a vast and inexhaustible supply of energy, produce little or no global warming emissions, improve public health and environmental quality, help stabilize energy prices, create jobs and other economic benefits, and contribute to a more reliable and resilient energy system. The costs of renewable energy have declined in recent years and are projected to continue decreasing, making renewables more accessible and affordable for consumers than ever.

Biomass Power Plants Produce Just as Much Pollution as Coal-Fired Power Plants

"There is no quicker way to move carbon into the atmosphere—the opposite of what we want—than through utility-scale biomass energy plants that burn millions of trees per year."

In the following viewpoint, Gordon Clark and Mary Booth point out that although biomass energy has been promoted as environmentally friendly, new and proposed biomass power plants emit just as much pollution and carbon dioxide as those using fossil fuels, sometimes even more. The arguments favoring biomass power plants as a renewable energy source are not valid, they say; recent studies have shown this, and some states are eliminating subsidies and tightening regulations requiring efficiency. The authors speculate whether the Environmental Protection Agency will take federal action and formulate rules that make biomass power plants responsible for the greenhouse gases they release. Booth is the director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, and Clark is its communications director.

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New research shows how global warming is messing with our rainfall

by Steven Sherwood and Anna Ukkola, The Conversation

The past century of human-induced warming has increased rainfall variability over 75% of the Earth's land area—particularly over Australia, Europe and eastern North America, new research shows.

The findings, by Chinese researchers and the UK Met Office, were published in the journal Science . They provide the first systematic observational evidence that climate change is making global rainfall patterns more volatile.

Climate models had predicted this variability would worsen under climate change. But these new findings show rainfall variability has already worsened over the past 100 years—especially in Australia.

Past studies of the observational record either focused on long-term average rain, which is not systematically changing globally, or rainfall extremes where changes are hard to measure accurately. This study looks solely at variability, which refers to uneven timing and amount of rainfall.

The results are consistent with previous research, including ours. This means dry periods are drier than in the past, and rainy periods are wetter.

Alarmingly, the problem will worsen as global warming continues. This raises the risk of droughts and floods—a pertinent issue for Australia.

What the study found

The research shows a systematic increase in rainfall variability since the 1900s. Day-to-day rainfall variability increased by 1.2% per decade, globally. The trend was more pronounced in the latter half of the century, after 1950.

The increase in variability means rain is more unevenly distributed over time. It might mean a year's worth of rain at a given location now falls in fewer days. It can also mean long, dry periods are interspersed by torrential downpours, or drought and flooding in quick succession.

The researchers examined observational data and found since the 1900s, rainfall variability has increased over 75% of the land areas studied. Europe, Australia and eastern North America were particularly affected. These are areas for which detailed and long-running observations are available.

In other regions, the long-term trend in rainfall variability was less prominent. The authors said that may be due to random changes in variability, or errors in the datasets.

The increase in daily rainfall variability occurred in all four seasons worldwide, although seasonal differences emerged at smaller, regional scales.

The authors say the increase is largely the result of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions , which have created a hotter and more humid atmosphere, more intense rain events and greater swings between them.

They say the findings pose new challenges for weather and climate predictions, as well as for resilience and adaptation by societies and ecosystems.

How global warming affects rainfall

To come to grips with these findings, it helps to understand the factors that determine how much heavy rain a storm produces—and how these factors are being affected by global warming.

The first factor is how much water vapor is present in the air. Warm air can contain more moisture. Every degree of global warming creates a 7% increase in the average amount of water vapor over a given patch of the surface.

Scientists have known about this problem for a long time. Earth has warmed 1.5°C since the industrial revolution—equating to a 10% increase in water vapor in the lower atmosphere. So this is driving storms to become rainier.

Second is how strong the storm winds can get, and third is how easily large raindrops form from smaller cloud particles. More research is needed to understand how these factors are affected by climate change, but the current evidence is that together they further amplify increases in rainfall over short time intervals and for very extreme storms, while reducing the increases for weaker storms.

How does this fit in with Australian research?

The findings released overnight confirm research by us and others into rainfall variability in Australia.

Analysis of daily extreme rainfall totals across Australia in present and future simulations revealed future increases were likely to exceed expectations from many past studies. Rainfall is likely to increase more sharply in the most extreme events, and appears to do this nearly everywhere on the continent.

In 2022, we looked at rainfall hour-by-hour in Sydney using radar data. We found the maximum hourly rainfall increased by 40% in Sydney over the past two decades.

Our findings have major implications for Sydney's preparedness for flash flooding. More intense downpours are likely to overwhelm stormwater systems designed for past conditions. But it is not clear how much of this remarkable regional increase in severe rains is due to climate change, or how widespread it is.

Increasing variability also means a greater risk of drought. Climate models suggest rainfall variability in many parts of Australia will keep increasing , unless greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced.

A change in only a handful of heavy rainfall days can make or break a drought in Australia. This means even small changes in variability can bring more devastating droughts in the future as dry periods become drier.

Heeding the warning

Policymakers can often be overly focused on whether their part of the world is becoming wetter or drier overall. But as this new research shows, it's variability they should be worried about.

This volatility might come in the form of worse droughts. Or it might mean much bigger increases in extreme rainfall and flooding.

