counterargument of global warming essay

7 arguments against climate change debunked

Climate change is accepted by most as a pressing crisis, however, there are also skeptics who doubt and question the science behind it..

Tejasri Gururaj

Debunking common climate change myths.

appledesign/iStock  

• Human activities have contributed greatly to the increase in greenhouse gases.
• This has, in turn, led to increased incidents of extreme weather events, higher ocean temperatures, and changes in Earth’s atmosphere.
• Despite the overwhelming evidence, some people are still skeptical about the existence and impact of climate change.

Climate change refers to long-term changes in precipitation, temperature, and other atmospheric conditions on Earth. It is primarily driven by natural factors such as variations in the sun’s intensity, volcanic activity , and internal processes within the Earth’s climate system.

However, human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, have significantly contributed to the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions, including gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ).

These gases trap heat, leading to a warming effect known as the greenhouse effect . The enhanced greenhouse effect intensifies the Earth’s natural warming processes, contributing to the observed rise in temperatures over the years.

The average global temperatures have risen by approximately 0.08 degrees Celsius (or 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since 1880, and this rate has more than doubled, to a rise of 0.18 degrees Celsius (or 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit), per decade since 1981.

However, the increase in temperatures has come with a rise in skepticism and doubts surrounding climate change . This skepticism, fueled by misconceptions and selective interpretations, weaves a narrative that questions the urgency of addressing our planet’s warming climate.

In this article, we shed light on some of the most common myths and arguments around climate change and provide a counterpoint rooted in scientific evidence.

1. There is no definitive proof that climate change is happening

Don Mennig/iStock  

The overwhelming scientific consensus supports the reality of climate change . Extensive evidence from various fields, including atmospheric science, oceanography, and paleoclimatology, affirms that our planet is experiencing significant changes in temperature and climate patterns.

Oceans have warmed , ice sheets are shrinking, glaciers are retreating, snow cover is decreasing , and sea levels are rising. NASA compiles a wealth of supporting evidence, underscoring the urgency of acknowledging and addressing climate change.

These observable changes leave little room for debate on the existence and impact of this global challenge. Denial of its reality is inconsistent with an extensive body of scientific data, reinforcing the need for urgent collective action.

2. The changes in measured temperatures are part of the natural cycle

While Earth’s climate certainly does experience natural cycles of warming and cooling, the current trend of rapid and unprecedented temperature rises is distinct from these. 

Scientific evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies , including advanced climate modeling and extensive data analysis, consistently attributes the recent warming to human activities. 

Burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and other human activities have led to a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions, creating a distinctive “fingerprint” separating human-induced climate change from natural variations. 

Acknowledging this anthropogenic inluence is crucial for understanding the magnitude of the current climate crisis and implementing effective mitigation strategies. Dismissing the human impact denies the overwhelming scientific consensus and undermines efforts to address the root causes of climate change.

3. Climate change and CO 2 are good for us

Leonsbox/iStock  

Some argue that climate change and increased CO 2 levels have positive effects, particularly on agriculture, but the prevailing scientific consensus strongly refutes this notion. 

For example, farmers in some areas may benefit from an earlier onset of spring and increased CO 2 aiding crop growth, but these advantages come with significant drawbacks. Weeds, invasive plants, and pests thrive in warmer conditions, offsetting crop benefits.

Additionally, the growing water scarcity in other agricultural areas negate positive effects.

Another example is that, in the long term, shipping may benefit from the opening of the Northwest Passage due to Arctic sea ice loss. But the loss of ice will also come with rising sea levels that will inundate coastal areas, leading to loss of land for living and agriculture.

It is crucial to recognize that the negative impacts of climate change far outweigh any potential benefits, and a “business as usual” approach to emissions could lead to catastrophic challenges to existing society, which has developed under the current climate.

4. The scale of climate change is not sufficiently large to take action beyond sensible least-cost measures

This notion is a stark misconception, considering the profound impacts of climate change. For example, forest fires in the western United States and Alaska have escalated since the early 1980s and are projected to increase further, exerting significant pressure on regional ecosystems.

Perhaps more seriously, the ongoing trends of earlier spring melt and reduced snowpack are already affecting water resources, with projections indicating a potential for chronic, long-duration hydrological drought in the western United States by the end of this century.

Taking only minimal action neglects the urgency of addressing the complex and interconnected issues associated with climate change . 

Comprehensive measures are necessary to mitigate the far-reaching impacts on ecosystems, economies, and human well-being.

5. The economic impact of substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is too large

While acknowledging the conclusions of climate scientists, the argument that the economic impact of substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is too much is misguided.

Economists have assessed the cost of mitigating climate change, considering the investment needed to cut global greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris Agreement aims to stay within a 2 degrees Celsius warming limit, with estimated losses to global GDP between 1.3% and 2.7% in 2050.

Projections for 1.5 degrees Celsius warming show losses between 2.6% and 4.2% of global GDP, but climate mitigation measures also bring benefits that are likely to outweigh costs over the 21st century.

Despite concerns about upfront costs for transitioning to a low-carbon economy , operational costs are expected to decrease, potentially falling below those of fossil generation by 2040. The transition to renewable energy is also expected to create millions of new jobs. Early action may not only avoid the impact of climate change but will also bring long-term economic gains.

Additional benefits, like improved health from cleaner air, will also lead to economic gains that further justify climate action. The trend of falling costs for alternative energy sources, such as solar and wind power , also challenges the competitiveness of fossil fuels.

In fact, failing to address climate change could lead to more severe economic consequences, making it imperative to prioritize emission reduction measures and invest in sustainable practices for the long-term health of our planet and economies.

6. It’s the urban heat island effect 

TheNewPhobia  

Some skeptics or deniers attribute global warming to factors like the urban heat island effect . However, this overlooks robust scientific evidence supporting the reality of climate change.

The urban heat island effect refers to localized warming in urban areas due to human activity and infrastructure, such as buildings and pavement, which absorb and re-radiate heat and lead to water run-off, disrupting local water cycles. While this phenomenon influences temperature measurements in cities, it does not negate the broader trend of global warming observed over the decades.

Contrary to the myth, urban heat is not to blame for climate change. Both urban and rural areas worldwide are warming because of elevated greenhouse gas levels. Some of the most significant warming occurs in non-urban regions, such as the Arctic.

Scientists account for urban heat when measuring Earth’s temperature to ensure accurate global climate assessments.

While urban heat islands don’t cause climate change, they do compound its effects, leading to heightened vulnerability in urban areas. With over half of the global population residing in urban areas, this challenge will intensify, as those living in urban areas will reach an anticipated 70% of the population by 2050.

Urban areas also contribute to climate change by increasing demand for air conditioning during more frequent heat waves. If this demand is met by burning fossil fuels , it results in greater emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, thus exacerbating climate challenges.

7. The data is manipulated by governments and scientists

Conspiracy theories surrounding climate change involve allegations of manipulated data, suppressed dissent, and the belief in hidden global governance agendas. However, these claims are not substantiated by credible evidence and are widely discredited within the scientific community.

Scientific research on climate change undergoes rigorous scrutiny through peer review processes, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data presented. 

Additionally, notions of hidden global governance agendas are unfounded. International efforts to address climate change, such as the Paris Agreement , involve collaboration among nations to mitigate the impacts of global warming. 

These agreements are transparent, and their goals focus on environmental sustainability rather than secretive global control.

Darwel/iStock  

This distrust in climate change is particularly notable in the United States. A recent study , based on a May 2022 nationally representative survey of American registered voters (2,096), explores the political and social factors influencing trust in university research and opinions about climate change. 

Researchers found that 45% of the electorate surveyed dismiss climate change as a problem, and 41% of those surveyed attribute it to non-human causes, with a notable lack of trust in university research contributing to denialism. 

The paper advocates for a comprehensive four-stage research strategy, including understanding trust dynamics, refining climate communication, exploring effective messaging, and fostering a culture of trust in climate research and communication.

The urgency to act cannot be overstated. The impacts of climate change are already evident, from rising temperatures to changing ecosystems, and the consequences extend beyond environmental concerns to encompass economic and societal stability.

In unraveling each myth, from dismissing claims of data manipulation to addressing skepticism about economic implications, we move closer to a more informed and responsible approach to our changing climate.

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As we move forward, it is essential to bridge gaps in understanding, promote transparent communication, and foster a culture that values and trusts scientific research. Climate change is a global challenge requiring a united response.

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Tejasri Gururaj Tejasri is a versatile Science Writer & Communicator, leveraging her expertise from an MS in Physics to make science accessible to all. In her spare time, she enjoys spending quality time with her cats, indulging in TV shows, and rejuvenating through naps.

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A cosmic counterargument to the climate change crisis, climate change is real, but does it really matter.

Posted April 13, 2019

In addition to being a writer, I’m also a realtor, and last night I dreamed that one of my real estate clients was teaching a class on climate change and presented several doomsday scenarios about what will happen if global warming continues on its current path. Scenarios included the Earth running extremely low on drinkable water and humans living in makeshift shacks in isolation in the few still-habitable areas. For whatever reason, I mounted two counterarguments to his scenarios. The first is shallow and I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but again, this was a dream so I’m at best only partially responsible for it: I asked him if this scenario would become a reality in the next 40 years or so (I’m in my mid-40’s so I suspect I was selfishly focusing on my own lifespan and trying to gauge how much I needed to worry). His reply was, nobody knows; it could happen sooner or it could happen later. In my dream, I decided not to worry too much about this outcome since, according to the instructor, no one even knows if it’s going to happen in our lifespan. Totally selfish and short-sighted, I know, but again, it was only a dream.

My second counterargument, which I’m now calling the "cosmic counterargument" to climate change, I find more interesting. It wasn’t articulated in words, but rather vague thoughts and sentiments, the essence of which was this: Isn’t it only natural to think that at some point, we as an invasive creature that spread like a cancer on this planet and wreaked havoc on it, will go the way of all the other now extinct species before us, and isn’t it only one step further to reason that we’ll probably take the planet with us? And if we do, since our planet is only one of an estimated 30 billion in our galaxy alone, wouldn’t it be no big deal if one disappeared? Is it just human vanity, or even human sentimentality, to believe that we could or should fight this process of climate change that we set in place so long ago?