The variability will challenge governments and communities in many ways, from managing scarce water resources to coping with natural disasters. We should start preparing for these future challenges now.

And as this dire global problem worsens, the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming , becomes ever more pressing.

Journal information: Science

Provided by The Conversation

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Andean Glaciers Reach Historic Lows: A Dire Warning for Global Climate

By University of Wisconsin-Madison August 10, 2024

Researchers have found that glaciers in the tropical Andes are smaller than any time since the last ice age, marking a significant milestone in the impact of global warming. This discovery, led by scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other institutions, highlights these glaciers as early indicators of potential global changes in glacier behavior due to climate change.

Recent research shows that Andes glaciers are shrinking to sizes unseen since the last ice age due to global warming, possibly forecasting similar future trends for global glaciers.

As they are in many places around the globe, glaciers perched high in the Andes Mountains are shrinking. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their collaborators have uncovered evidence that the high-altitude tropical ice fields are likely smaller than they’ve been at any time since the last ice age ended 11,700 years ago.

That would make the tropical Andes the first region in the world known to pass that threshold as a result of the steadily warming global climate. It also makes them possible harbingers of what’s to come for glaciers globally.

“We think these are the canary in the coal mine. The tropics would probably be the first place you’d expect ice to disappear, and that’s what we’re seeing,” says Shaun Marcott, a professor of geoscience at UW–Madison. Marcott guided the research with colleagues at Boston College and Tulane University. Andrew Gorin, a former Boston College graduate student who is now at the University of California, Berkeley , led the study, which was recently published in the journal Science .

Mechanisms of Glacier Formation and Melting

Glaciers grow slowly over time in regions where summer weather isn’t warm enough to melt all of the previous winter’s snowfall. Over time, unmelted snow collects and gets compacted and begins to move under its own weight, resulting in the year-round ice that defines a glacier.

Satellite imagery and on-the-ground observations have provided conclusive evidence for decades that high-altitude glaciers in the Andes are steadily shrinking as warmer temperatures cause them to melt more quickly than falling snow can replenish them.

What has remained unclear, though, is whether the glaciers’ dwindling footprints are anomalously small compared to the rest of the period that began at the end of the last ice age, known as the Holocene. Meanwhile, glaciers in other parts of the world were smaller at some points in the early Holocene, when the global climate was warmer and drier than recent millennia.

“We knew that glaciers ebbed and flowed in the past, so we wanted to learn how the behavior of glaciers today — melting due to human-caused climate change — stacks up against their long-term fluctuations,” says Andy Jones, a UW–Madison doctoral student and study co-author.

Geochemical Analysis of Glacial Retreat

To answer this question, the team of scientists analyzed the geochemistry of bedrock from areas near the edges of four glaciers in the high tropical Andes, choosing sites that satellite imagery showed were exposed by melting ice in only the last two or three decades.

The team specifically looked for evidence of two unique isotopes — basically chemical flavors — of a pair of elements with the bedrock’s quartz crystals: beryllium-10 and carbon-14. These isotopes are only present in rock that has spent time at or near the Earth’s surface as they result from interactions between the rock and cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles that constantly rain down on the planet from outer space.

Bedrock accumulates beryllium-10 and carbon-14 once it’s exposed to the surface, so measuring the isotopes’ concentrations in rock crystals near glaciers can be useful for understanding the previous extent of ice coverage. The team found “remarkably low” concentrations of both isotopes in nearly all samples, suggesting that melting ice has exposed bedrock near the glaciers for the first time only recently in most of the sampled locations.

Additional analyses — and the fact that the extremely low concentrations were consistent across sample sites — made the researchers confident that melting ice, rather than erosion, exposed the bedrock.

“It’s highly unlikely this is from erosion,” says Marcott. “Because the multiple locations we went to all show the same thing.”

This consistency points to a single likely conclusion, according to Marcott: The world’s tropical glaciers, more than 99% of which are located in the Andes, are the first to shrink beyond what’s been seen in the recent geologic past.

“Glaciers are very sensitive to the climate system that they live in,” says Marcott. “They really are the place you would look to see some of the first big changes resulting from a warming climate. You can look to these glaciers and imagine what we might be looking at going into the future in other places like the Western United States, which is a no-ice scenario.”

Reference: “Recent tropical Andean glacier retreat is unprecedented in the Holocene” by Andrew L. Gorin, Jeremy D. Shakun, Andrew G. Jones, Tori M. Kennedy, Shaun A. Marcott, Brent M. Goehring, Lucas K. Zoet, Vincent Jomelli, Gordon R. M. Bromley, Emilio I. Mateo, Bryan G. Mark, Donald T. Rodbell, Adrien Gilbert and Marc W. Caffee, 1 August 2024, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.adg7546

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (EAR-1805620; EAR-1805133; EAR-1805892).

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• R. C. Johnson

Impact of high-speed rail on road traffic and greenhouse gas emissions

Intercity high-speed rail (HSR) can have large climate benefits with its high energy efficiency. This study explores the substitution effects of HSR on road traffic in China, which can be translated to an annual reduction of 14.76 million tons of CO 2 -equivalent emissions.

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