Some scientifically-uninformed people have argued over the past decade that global warming is just a natural phase of the mega-process of earth’s cooling and warming over time, that the Earth moves through ice ages and warming trends and that humans have nothing to do with the current warming trend. This argument is, in two words, pretty dumb. There is every reason, both scientific and common sense- wise , to believe that since our species multiplied in the billions and relied on fossil fuel-driven technologies to an extreme, we have altered the air, water, and soil we live in and on. We’ve altered our habitat. Scientists know the current warming trend is more extreme than others in the past. And because we’ve altered our planet and its atmosphere, it’s not crazy to think we can alter it again, in a more positive direction, by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and moving toward alternative fuel sources. All familiar territory so far.

But my point is different: I wonder if it's not also a natural process for our species and our home to become extinct once we’ve altered it to the extent we have. We know species have come and gone. We know planets and other celestial bodies come and go. For all we know, there may be no other creatures in the galaxy exactly like humans and there may be no other planets exactly like Earth (we lack the required wide-angle view and deep-time perspectives to know for sure) but it’s likely that, just like individual creatures and individual species, planets too come and go, along with whatever inhabitants or unimaginable life-forms are attached to them. Just like human beings, it’s likely that planets and even planetary systems move through birth, life, sickness, and death. So yes, this warming trend is our doing, and yes, it might do us in, but moreover, this whole process might be just a facet of nature.

An image comes to mind of small child stomping on the ground near an ant hill or pouring water into the entrance/exit hole of the ant hill until all the little panicked creatures come rushing out, scrambling to escape the imminent danger. I feel like that’s what we’re doing now in response to global warming, a crisis that we’ve brought upon ourselves with our advances in technology, and the one that scientists predict will most surely do us in, unless... [insert all the familiar arguments].

But it’s curious that scientists are unanimously on board with this call to attention and call to action to stop or at least slow down global warming by all measures possible. I mused the other day while driving my beloved electric car (the Nissan LEAF) that it would be wonderful if the first car had been electric, and we had set ourselves on that path instead. We’re told that there are many factors involved in global warming or climate change, and we’re seeing the results of it with more dynamic weather patterns and more intense storms and yes, sea levels rising and average temperatures rising. We’re all experiencing it either first-hand or by being in touch with what’s going on in the wider world around us. Climate change is no myth. The scientists are right. But isn’t it interesting that scientific experts are leading the charge to Do Something Now when it’s this same group of humans who are clued into just how small and insignificant and fleeting our planet is, because they presumably appreciate, more than anyone, just how teeny we are in our unimaginably vast universe.

Our planet is a speck of dust in an enormous universal dust-bunny. Of all the specks of dust and gas clouds in the vast universe, our busy little planet is but a “pale, blue dot” (to borrow Carl Sagan’s famous moniker for Earth). Planetary bodies come and go. Stars are born and burn up. Meteors travel through space and transform into nothingness. So, is it just human vanity or sentimentality (who knew scientists were the sentimental ones?) to believe that we can, or even that we should, take all possible action to stop what could be a very natural process: the natural life span of one little speck of dust in the universe? I don’t mean this post to be depressing or morbid. Again, it was just a dream, and I thought it was interesting.

Liz Swan, Ph.D. , is a writer and philosopher who teaches writing at the University of Colorado Boulder. She enjoys writing about all the facets of human nature—the light, the dark, and the shades of grey in between.

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Consider the following thesis for a short paper that analyzes different approaches to stopping climate change:

Climate activism that focuses on personal actions such as recycling obscures the need for systemic change that will be required to slow carbon emissions.

The author of this thesis is promising to make the case that personal actions not only will not solve the climate problem but may actually make the problem more difficult to solve. In order to make a convincing argument, the author will need to consider how thoughtful people might disagree with this claim. In this case, the author might anticipate the following counterarguments:

• By encouraging personal actions, climate activists may raise awareness of the problem and encourage people to support larger systemic change.  
• Personal actions on a global level would actually make a difference.  
• Personal actions may not make a difference, but they will not obscure the need for systemic solutions.  
• Personal actions cannot be put into one category and must be differentiated.

In order to make a convincing argument, the author of this essay may need to address these potential counterarguments. But you don’t need to address every possible counterargument. Rather, you should engage counterarguments when doing so allows you to strengthen your own argument by explaining how it holds up in relation to other arguments. 

How to address counterarguments 

Once you have considered the potential counterarguments, you will need to figure out how to address them in your essay. In general, to address a counterargument, you’ll need to take the following steps.

• State the counterargument and explain why a reasonable reader could raise that counterargument.  
• Counter the counterargument. How you grapple with a counterargument will depend on what you think it means for your argument. You may explain why your argument is still convincing, even in light of this other position. You may point to a flaw in the counterargument. You may concede that the counterargument gets something right but then explain why it does not undermine your argument. You may explain why the counterargument is not relevant. You may refine your own argument in response to the counterargument.  
• Consider the language you are using to address the counterargument. Words like but or however signal to the reader that you are refuting the counterargument. Words like nevertheless or still signal to the reader that your argument is not diminished by the counterargument. 

Here’s an example of a paragraph in which a counterargument is raised and addressed.

Image version

The two steps are marked with counterargument and “counter” to the counterargument: COUNTERARGUMENT/ But some experts argue that it’s important for individuals to take action to mitigate climate change. In “All That Performative Environmentalism Adds Up,” Annie Lowery argues that personal actions to fight climate change, such as reducing household trash or installing solar panels, matter because change in social behavior can lead to changes in laws. [1]  

COUNTER TO THE COUNTERARGUMENT/ While Lowery may be correct that individual actions can lead to collective action, this focus on individual action can allow corporations to receive positive publicity while continuing to burn fossil fuels at dangerous rates.

Where to address counterarguments 

There is no one right place for a counterargument—where you raise a particular counterargument will depend on how it fits in with the rest of your argument. The most common spots are the following:

• Before your conclusion This is a common and effective spot for a counterargument because it’s a chance to address anything that you think a reader might still be concerned about after you’ve made your main argument. Don’t put a counterargument in your conclusion, however. At that point, you won’t have the space to address it, and readers may come away confused—or less convinced by your argument.
• Before your thesis Often, your thesis will actually be a counterargument to someone else’s argument. In other words, you will be making your argument because someone else has made an argument that you disagree with. In those cases, you may want to offer that counterargument before you state your thesis to show your readers what’s at stake—someone else has made an unconvincing argument, and you are now going to make a better one. 
• After your introduction In some cases, you may want to respond to a counterargument early in your essay, before you get too far into your argument. This is a good option when you think readers may need to understand why the counterargument is not as strong as your argument before you can even launch your own ideas. You might do this in the paragraph right after your thesis. 
• Anywhere that makes sense  As you draft an essay, you should always keep your readers in mind and think about where a thoughtful reader might disagree with you or raise an objection to an assertion or interpretation of evidence that you are offering. In those spots, you can introduce that potential objection and explain why it does not change your argument. If you think it does affect your argument, you can acknowledge that and explain why your argument is still strong.

[1] Annie Lowery, “All that Performative Environmentalism Adds Up.” The Atlantic . August 31, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/your-tote-bag-can-mak…

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October 17, 2017

Climate Skeptics Want More CO2

A key argument used to downplay the consequences of climate change is resurfacing

By Chelsea Harvey , Scott Waldman & E&E News

Roy Scott Getty Images

A key argument used by climate skeptics to downplay the consequences of anthropogenic climate change is resurfacing: the idea that carbon dioxide emissions are a net positive for the planet's vegetation.

The line of reasoning is being used to push back on the underlying science of global warming. The Heartland Institute, which has sought to place climate contrarians on science advisory councils at U.S. EPA, even suggested that it might sue companies for not emitting more CO2 Climatewire , Oct. 16).

The idea that carbon has benefits has been used before. As the argument goes, plants rely on carbon dioxide to survive, and if the atmosphere contains more of the gas it could stimulate plant growth. That's a good thing for humans, who rely on them for oxygen and food, they say.

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Researchers are still trying to fully understand the effects of rising CO2 levels on plants around the world. But while CO2 may indeed be a boon for vegetation in some ways, climate scientists have repeatedly pointed out that other effects of climate change may outweigh these benefits.

An old argument resurfaced

Focusing on the benefits of increased atmospheric CO2 has long been a talking point among those who question the mainstream science of climate change. The Heartland plan, in particular, calls for funding to be directed to Craig Idso, who heads the Center for Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. He has long promoted the benefits of carbon dioxide. Idso's work has been supported by Heartland as well as energy companies.

Idso, who was a featured speaker at this year's Heartland conference in Washington, regularly calls CO2 the “elixir of life” and claims that the planet is headed toward explosive growth in plant life. His work frequently downplays the effect of carbon dioxide on the planet. He has claimed that increased crop yields sparked by rising CO2 levels could create an economic boost of $10 trillion by 2050.

Idso did not return a request for comment.

Those talking points can also be found in Congress. Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, argued in an essay for the Heritage Foundation that people should focus more on the benefits of rising temperatures. His piece, published in July, was named “Don't Believe the Hysteria Over Carbon Dioxide.”

“While crops typically suffer from high heat and lack of rainfall, carbon enrichment helps produce more resilient food crops, such as maize, soybeans, wheat, and rice,” Smith wrote. “In fact, atmospheric carbon dioxide is so important for plant health that greenhouses often use a carbon dioxide generator to increase production.”

The flaws in the argument

It's true that an increase in available carbon dioxide can be a boon for plants, which need it to make the food they turn into energy. In fact, recent research published in Nature Climate Change has suggested that rising CO2 levels have contributed to a global “greening” over the last few decades, or an increase in the leaves on trees and other plants, particularly in the rapidly warming Arctic.

But the idea that increasing CO2 will be a pure advantage for plants everywhere ignores the negative side effects that human-induced climate change may have on vegetation. In fact, research suggests that plants in some parts of the world — including some staple food crops for people — may actually come out the worse for it.

“There really is this fundamental tug of war between rising CO2 concentrations benefiting plants and then the effects of climate change harming plants,” said William Anderegg, an expert on forests and climate change at the University of Utah.

The most obvious problem is that rising CO2 concentrations also lead to rising global temperatures — and this is not always a good thing for plants, particularly in regions that already have warm or dry climates. Plants tend to lose more water through their leaves in warmer temperatures, which can offset the benefits they enjoy from more carbon dioxide. And scientists believe that in many parts of the world, climate change will bring about an increase in extreme events, including drought, severe storms and wildfires — all of which can harm plant life.

In the last few years, multiple studies have found that rising CO2 levels — and particularly their climatic side effects — are not necessarily all good for plants, and particularly for agriculture.

Several long-term studies of grasslands, including one in California and another in Yellowstone National Park, suggest that the productivity of these ecosystems may suffer under the effects of climate change, such as increases in temperature or dryness, despite the advantages of higher CO2 levels.

Another 2016 paper in Nature Communications , focusing on agriculture in the United States, suggested that high temperatures may cause severe reductions in the production of certain major crops, including corn and soybeans. And the research indicated that higher CO2 concentrations would not be enough to significantly offset these losses.

Some research has also suggested that rising CO2 concentrations may even affect the nutritional value of crops, Anderegg pointed out, with potential health consequences for the humans who rely on them for food. A 2014 paper in Nature suggested that some beans and grains have lower concentrations of zinc and iron when they're grown under elevated CO2 concentrations.

And all of these climate-related factors aside, some scientists also believe that the advantages of rising carbon dioxide may not last forever — that, in fact, plants may eventually adjust to the higher concentrations, and the growth benefits will taper off over time.

Until that point, though, studies do indicate that more CO2 is still a boon for plants, all other factors being equal. And while plants may suffer under rising temperatures in some parts of the world, it's possible they may thrive in others (the greening in the world's northern region is an example). Scientists are now increasingly working to determine exactly how all these factors fit together and what the world's vegetation will look like in the future.

“It's still a major scientific research area to figure out when and where the CO2 effects versus the climate change effects will dominate,” Anderegg said.

Of course, climate change will hardly affect the planet through its influence on vegetation alone. Even if plants do perform better in some places, the argument ignores myriad negative climate consequences caused by rising carbon emissions, from warming temperatures to severe weather events to rising sea levels.

But as far as plants are concerned, Anderegg also noted that while the science is still emerging, “on the whole, I think there's a general understanding that the impacts of climate change are materializing sooner and are more severe than they were a decade or two ago.”

“The rosy optimistic scenarios where CO2 'wins' do exist, but there are also plenty of scenarios where drought and temperature and disturbances combined basically push global plants into accelerating climate change,” he added.

Home » Everyday actions » 6 Claims Made by Climate Change Skeptics—and How to Respond

6 Claims Made by Climate Change Skeptics—and How to Respond

Filed Under: Everyday actions   |  Tagged: Climate Last updated November 1, 2021

A man walks through the mud in San Pedro Sula. Three days after Hurricane Eta hit the Nicaraguan coast as a Category 4 storm, the aftermath of flooding and mudslides has displaced over 350,000 Hondurans. The death toll in Central America is over 100 and expected to rise because of many missing people (Photo by Seth Sidney Berry / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

It’s hard to believe, but apparently more than a few climate change deniers still roam our ever-heating planet. According to a recent study in the esteemed science journal PLOS , people systematically understate their disbelief in human-caused climate change when answering surveys, so skepticism is more prevalent than many of us realize.

Given the urgency of the climate crisis, it’s crucial that we all do our part to educate any doubters we might encounter. That’s why the Rainforest Alliance has compiled six arguments commonly made by climate change deniers, along with science-backed responses you can deploy to convince them of the truth: that climate change is real, accelerating, and that we need to take bold action ASAP.  

1. Climate change denier claim: “This is the coldest winter we’ve had in years! So much for global warming.”

There’s a difference between climate and weather: Weather fluctuates day in, day out, whereas climate refers to long term trends—and the overall trend is clearly and indisputably a warming one. While the impacts of climate change have only just begun to hit the Global North, farmers in the tropics have been contending with impacts—from droughts to floods to a proliferation of crop-destroying pests—for years. That’s why the Rainforest Alliance works with farmers to take a climate-smart approach . That means first assessing a farm’s particular climate risks, taking the crop and local ecosystem into account, then finding the right combination of tools to manage the farms climate challenges. That’s what makes climate-smart agriculture “smart.”

2. “Climate change is natural and normal—it’s happened at other points in history.”

It’s true that there have been periods of global warming and cooling—also related to spikes and lulls in greenhouse gases—during the Earth’s long history. But those historic increases in CO 2 should be a warning to us: They led to serious environmental disruptions, including mass extinctions. Today, humans are emitting greenhouse gases at a far higher rate than any previous increase in history .  (Before you collapse into a puddle of despair, however, find out about our work to promote natural climate solutions , like community forestry and regenerative agriculture.)

3. “There’s no consensus among scientists that climate change is real.”

Wrong. There is nearly 100 percent agreement among scientists. Moreover, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that global warming is accelerating, and will reach 1.C above pre-Industrial levels around 2030 —a full decade earlier than previously forecast .  

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4. “Plants and animals can adapt.”

Wrong again. Because human-caused climate change is happening so rapidly, species simply don’t have time to adapt . Frogs tell the story best: With their semi-permeable skin, unprotected eggs, and reliance on external temperatures to regulate their own, they are often among the first species to die off when ecosystems tip out of balance—and they’re dying off in droves. The Rainforest Alliance chose a frog as its mascot more than 30 years ago precisely because it’s a bio-indicator: A healthy frog population signals a healthy ecosystem, which is what we’ve been working to promote—along with thriving communities—since 1987.

5. “Climate change is good for us.”

It’s hard to even know where to begin to address this statement by climate change deniers, especially when you think about the human cost of a warming planet. The evidence points to a clear link between climate change and a surge in modern slavery : When crop failures, drought, floods, or fires wipe out livelihoods and homes, people migrate in the hopes of improving their lot—but can find themselves vulnerable to human trafficking and forced labor and other human rights abuses. And the overall economic cost is staggering: The global economy could lose $23 trillion to climate change by 2050 .

6. “OK, maybe climate change is real, but there’s nothing to be done—it’s too late.”

It’s true that we don’t have a moment to waste, but it’s not too late. If governments, business, and individuals begin taking drastic action now, we can keep warming within the 1.5C target set by the Paris Agreement. What can you do to make sure that happens? A lot. Here are actions you can take —both to make your daily life more sustainable and to push governments and companies to act—to secure a better future.  

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These are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really.

Contrarian climate scientist Roy Spencer summed up the contrarian case for a fossil fuel and tobacco-funded think tank

When I give a presentation and mention the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming , I’m often asked, “what’s the deal with the other 3%?”. These are the publishing climate scientists who argue that something other than humans is responsible for the majority of global warming, although their explanations are often contradictory and don’t withstand scientific scrutiny .

A few months ago, the world’s largest private sector coal company went to court, made its best scientific case against the 97% expert consensus, and lost . One of coal’s expert witnesses was University of Alabama at Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer - a controversial figure who once compared those with whom he disagreed to Nazis , and has expressed his love for Fox News .

Last week, Spencer wrote a white paper for the Texas Public Policy Institute (TPPI) outlining the contrarian case against climate concerns. TPPI is part of the web of denial , having received substantial funding from both the tobacco and fossil fuel industries , including $65,000 from ExxonMobil and at least $911,499 from Koch-related foundations since 1998, and over $3 million from “dark money” anonymizers Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Spencer’s arguments should of course be evaluated on their own merits, regardless of who commissioned them. However, it turns out that they have little merit on which to stand. The white paper is a classic example of a Gish Gallop – producing such a large volume of nonsense arguments that refuting all of them is too time-consuming. NASA Goddard director Gavin Schmidt rightly described Spencer’s paper as:

A great example of how making nonsense arguments undermines his whole point. Sad! https://t.co/kqY1czsH3S — Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) July 20, 2016

A mishmash of myths

Most of Spencer’s white paper consists of repeating a variety of long-debunked myths. It’s laid out in the form of 13 basic climate questions that Spencer tries to answer. Fortunately, SkepticalScience.com has a database of over 200 climate myths , and summaries of what the peer-reviewed scientific research says about each. This makes it possible to handle Spencer’s 13-point Gish Gallop by simply referring to the relevant myth rebuttals. So here we go:

1) ‘Carbon dioxide is a trace gas’ is rebutted as Myth #127 .

2) ‘Climate has changed before’ is addressed in Myth #2 , and climate scientist Michael Mann recently rebutted the myth that climate researchers ignore natural factors. Spencer’s misleading claims about temperatures of the past 2,000 years based on a paper by Henrik Ljungqvist are refuted in Myth #168 . Claims of hotter periods during that time than today are tackled in Myth #56 , and implications that the planet is magically warming because it used to be colder during the Little Ice Age in Myth #32 . Finally, the rebuttal to Myth #136 explains why we can’t just blame global warming on natural cycles.

3) The reliability of global temperature measurements is explained in Myth #6 .

4) Models used by the IPCC have accurately predicted global warming, as explained in the rebuttals to and Myth #229 , as well as an important paper published last year .

5) The net negative consequences of rapid global warming are outlined in the rebuttal to Myth #12 .

6) The warming over the past 18 years is discussed in the rebuttal to Myth #7 , and is clear from the record hot temperatures of the past 3 years .

7) The accuracy of climate models is covered under Myth #5 and in my book.

8) The sensitivity of the climate to the increasing greenhouse effect is addressed in Myth #30 , and the role of clouds in Myth #143 .

9) False claims about the 97% expert climate consensus are in Myth #3 and Myth #226 .

10) Claims of ‘slow’ ocean warming are refuted by the fact that it’s accumulating heat at a rate equivalent to 4 atomic bomb detonations per second , consistent with climate model predictions .

11) Spencer downplays the importance of our repeated breaking of temperature records, but we wouldn’t be breaking them without global warming .

12) On climate change causing extreme weather ( Myth #41 ), Spencer suggests that we shouldn’t worry about stronger hurricanes ( Myth #16 ), denies the record intensity of California’s current drought , and cherry picks sea ice ( Myth #157 ) and snow cover data ( Myth #159 ).

13) Spencer ends his paper with the claim that the 97% of climate research that’s consistent with the expert consensus is all politically biased. This is ironic given that Spencer has previously said:

I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.

The best case against climate concern is really bad

All in all, Spencer managed to cram about 24 climate myths into a 13-point white paper. Most importantly, as Schmidt noted, the bulk of those myths served no purpose.

Just consider Spencer’s very first argument. No scientist should ever claim that carbon pollution is benign because it’s only present in the atmosphere in trace amounts. For example, arsenic can be deadly if present in trace amounts in water; Spencer probably wouldn’t drink from a water source with 400 ppm of arsenic. This is an easily-refuted, scientifically-useless argument whose sole purpose seems to be fooling non-experts. It’s the climate version of the Chewbacca defense .

In the Peabody Energy case, the judge ruled that the preponderance of evidence did not support Spencer or his fellow coal expert witnesses. Without strong evidence supporting their arguments, climate contrarians often resort to Gish Gallops to win arguments. In fact, the RationalWiki page on Gish Gallops lists another climate contrarian, Christoper Monckton among the well-known “ abusers of this technique ,” alongside Donald Trump.

In short, if there were a valid case against the urgent need for climate action, contrarians’ best experts wouldn’t have to scrape 24 long-debunked myths from the bottom of the oil barrel.

• Climate science scepticism and denial
• Climate Consensus - the 97%
• Climate crisis
• Greenhouse gas emissions
• Climate science
• Polar regions

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Most viewed.

Isn't there a lot of disagreement among climate scientists about global warming?

No. By a large majority, climate scientists agree that average global temperature today is warmer than in pre-industrial times and that human activity is the most significant factor. 

Today, there is no real disagreement among climate experts that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming. NOAA Climate.gov cartoon by Emily Greenhalgh. 

Consensus of experts

The United States' foremost scientific agencies and organizations have recognized global warming as a human-caused problem that should be addressed. The U.S. Global Change Research Program has published a series of scientific reports documenting the causes and impacts of global climate change. NOAA , NASA , the National Science Foundation , the National Research Council , and the Environmental Protection Agency have all published reports and fact sheets stating that Earth is warming mainly due to the increase in human-produced heat-trapping gases.

On their climate home page , the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicines says, "Scientists have known for some time, from multiple lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth’s climate, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions," and that "Climate change is increasingly affecting people’s lives." 

Soot from fires and air pollution contributes to global warming, and its impacts may be especially strong in the Arctic, where it darkens the snow and ice—as shown in this photo—and accelerates melting. Despite some uncertainty about just how much influence soot and other aerosol particles have played in climate change in the past century, there's little debate among climate scientists that the primary driver of recent global warming is carbon dioxide emissions. Photo from NOAA Ocean Today .

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) issued this position statement : "Scientific evidence indicates that the leading cause of climate change in the most recent half century is the anthropogenic increase in the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, tropospheric ozone, and nitrous oxide." (Adopted April 15, 2019)

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) issued this position statement : "Human activities are changing Earth's climate, causing increasingly disruptive societal and ecological impacts. Such impacts are creating hardships and suffering now, and they will continue to do so into the future—in ways expected as well as potentially unforeseen. To limit these impacts, the world's nations have agreed to hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels. To achieve this goal, global society must promptly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions." (Reaffirmed in November 2019)

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) What We Know site states: "Based on the evidence, about 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening."

Consensus of evidence

These scientific organizations have not issued statements in a void; they echo the findings of individual papers published in refereed scientific journals. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) maintains a database of over 8,500 peer-reviewed science journals, and multiple studies of this database show evidence of overwhelming agreement among climate scientists. In 2004, science historian Naomi Oreskes published the results of her examination of the ISI database in the journal Science . She reviewed 928 abstracts published between 1993 and 2003 related to human activities warming the Earth's surface, and stated, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

This finding hasn't changed with time. In 2016, a review paper summarized the results of several independent studies on peer-reviewed research related to climate. The authors found results consistent with a 97-percent consensus that human activity is causing climate change. A 2021 paper found a greater than 99-percent consensus.

Probably the most definitive assessments of global climate science come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Founded by the United Nations in 1988, the IPCC releases periodic reports, and each major release includes three volumes: one on the science, one on impacts, and one on mitigation. Each volume is authored by a separate team of experts, who reviews, evaluates, and summarizes relevant research published since the prior report. Each IPCC report undergoes several iterations of expert and government review. The 2021 IPCC report, for instance, received and responded to more than 78,000 expert and government review comments.

Every five years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change convenes hundreds of international scientists and government representatives to review and assess peer-reviewed research on climate science. In each cycle, the panel publishes three key reports: one on the basic science , one on impacts , and one on mitigation .

The IPCC does not involve just a few scientists, or even just dozens of scientists. An IPCC press release explains: "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."

Governments and climate experts across the globe nominate scientists for IPCC authorship, and the IPCC works to find a mix of authors, from developed and developing countries, among men and women, and among authors who are experienced with the IPCC and new to the process. Published in 2021, the Sixth Assessment Report was assembled by 751 experts from more than 60 countries (31 coordinating authors, 167 lead authors, 36 review editors, and 517 contributing authors). Collectively, the authors cited more than 14,000 scientific papers. In other words, the IPCC reports themselves are a comprehensive, consensus statement on the state climate science.

In the headline statements from the Sixth Assessment report's Summary for Policymakers, the IPCC concluded:

It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole – and the present state of many aspects of the climate system – are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since [our last report].

Cook, J., D. Nuccitelli, S.A. Green, M. Richardson, B. Winkler, R. Painting, R. Way, P. Jacobs, and A. Skuce (2013). Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters , 8, 024024. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024 .

Cook, J., Oreskes, N., Doran, P.T., Anderegg, W.R.L., Verheggen, B., Mailbach, E.W., Carlton, J.S., Lewandowsky, S., Skuce, A.G., Green, S.A., Nuccitelli, D., Jacobs, P., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., Rice, K. (2016). Consensus on consensus: A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. Environmental Research Letters , 11, 048002. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002 .

Doran, P., and M.K. Zimmerman (2009): Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Eos , 90(3), 22–23.

IPCC. (2013). Factsheet: How does the IPCC select its authors? Accessed January 3, 2020.

IPCC. (2014). Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva Switzerland. Accessed January 22, 2020.

IPCC. (2021). Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 3−32, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.001.

IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. (2021). https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

Lynas, M., Houlton, B.Z., Perry, S. (2021). Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters , 16, 114005. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 .

Oreskes, N. (2004). The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Science , 306, 1686. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1103618 .

Oreskes, N. (2018). The scientific consensus on climate change: How do we know we're not wrong? Climate Modelling , pp. 31–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65058-6_2 .

Sherwood, S. (2011, May 10). Trust us, we're climate scientists: The case for the IPCC . The Conversation .

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The Center for Global Studies

Climate change argumentation.

Carmen Vanderhoof, Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, Penn State

Carmen Vanderhoof is a doctoral candidate in Science Education at Penn State. Her research employs multimodal discourse analysis of elementary students engaged in a collaborative engineering design challenge in order to examine students’ decision-making practices. Prior to resuming graduate studies, she was a secondary science teacher and conducted molecular biology research. 

• Subject(s):  Earth Science
• Topic:  Climate Change and Sustainability
• Grade/Level:  9-12 (can be adapted to grades 6-8)
• Objectives:  Students will be able to write a scientific argument using evidence and reasoning to support claims. Students will also be able to reflect on the weaknesses in their own arguments in order to improve their argument and then respond to other arguments.
• Suggested Time Allotment:  4-5 hours (extra time for extension)

This lesson is derived from Dr. Peter Buckland’s sustainability  presentation for the Center for Global Studies . Dr. Peter Buckland, a Penn State alumnus, is a postdoctoral fellow for the Sustainability Institute. He has drawn together many resources for teaching about climate change, sustainability, and other environmental issues. 

While there are many resources for teaching about climate change and sustainability, it may be tough to figure out where to start. There are massive amounts of data available to the general public and students need help searching for good sources of evidence. Prior to launching into a search, it would be worthwhile figuring out what the students already know about climate change, where they learned it, and how they feel about efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. There are many options for eliciting prior knowledge, including taking online quizzes, whole-class discussion, or drawing concept maps. For this initial step, it is important that students feel comfortable to share, without engaging in disagreements. The main idea is to increase students’ understanding about global warming, rather than focus on the potential controversial nature of this topic.

A major goal of this unit is to engage students in co-constructing evidence-based explanations through individual writing, sharing, re-writing, group discussion, and whole group reflection. The argumentation format presented here contains claims supported by evidence and reasoning (Claims Evidence Reasoning – CER). Argumentation in this sense is different from how the word “argument” is used in everyday language. Argumentation is a collaborative process towards an end goal, rather than a competition to win (Duschl & Osborne, 2002). Scientific argumentation is the process of negotiating and communicating findings through a series of claims supported by evidence from various sources along with a rationale or reasoning linking the claim with the evidence. For students, making the link between claim and evidence can be the most difficult part of the process.

Where does the evidence come from?

Evidence and data are often used synonymously, but there is a difference. Evidence is “the representation of data in a form that undergirds an argument that works to answer the original question” (Hand et al., 2009, p. 129). This explains why even though scientists may use the same data to draw explanations from, the final product may take different forms depending on which parts of the data were used and how. For example, in a court case experts from opposing sides may use the same data to persuade the jury to reach different conclusions. Another way to explain this distinction to students is “the story built from the data that leads to a claim is the evidence” (Hand et al., 2009, p. 129). Evidence can come from many sources – results from controlled experiments, measurements, books, articles, websites, personal observations, etc. It is important to discuss with students the issue of the source’s reliability and accuracy. When using data freely available online, ask yourself: Who conducted the study? Who funded the research? Where was it published or presented? 

What is a claim and how do I find it?

A scientific claim is a statement that answers a question or an inference based on information, rather than just personal opinion.               

How can I connect the claim(s) with the evidence?

That’s where the justification or reasoning comes in. This portion of the argument explains why the evidence is relevant to the claim or how the evidence supports the claim.

Implementation

Learning context and connecting to state standards.

This interdisciplinary unit can be used in an earth science class or adapted to environmental science, chemistry, or physics. The key to adapting the lesson is guiding students to sources of data that fit the discipline they are studying.

For  earth science , students can explain the difference between climate and weather, describe the factors associated with global climate change, and explore a variety of data sources to draw their evidence from.  Pennsylvania Academic Standards  for earth and space science (secondary): 3.3.12.A1, 3.3.12.A6, 3.3.10.A7.    

For  environmental science , students can analyze the costs and benefits of pollution control measures.  Pennsylvania Academic Standards  for Environment and Ecology (secondary): 4.5.12.C.          

For  chemistry  and  physics , students can explain the function of greenhouse gases, construct a model of the greenhouse effect, and model energy flow through the atmosphere.   Pennsylvania Academic Standards  for Physical Sciences (secondary): 3.2.10.B6.      

New Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Connections

Human impacts and global climate change are directly addressed in the NGSS.  Disciplinary Core Ideas  (DCI): HS-ESS3-3, HS-ESS3-4, HS-ESS3-5, HS-ESS3-6.     

Lesson 1: Introduction to climate change

• What are greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect? (sample answer: greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane contribute to overall heating of the atmosphere; these gases trap heat just like the glass in a greenhouse or in a car) 
• What is the difference between weather and climate? (sample answer: weather is the daily temperature and precipitation measurements, while climate is a much longer pattern over multiple years)

Drawing of the greenhouse effect  – as individuals or in pairs, have students look up the greenhouse effect and draw a diagram to represent it; share out with the class

• Optional: figure out students’ beliefs about global warming using the Yale Six Americas Survey (students answer a series of questions and at the end they are given one of the following categories: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, dismissive).

Lesson 2: Searching for and evaluating evidence

• Compare different data sources and assess their credibility
• Temperature
• Precipitation
• Storm surge
• Ask the students to think about what types of claims they can make about climate change using the data they found (Sample claims: human activity is causing global warming or sea-level rise in the next fifty years will affect coastal cities like Amsterdam, Hong Kong, or New Orleans).

Lesson 3: Writing an argument using evidence

• Claim – an inference or a statement that answers a question
• Evidence – an outside source of information that supports the claim, often drawn from selected data
• Reasoning –  the justification/support for the claim; what connects the evidence with the claim
• Extending arguments –  have students exchange papers and notice the strengths of the other arguments they are reading (can do multiple cycles of reading); ask students to go back to their original argument and expand it with more evidence and/or more justification for why the evidence supports the claim
• Anticipate Rebuttals  – ask students to think and write about any weaknesses in their own argument

Lesson 4: Argumentation discussion  

• rebuttal  – challenges a component of someone’s argument – for example, a challenge to the evidence used in the original argument
• counterargument  – a whole new argument that challenges the original argument
• respect group members and their ideas
• wait for group members to finish their turns before speaking
• be mindful of your own contributions to the discussion (try not to take over the whole discussion so others can contribute too; conversely, if you didn’t already talk, find a way to bring in a new argument, expand on an existing argument, or challenge another argument)  
• Debate/discussion  – In table groups have students share their arguments and practice rebuttals and counterarguments
• Whole-group reflection  – ask students to share key points from their discussion

Lesson 5: Argumentation in action case study

Mumbai, india case study.

Rishi is a thirteen year old boy who attends the Gayak Rafi Nagar Urdu Municipal school in Mumbai. There is a massive landfill called Deonar right across from his school. Every day 4,000 tons of waste are piled on top of the existing garbage spanning 132 hectares (roughly half a square mile). Rishi ventures out to the landfill after school to look for materials that he can later trade for a little bit of extra money to help his family. He feels lucky that he gets to go to school during the day; others are not so lucky. One of his friends, Aamir, had to stop going to school and work full time after his dad got injured. They often meet to chat while they dig through the garbage with sticks. Occasionally, they find books in okay shape, which aren’t worth anything in trade, but to them they are valuable.

One day Rishi was out to the market with his mom and saw the sky darken with a heavy smoke that blocked out the sun. They both hurried home and found out there was a state of emergency and the schools closed for two days. It took many days to put out the fire at Deonar. He heard his dad say that the fire was so bad that it could be seen from space. He wonders what it would be like to see Mumbai from up there. Some days he wishes the government would close down Deonar and clean it up. Other days he wonders what would happen to all the people that depend on it to live if the city shuts down Deonar.

Mumbai is one of the coastal cities that are considered vulnerable with increasing global temperature and sea level rise. The urban poor are most affected by climate change. Their shelter could be wiped out by a tropical storm and rebuilding would be very difficult.

Write a letter to a public official who may be able to influence policy in Mumbai.

What would you recommend they do? Should they close Deonar? What can they do to reduce air pollution in the city and prepare for possible storms? Remember to use evidence in your argument.  

If students want to read the articles that inspired the case study direct them to: http://unhabitat.org/urban-themes/climate-change/

http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2012-07-06/top-20-cities-with-billions-at-risk-from-climate-change.html#slide16

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-26/smelly-dumps-drive-away-affordable-homes-in-land-starved-mumbai

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/asia/mumbai-giant-garbage-dump-fire/

Resources:    

• Lines of Evidence  video  from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine  http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/videos-multimedia/climate-change-lines-of-evidence-videos/  
• Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network  (CLEAN) 
• Climate maps  from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Sources of data from  NASA
• Explore the original source of the  Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) study

Differentiated Instruction

• For visual learners – use diagrams, encourage students to map out their arguments prior to writing them
• For auditory learners – use the lines of evidence video
• For ESL students – provide them with a variety of greenhouse gases diagrams, allow for a more flexible argument format and focus on general meaning-making – ex. using arrows to connect their sources of evidence to claims
• For advanced learners – ask them to search through larger data sets and make comparisons between data from different sources; they can also research environmental policies and why they stalled out in congress 
• For learners that need more support – print out excerpts from articles; pinpoint the main ideas to help with the research; help students connect their evidence with their claims; consider allowing students to work in pairs to accomplish the writing task 

Argument write-up  – check that students’ arguments contain claims supported by evidence and reasoning and that they thought about possible weaknesses in their own arguments. 

Case study letter  – check that students included evidence in their letter.

References:

Duschl, R. A., & Osborne, J. (2002). Supporting and promoting argumentation discourse in science education.

Hand, B. et al. (2009) Negotiating Science: The Critical Role of Argumentation in Student Inquiry. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

McNeill, K. L., & Krajcik, J. (2012). Claim, evidence and reasoning: Supporting grade 5 – 8 students in constructing scientific explanations. New York, NY: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.

Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/basics/today/greenhouse-gases.html

http://unhabitat.org/urban-themes/climate-change/

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10 (page 173) p. 173 Conclusion

• Published: November 2008
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The ‘Conclusion’ confirms that global warming is the major challenge for our global society. There is very little doubt that global warming will change our climate in the next century. So what are the solutions to global warming? First, there must be an international political solution. Second, funding for developing cheap and clean energy production must be increased, as all economic development is based on increasing energy usage. We must not pin all our hopes on global politics and clean energy technology, so we must prepare for the worst and adapt. If implemented now, a lot of the costs and damage that could be caused by changing climate can be mitigated.

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Essay on Global Warming

• Updated on  
• Apr 27, 2024

Being able to write an essay is an integral part of mastering any language. Essays form an integral part of many academic and scholastic exams like the SAT , and UPSC amongst many others. It is a crucial evaluative part of English proficiency tests as well like IELTS , TOEFL , etc. Major essays are meant to emphasize public issues of concern that can have significant consequences on the world. To understand the concept of Global Warming and its causes and effects, we must first examine the many factors that influence the planet’s temperature and what this implies for the world’s future. Here’s an unbiased look at the essay on Global Warming and other essential related topics.

Short Essay on Global Warming and Climate Change?

Since the industrial and scientific revolutions, Earth’s resources have been gradually depleted. Furthermore, the start of the world’s population’s exponential expansion is particularly hard on the environment. Simply put, as the population’s need for consumption grows, so does the use of natural resources , as well as the waste generated by that consumption.

Climate change has been one of the most significant long-term consequences of this. Climate change is more than just the rise or fall of global temperatures; it also affects rain cycles, wind patterns, cyclone frequencies, sea levels, and other factors. It has an impact on all major life groupings on the planet.

Also Read: World Population Day

What is Global Warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century, primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels . The greenhouse gases consist of methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and chlorofluorocarbons. The weather prediction has been becoming more complex with every passing year, with seasons more indistinguishable, and the general temperatures hotter.

The number of hurricanes, cyclones, droughts, floods, etc., has risen steadily since the onset of the 21st century. The supervillain behind all these changes is Global Warming. The name is quite self-explanatory; it means the rise in the temperature of the Earth.

Also Read: What is a Natural Disaster?

What are the Causes of Global Warming?

According to recent studies, many scientists believe the following are the primary four causes of global warming:

• Deforestation 
• Greenhouse emissions
• Carbon emissions per capita

Extreme global warming is causing natural disasters , which can be seen all around us. One of the causes of global warming is the extreme release of greenhouse gases that become trapped on the earth’s surface, causing the temperature to rise. Similarly, volcanoes contribute to global warming by spewing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere.

The increase in population is one of the major causes of Global Warming. This increase in population also leads to increased air pollution . Automobiles emit a lot of CO2, which remains in the atmosphere. This increase in population is also causing deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

The earth’s surface emits energy into the atmosphere in the form of heat, keeping the balance with the incoming energy. Global warming depletes the ozone layer, bringing about the end of the world. There is a clear indication that increased global warming will result in the extinction of all life on Earth’s surface.

Also Read: Land, Soil, Water, Natural Vegetation, and Wildlife Resources

Solutions for Global Warming

Of course, industries and multinational conglomerates emit more carbon than the average citizen. Nonetheless, activism and community effort are the only viable ways to slow the worsening effects of global warming. Furthermore, at the state or government level, world leaders must develop concrete plans and step-by-step programmes to ensure that no further harm is done to the environment in general.

Although we are almost too late to slow the rate of global warming, finding the right solution is critical. Everyone, from individuals to governments, must work together to find a solution to Global Warming. Some of the factors to consider are pollution control, population growth, and the use of natural resources.

One very important contribution you can make is to reduce your use of plastic. Plastic is the primary cause of global warming, and recycling it takes years. Another factor to consider is deforestation, which will aid in the control of global warming. More tree planting should be encouraged to green the environment. Certain rules should also govern industrialization. Building industries in green zones that affect plants and species should be prohibited.

Also Read: Essay on Pollution

Effects of Global Warming

Global warming is a real problem that many people want to disprove to gain political advantage. However, as global citizens, we must ensure that only the truth is presented in the media.

This decade has seen a significant impact from global warming. The two most common phenomena observed are glacier retreat and arctic shrinkage. Glaciers are rapidly melting. These are clear manifestations of climate change.

Another significant effect of global warming is the rise in sea level. Flooding is occurring in low-lying areas as a result of sea-level rise. Many countries have experienced extreme weather conditions. Every year, we have unusually heavy rain, extreme heat and cold, wildfires, and other natural disasters.

Similarly, as global warming continues, marine life is being severely impacted. This is causing the extinction of marine species as well as other problems. Furthermore, changes are expected in coral reefs, which will face extinction in the coming years. These effects will intensify in the coming years, effectively halting species expansion. Furthermore, humans will eventually feel the negative effects of Global Warming.

Also Read: Concept of Sustainable Development

Sample Essays on Global Warming

Here are some sample essays on Global Warming:

Essay on Global Warming Paragraph in 100 – 150 words

Global Warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere and is a result of human activities that have been causing harm to our environment for the past few centuries now. Global Warming is something that can’t be ignored and steps have to be taken to tackle the situation globally. The average temperature is constantly rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the last few years.

The best method to prevent future damage to the earth, cutting down more forests should be banned and Afforestation should be encouraged. Start by planting trees near your homes and offices, participate in events, and teach the importance of planting trees. It is impossible to undo the damage but it is possible to stop further harm.

Also Read: Social Forestry

Essay on Global Warming in 250 Words

Over a long period, it is observed that the temperature of the earth is increasing. This affected wildlife, animals, humans, and every living organism on earth. Glaciers have been melting, and many countries have started water shortages, flooding, and erosion and all this is because of global warming. 

No one can be blamed for global warming except for humans. Human activities such as gases released from power plants, transportation, and deforestation have increased gases such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere.                                              The main question is how can we control the current situation and build a better world for future generations. It starts with little steps by every individual. 

Start using cloth bags made from sustainable materials for all shopping purposes, instead of using high-watt lights use energy-efficient bulbs, switch off the electricity, don’t waste water, abolish deforestation and encourage planting more trees. Shift the use of energy from petroleum or other fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Instead of throwing out the old clothes donate them to someone so that it is recycled. 

Donate old books, don’t waste paper.  Above all, spread awareness about global warming. Every little thing a person does towards saving the earth will contribute in big or small amounts. We must learn that 1% effort is better than no effort. Pledge to take care of Mother Nature and speak up about global warming.

Also Read: Types of Water Pollution

Essay on Global Warming in 500 Words

Global warming isn’t a prediction, it is happening! A person denying it or unaware of it is in the most simple terms complicit. Do we have another planet to live on? Unfortunately, we have been bestowed with this one planet only that can sustain life yet over the years we have turned a blind eye to the plight it is in. Global warming is not an abstract concept but a global phenomenon occurring ever so slowly even at this moment. Global Warming is a phenomenon that is occurring every minute resulting in a gradual increase in the Earth’s overall climate. Brought about by greenhouse gases that trap the solar radiation in the atmosphere, global warming can change the entire map of the earth, displacing areas, flooding many countries, and destroying multiple lifeforms. Extreme weather is a direct consequence of global warming but it is not an exhaustive consequence. There are virtually limitless effects of global warming which are all harmful to life on earth. The sea level is increasing by 0.12 inches per year worldwide. This is happening because of the melting of polar ice caps because of global warming. This has increased the frequency of floods in many lowland areas and has caused damage to coral reefs. The Arctic is one of the worst-hit areas affected by global warming. Air quality has been adversely affected and the acidity of the seawater has also increased causing severe damage to marine life forms. Severe natural disasters are brought about by global warming which has had dire effects on life and property. As long as mankind produces greenhouse gases, global warming will continue to accelerate. The consequences are felt at a much smaller scale which will increase to become drastic shortly. The power to save the day lies in the hands of humans, the need is to seize the day. Energy consumption should be reduced on an individual basis. Fuel-efficient cars and other electronics should be encouraged to reduce the wastage of energy sources. This will also improve air quality and reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming is an evil that can only be defeated when fought together. It is better late than never. If we all take steps today, we will have a much brighter future tomorrow. Global warming is the bane of our existence and various policies have come up worldwide to fight it but that is not enough. The actual difference is made when we work at an individual level to fight it. Understanding its import now is crucial before it becomes an irrevocable mistake. Exterminating global warming is of utmost importance and each one of us is as responsible for it as the next.  

Also Read: Essay on Library: 100, 200 and 250 Words

Essay on Global Warming UPSC

Always hear about global warming everywhere, but do we know what it is? The evil of the worst form, global warming is a phenomenon that can affect life more fatally. Global warming refers to the increase in the earth’s temperature as a result of various human activities. The planet is gradually getting hotter and threatening the existence of lifeforms on it. Despite being relentlessly studied and researched, global warming for the majority of the population remains an abstract concept of science. It is this concept that over the years has culminated in making global warming a stark reality and not a concept covered in books. Global warming is not caused by one sole reason that can be curbed. Multifarious factors cause global warming most of which are a part of an individual’s daily existence. Burning of fuels for cooking, in vehicles, and for other conventional uses, a large amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and methane amongst many others is produced which accelerates global warming. Rampant deforestation also results in global warming as lesser green cover results in an increased presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas.  Finding a solution to global warming is of immediate importance. Global warming is a phenomenon that has to be fought unitedly. Planting more trees can be the first step that can be taken toward warding off the severe consequences of global warming. Increasing the green cover will result in regulating the carbon cycle. There should be a shift from using nonrenewable energy to renewable energy such as wind or solar energy which causes less pollution and thereby hinder the acceleration of global warming. Reducing energy needs at an individual level and not wasting energy in any form is the most important step to be taken against global warming. The warning bells are tolling to awaken us from the deep slumber of complacency we have slipped into. Humans can fight against nature and it is high time we acknowledged that. With all our scientific progress and technological inventions, fighting off the negative effects of global warming is implausible. We have to remember that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors but borrow it from our future generations and the responsibility lies on our shoulders to bequeath them a healthy planet for life to exist. 

Also Read: Essay on Disaster Management

Climate Change and Global Warming Essay

Global Warming and Climate Change are two sides of the same coin. Both are interrelated with each other and are two issues of major concern worldwide. Greenhouse gases released such as carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants in the earth’s atmosphere cause Global Warming which leads to climate change. Black holes have started to form in the ozone layer that protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays. 

Human activities have created climate change and global warming. Industrial waste and fumes are the major contributors to global warming. 

Another factor affecting is the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and also one of the reasons for climate change.  Global warming has resulted in shrinking mountain glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic and causing climate change. Switching from the use of fossil fuels to energy sources like wind and solar. 

When buying any electronic appliance buy the best quality with energy savings stars. Don’t waste water and encourage rainwater harvesting in your community. 

Also Read: Essay on Air Pollution

Tips to Write an Essay

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Also Read: I Love My India Essay: 100 and 500+ Words in English for School Students

Ans. Both natural and man-made factors contribute to global warming. The natural one also contains methane gas, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gases. Deforestation, mining, livestock raising, burning fossil fuels, and other man-made causes are next.

Ans. The government and the general public can work together to stop global warming. Trees must be planted more often, and deforestation must be prohibited. Auto usage needs to be curbed, and recycling needs to be promoted.

Ans. Switching to renewable energy sources , adopting sustainable farming, transportation, and energy methods, and conserving water and other natural resources.

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Digvijay Singh

Having 2+ years of experience in educational content writing, withholding a Bachelor's in Physical Education and Sports Science and a strong interest in writing educational content for students enrolled in domestic and foreign study abroad programmes. I believe in offering a distinct viewpoint to the table, to help students deal with the complexities of both domestic and foreign educational systems. Through engaging storytelling and insightful analysis, I aim to inspire my readers to embark on their educational journeys, whether abroad or at home, and to make the most of every learning opportunity that comes their way.

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This was really a good essay on global warming… There has been used many unic words..and I really liked it!!!Seriously I had been looking for a essay about Global warming just like this…

Thank you for the comment!

I want to learn how to write essay writing so I joined this page.This page is very useful for everyone.

Hi, we are glad that we could help you to write essays. We have a beginner’s guide to write essays ( https://leverageedu.com/blog/essay-writing/ ) and we think this might help you.

It is not good , to have global warming in our earth .So we all have to afforestation program on all the world.

thank you so much

Very educative , helpful and it is really going to strength my English knowledge to structure my essay in future

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Global warming is the increase in 𝓽𝓱𝓮 ᴀᴠᴇʀᴀɢᴇ ᴛᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴀᴛᴜʀᴇs ᴏғ ᴇᴀʀᴛʜ🌎 ᴀᴛᴍᴏsᴘʜᴇʀᴇ

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A problem built into our relationship with energy itself. Photo by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum

Deep warming

Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. waste heat could radically alter earth’s future.

by Mark Buchanan   + BIO

The world will be transformed. By 2050, we will be driving electric cars and flying in aircraft running on synthetic fuels produced through solar and wind energy. New energy-efficient technologies, most likely harnessing artificial intelligence, will dominate nearly all human activities from farming to heavy industry. The fossil fuel industry will be in the final stages of a terminal decline. Nuclear fusion and other new energy sources may have become widespread. Perhaps our planet will even be orbited by massive solar arrays capturing cosmic energy from sunlight and generating seemingly endless energy for all our needs.

That is one possible future for humanity. It’s an optimistic view of how radical changes to energy production might help us slow or avoid the worst outcomes of global warming. In a report from 1965, scientists from the US government warned that our ongoing use of fossil fuels would cause global warming with potentially disastrous consequences for Earth’s climate. The report, one of the first government-produced documents to predict a major crisis caused by humanity’s large-scale activities, noted that the likely consequences would include higher global temperatures, the melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels. ‘Through his worldwide industrial civilisation,’ the report concluded, ‘Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment’ – an experiment with a highly uncertain outcome, but clear and important risks for life on Earth.

Since then, we’ve dithered and doubted and argued about what to do, but still have not managed to take serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which continue to rise. Governments around the planet have promised to phase out emissions in the coming decades and transition to ‘green energy’. But global temperatures may be rising faster than we expected: some climate scientists worry that rapid rises could create new problems and positive feedback loops that may accelerate climate destabilisation and make parts of the world uninhabitable long before a hoped-for transition is possible.

Despite this bleak vision of the future, there are reasons for optimists to hope due to progress on cleaner sources of renewable energy, especially solar power. Around 2010, solar energy generation accounted for less than 1 per cent of the electricity generated by humanity. But experts believe that, by 2027, due to falling costs, better technology and exponential growth in new installations, solar power will become the largest global energy source for producing electricity. If progress on renewables continues, we might find a way to resolve the warming problem linked to greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, large-scale societal and ecological changes might have helped us avoid the worst consequences of our extensive use of fossil fuels.

It’s a momentous challenge. And it won’t be easy. But this story of transformation only hints at the true depth of the future problems humanity will confront in managing our energy use and its influence over our climate.

As scientists are gradually learning, even if we solve the immediate warming problem linked to the greenhouse effect, there’s another warming problem steadily growing beneath it. Let’s call it the ‘deep warming’ problem. This deeper problem also raises Earth’s surface temperature but, unlike global warming, it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases and our use of fossil fuels. It stems directly from our use of energy in all forms and our tendency to use more energy over time – a problem created by the inevitable waste heat that is generated whenever we use energy to do something. Yes, the world may well be transformed by 2050. Carbon dioxide levels may stabilise or fall thanks to advanced AI-assisted technologies that run on energy harvested from the sun and wind. And the fossil fuel industry may be taking its last breaths. But we will still face a deeper problem. That’s because ‘deep warming’ is not created by the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s a problem built into our relationship with energy itself.

F inding new ways to harness more energy has been a constant theme of human development. The evolution of humanity – from early modes of hunter-gathering to farming and industry – has involved large systematic increases in our per-capita energy use. The British historian and archaeologist Ian Morris estimates, in his book Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (2015), that early human hunter-gatherers, living more than 10,000 years ago, ‘captured’ around 5,000 kcal per person per day by consuming food, burning fuel, making clothing, building shelter, or through other activities. Later, after we turned to farming and enlisted the energies of domesticated animals, we were able to harness as much as 30,000 kcal per day. In the late 17th century , the exploitation of coal and steam power marked another leap: by 1970, the use of fossil fuels allowed humans to consume some 230,000 kcal per person per day. (When we think about humanity writ large as ‘humans’, it’s important to acknowledge that the average person in the wealthiest nations consumes up to 100 times more energy than the average person in the poorest nations.) As the global population has risen and people have invented new energy-dependent technologies, our global energy use has continued to climb.

In many respects, this is great. We can now do more with less effort and achieve things that were unimaginable to the 17th-century inventors of steam engines, let alone to our hominin ancestors. We’ve made powerful mining machines, superfast trains, lasers for use in telecommunications and brain-imaging equipment. But these creations, while helping us, are also subtly heating the planet.

All the energy we humans use – to heat our homes, run our factories, propel our automobiles and aircraft, or to run our electronics – eventually ends up as heat in the environment. In the shorter term, most of the energy we use flows directly into the environment. It gets there through hot exhaust gases, friction between tires and roads, the noises generated by powerful engines, which spread out, dissipate, and eventually end up as heat. However, a small portion of the energy we use gets stored in physical changes, such as in new steel, plastic or concrete. It’s stored in our cities and technologies. In the longer term, as these materials break down, the energy stored inside also finds its way into the environment as heat. This is a direct consequence of the well-tested principles of thermodynamics.

Waste heat will pose a problem that is every bit as serious as global warming from greenhouse gases

In the early decades of the 21st century , this heat created by simply using energy, known as ‘waste heat’, is not so serious. It’s equivalent to roughly 2 per cent of the planetary heating imbalance caused by greenhouse gases – for now. But, with the passing of time, the problem is likely to get much more serious. That’s because humans have a historical tendency to consistently discover and produce things, creating entirely new technologies and industries in the process: domesticated animals for farming; railways and automobiles; global air travel and shipping; personal computers, the internet and mobile phones. The result of such activities is that we end up using more and more energy, despite improved energy efficiency in nearly every area of technology.

During the past two centuries at least (and likely for much longer), our yearly energy use has doubled roughly every 30 to 50 years . Our energy use seems to be growing exponentially, a trend that shows every sign of continuing. We keep finding new things to do and almost everything we invent requires more and more energy: consider the enormous energy demands of cryptocurrency mining or the accelerating energy requirements of AI.

If this historical trend continues, scientists estimate waste heat will pose a problem in roughly 150-200 years that is every bit as serious as the current problem of global warming from greenhouse gases. However, deep heating will be more pernicious as we won’t be able to avoid it by merely shifting from one kind energy to another. A profound problem will loom before us: can we set strict limits on all the energy we use? Can we reign in the seemingly inexorable expansion of our activities to avoid destroying our own environment?

Deep warming is a problem hiding beneath global warming, but one that will become prominent if and when we manage to solve the more pressing issue of greenhouse gases. It remains just out of sight, which might explain why scientists only became concerned about the ‘waste heat’ problem around 15 years ago.

O ne of the first people to describe the problem is the Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson, who discussed the issue of waste heat in a paper titled ‘Long-Term Global Heating from Energy Usage’ (2008). He concluded that our technological society may be facing a fundamental limit to growth due to ‘unavoidable global heating … dictated solely by the second law of thermodynamics, a biogeophysical effect often ignored when estimating future planetary warming scenarios’. When I emailed Chaisson to learn more, he told me the history of his thinking on the problem:

It was on a night flight, Paris-Boston [circa] 2006, after a UNESCO meeting on the environment when it dawned on me that the IPCC were overlooking something. While others on the plane slept, I crunched some numbers literally on the back of an envelope … and then hoped I was wrong, that is, hoped that I was incorrect in thinking that the very act of using energy heats the air, however slightly now.

The transformation of energy into heat is among the most ubiquitous processes of physics

Chaisson drafted the idea up as a paper and sent it to an academic journal. Two anonymous reviewers were eager for it to be published. ‘A third tried his damnedest to kill it,’ Chaisson said, the reviewer claiming the findings were ‘irrelevant and distracting’. After it was finally published, the paper got some traction when it was covered by a journalist and ran as a feature story on the front page of The Boston Globe . The numbers Chaisson crunched, predictions of our mounting waste heat, were even run on a supercomputer at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, by Mark Flanner, a professor of earth system science. Flanner, Chaisson suspected at the time, was likely ‘out to prove it wrong’. But, ‘after his machine crunched for many hours’, he saw the same results that Chaisson had written on the back of an envelope that night in the plane.

Around the same time, also in 2008, two engineers, Nick Cowern and Chihak Ahn, wrote a research paper entirely independent of Chaisson’s work, but with similar conclusions. This was how I first came across the problem. Cowern and Ahn’s study estimated the total amount of waste heat we’re currently releasing to the environment, and found that it is, right now, quite small. But, like Chaisson, they acknowledged that the problem would eventually become serious unless steps were taken to avoid it.

That’s some of the early history of thinking in this area. But these two papers, and a few other analyses since, point to the same unsettling conclusion: what I am calling ‘deep warming’ will be a big problem for humanity at some point in the not-too-distant future. The precise date is far from certain. It might be 150 years , or 400, or 800, but it’s in the relatively near future, not the distant future of, say, thousands or millions of years. This is our future.

T he transformation of energy into heat is among the most ubiquitous processes of physics. As cars drive down roads, trains roar along railways, planes cross the skies and industrial plants turn raw materials into refined products, energy gets turned into heat, which is the scientific word for energy stored in the disorganised motions of molecules at the microscopic level. As a plane flies from Paris to Boston, it burns fuel and thrusts hot gases into the air, generates lots of sound and stirs up contrails. These swirls of air give rise to swirls on smaller scales which in turn make smaller ones until the energy ultimately ends up lost in heat – the air is a little warmer than before, the molecules making it up moving about a little more vigorously. A similar process takes place when energy is used by the tiny electrical currents inside the microchips of computers, silently carrying out computations. Energy used always ends up as heat. Decades ago, research by the IBM physicist Rolf Landauer showed that a computation involving even a single computing bit will release a certain minimum amount of heat to the environment.

How this happens is described by the laws of thermodynamics, which were described in the mid-19th century by scientists including Sadi Carnot in France and Rudolf Clausius in Germany. Two key ‘laws’ summarise its main principles.

The first law of thermodynamics simply states that the total quantity of energy never changes but is conserved. Energy, in other words, never disappears, but only changes form. The energy initially stored in an aircraft’s fuel, for example, can be changed into the energetic motion of the plane. Turn on an electric heater, and energy initially held in electric currents gets turned into heat, which spreads into the air, walls and fabric of your house. The total energy remains the same, but it markedly changes form.

We’re generating waste heat all the time with everything we do

The second law of thermodynamics, equally important, is more subtle and states that, in natural processes, the transformation of energy always moves from more organised and useful forms to less organised and less useful forms. For an aircraft, the energy initially concentrated in jet fuel ends up dissipated in stirred-up winds, sounds and heat spread over vast areas of the atmosphere in a largely invisible way. It’s the same with the electric heater: the organised useful energy in the electric currents gets dissipated and spread into the low-grade warmth of the walls, then leaks into the outside air. Although the amount of energy remains the same, it gradually turns into less organised, less usable forms. The end point of the energy process produces waste heat. And we’re generating it all the time with everything we do.

Data on world energy consumption shows that, collectively, all humans on Earth are currently using about 170,000 terawatt-hours (TWh), which is a lot of energy in absolute terms – a terawatt-hour is the total energy consumed in one hour by any process using energy at a rate of 1 trillion watts. This huge number isn’t surprising, as it represents all the energy being used every day by the billions of cars and homes around the world, as well as by industry, farming, construction, air traffic and so on. But, in the early 21st century , the warming from this energy is still much less than the planetary heating due to greenhouse gases.

Concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO 2 and methane are quite small, and only make a fractional difference to how much of the Sun’s energy gets trapped in the atmosphere, rather than making it back out to space. Even so, this fractional difference has a huge effect because the stream of energy arriving from the Sun to Earth is so large. Current estimates of this greenhouse energy imbalance come to around 0.87 W per square meter, which translates into a total energy figure about 50 times larger than our waste heat. That’s reassuring. But as Cowern and Ahn wrote in their 2008 paper, things aren’t likely to stay this way over time because our energy usage keeps rising. Unless, that is, we can find some radical way to break the trend of using ever more energy.

O ne common objection to the idea of the deep warming is to claim that the problem won’t really arise. ‘Don’t worry,’ someone might say, ‘with efficient technology, we’re going to find ways to stop using more energy; though we’ll end up doing more things in the future, we’ll use less energy.’ This may sound plausible at first, because we are indeed getting more efficient at using energy in most areas of technology. Our cars, appliances and laptops are all doing more with less energy. If efficiency keeps improving, perhaps we can learn to run these things with almost no energy at all? Not likely, because there are limits to energy efficiency.

Over the past few decades, the efficiency of heating in homes – including oil and gas furnaces, and boilers used to heat water – has increased from less than 50 per cent to well above 90 per cent of what is theoretically possible. That’s good news, but there’s not much more efficiency to be realised in basic heating. The efficiency of lighting has also vastly improved, with modern LED lighting turning something like 70 per cent of the applied electrical energy into light. We will gain some efficiencies as older lighting gets completely replaced by LEDs, but there’s not a lot of room left for future efficiency improvements. Similar efficiency limits arise in the growing or cooking of food; in the manufacturing of cars, bikes and electronic devices; in transportation, as we’re taken from place to place; in the running of search engines, translation software, GPT-4 or other large-language models.

Even if we made significant improvements in the efficiencies of these technologies, we will only have bought a little time. These changes won’t delay by much the date when deep warming becomes a problem we must reckon with.

Optimising efficiencies is just a temporary reprieve, not a radical change in our human future

As a thought experiment, suppose we could immediately improve the energy efficiency of everything we do by a factor of 10 – a fantastically optimistic proposal. That is, imagine the energy output of humans on Earth has been reduced 10 times , from 170,000 TWh to 17,000 TWh . If our energy use keeps expanding, doubling every 30-50 years or so (as it has for centuries), then a 10-fold increase in waste heat will happen in just over three doubling times, which is about 130 years : 17,000 TWh doubles to 34,000 TWh , which doubles to 68,000 TWh , which doubles to 136,000 TWh , and so on. All those improvements in energy efficiency would quickly evaporate. The date when deep warming hits would recede by 130 years or so, but not much more. Optimising efficiencies is just a temporary reprieve, not a radical change in our human future.

Improvements in energy efficiency can also have an inverse effect on our overall energy use. It’s easy to think that if we make a technology more efficient, we’ll then use less energy through the technology. But economists are deeply aware of a paradoxical effect known as ‘rebound’, whereby improved energy efficiency, by making the use of a technology cheaper, actually leads to more widespread use of that technology – and more energy use too. The classic example, as noted by the British economist William Stanley Jevons in his book The Coal Question (1865), is the invention of the steam engine. This new technology could extract energy from burning coal more efficiently, but it also made possible so many new applications that the use of coal increased. A recent study by economists suggests that, across the economy, such rebound effects might easily swallow at least 50 per cent of any efficiency gains in energy use. Something similar has already happened with LED lights, for which people have found thousands of new uses.

If gains in efficiency won’t buy us lots of time, how about other factors, such as a reduction of the global population? Scientists generally believe that the current human population of more than 8 billion people is well beyond the limits of our finite planet, especially if a large fraction of this population aspires to the resource-intensive lifestyles of wealthy nations. Some estimates suggest that a more sustainable population might be more like 2 billion , which could reduce energy use significantly, potentially by a factor of three or four. However, this isn’t a real solution: again, as with the example of improved energy efficiency, a one-time reduction of our energy consumption by a factor of three will quickly be swallowed up by an inexorable rise in energy use. If Earth’s population were suddenly reduced to 2 billion – about a quarter of the current population – our energy gains would initially be enormous. But those gains would be erased in two doubling times, or roughly 60-100 years , as our energy demands would grow fourfold.

S o, why aren’t more people talking about this? The deep warming problem is starting to get more attention. It was recently mentioned on Twitter by the German climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, who cautioned that nuclear fusion, despite excitement over recent advances, won’t arrive in time to save us from our waste heat, and might make the problem worse. By providing another cheap source of energy, fusion energy could accelerate both the growth of our energy use and the reckoning of deep warming. A student of Rahmstorf’s, Peter Steiglechner, wrote his master’s thesis on the problem in 2018. Recognition of deep warming and its long-term implications for humanity is spreading. But what can we do about the problem?

Avoiding or delaying deep warming will involve slowing the rise of our waste heat, which means restricting the amount of energy we use and also choosing energy sources that exacerbate the problem as little as possible. Unlike the energy from fossil fuels or nuclear power, which add to our waste energy burden, renewable energy sources intercept energy that is already on its way to Earth, rather than producing additional waste heat. In this sense, the deep warming problem is another reason to pursue renewable energy sources such as solar or wind rather than alternatives such as nuclear fusion, fission or even geothermal power. If we derive energy from any of these sources, we’re unleashing new flows of energy into the Earth system without making a compensating reduction. As a result, all such sources will add to the waste heat problem. However, if renewable sources of energy are deployed correctly, they need not add to our deposition of waste heat in the environment. By using this energy, we produce no more waste heat than would have been created by sunlight in the first place.

Take the example of wind energy. Sunlight first stirs winds into motion by heating parts of the planet unequally, causing vast cells of convection. As wind churns through the atmosphere, blows through trees and over mountains and waves, most of its energy gets turned into heat, ending up in the microscopic motions of molecules. If we harvest some of this wind energy through turbines, it will also be turned into heat in the form of stored energy. But, crucially, no more heat is generated than if there had been no turbines to capture the wind.

The same can hold true for solar energy. In an array of solar cells, if each cell only collects the sunlight falling on it – which would ordinarily have been absorbed by Earth’s surface – then the cells don’t alter how much waste heat gets produced as they generate energy. The light that would have warmed Earth’s surface instead goes into the solar cells, gets used by people for some purpose, and then later ends up as heat. In this way we reduce the amount of heat being absorbed by Earth by precisely the same amount as the energy we are extracting for human use. We are not adding to overall planetary heating. This keeps the waste energy burden unchanged, at least in the relatively near future, even if we go on extracting and using ever larger amounts of energy.

Covering deserts in dark panels would absorb a lot more energy than the desert floor

Chaisson summarised the problem quite clearly in 2008:

I’m now of the opinion … that any energy that’s dug up on Earth – including all fossil fuels of course, but also nuclear and ground-sourced geothermal – will inevitably produce waste heat as a byproduct of humankind’s use of energy. The only exception to that is energy arriving from beyond Earth, this is energy here and now and not dug up, namely the many solar energies (plural) caused by the Sun’s rays landing here daily … The need to avoid waste heat is indeed the single, strongest, scientific argument to embrace solar energies of all types.

But not just any method of gathering solar energy will avoid the deep warming problem. Doing so requires careful engineering. For example, covering deserts with solar panels would add to planetary heating because deserts reflect a lot of incident light back out to space, so it is never absorbed by Earth (and therefore doesn’t produce waste heat). Covering deserts in dark panels would absorb a lot more energy than the desert floor and would heat the planet further.

We’ll also face serious problems in the long run if our energy appetite keeps increasing. Futurists dream of technologies deployed in space where huge panels would absorb sunlight that would otherwise have passed by Earth and never entered our atmosphere. Ultimately, they believe, this energy could be beamed down to Earth. Like nuclear energy, such technologies would add an additional energy source to the planet without any compensating removal of heating from the sunlight currently striking our planet’s surface. Any effort to produce more energy than is normally available from sunlight at Earth’s surface will only make our heating problems worse.

D eep warming is simply a consequence of the laws of physics and our inquisitive nature. It seems to be in our nature to constantly learn and develop new things, changing our environment in the process. For thousands of years, we have harvested and exploited ever greater quantities of energy in this pursuit, and we appear poised to continue along this path with the rapidly expanding use of renewable energy sources – and perhaps even more novel sources such as nuclear fusion. But this path cannot proceed indefinitely without consequences.

The logic that more energy equals more warming sets up a profound dilemma for our future. The laws of physics and the habits ingrained in us from our long evolutionary history are steering us toward trouble. We may have a technological fix for greenhouse gas warming – just shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources – but there is no technical trick to get us out of the deep warming problem. That won’t stop some scientists from trying.

Perhaps, believing that humanity is incapable of reducing its energy usage, we’ll adopt a fantastic scheme to cool the planet, such as planetary-scale refrigeration or using artificially engineered tornadoes to transport heat from Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere where it can be radiated away to space. As far-fetched as such approaches sound, scientists have given some serious thought to these and other equally bizarre ideas, which seem wholly in the realm of science fiction. They’re schemes that will likely make the problem worse not better.

We will need to transform the human story. It must become a story of doing less, not more

I see several possibilities for how we might ultimately respond. As with greenhouse gas warming, there will probably be an initial period of disbelief, denial and inaction, as we continue with unconstrained technological advance and growing energy use. Our planet will continue warming. Sooner or later, however, such warming will lead to serious disruptions of the Earth environment and its ecosystems. We won’t be able to ignore this for long, and it may provide a natural counterbalance to our energy use, as our technical and social capacity to generate and use ever more energy will be eroded. We may eventually come to some uncomfortable balance in which we just scrabble out a life on a hot, compromised planet because we lack the moral and organisational ability to restrict our energy use enough to maintain a sound environment.

An alternative would require a radical break with our past: using less energy. Finding a way to use less energy would represent a truly fundamental rupture with all of human history, something entirely novel. A rupture of this magnitude won’t come easily. However, if we could learn to view restrictions on our energy use as a non-negotiable element of life on Earth, we may still be able to do many of the things that make us essentially human: learning, discovering, inventing, creating. In this scenario, any helpful new technology that comes into use and begins using lots of energy would require a balancing reduction in energy use elsewhere. In such a way, we might go on with the future being perpetually new, and possibly better.

None of this is easily achieved and will likely mirror our current struggles to come to agreements on greenhouse gas heating. There will be vicious squabbles, arguments and profound polarisation, quite possibly major wars. Humanity will never have faced a challenge of this magnitude, and we won’t face up to it quickly or easily, I expect. But we must. Planetary heating is in our future – the very near future and further out as well. Many people will find this conclusion surprisingly hard to swallow, perhaps because it implies fundamental restrictions on our future here on Earth: we can’t go on forever using more and more energy, and, at the same time, expecting the planet’s climate to remain stable.

The world will likely be transformed by 2050. And, sometime after that, we will need to transform the human story. The narrative arc of humanity must become a tale of continuing innovation and learning, but also one of careful management. It must become a story, in energy terms, of doing less, not more. There’s no technology for entirely escaping waste heat, only techniques.

This is important to remember as we face up to the extremely urgent challenge of heating linked to fossil-fuel use and greenhouse gases. Global warming is just the beginning of our problems. It’s a testing ground to see if we can manage an intelligent and coordinated response. If we can handle this challenge, we might be better prepared, more capable and resilient as a species to tackle an even harder one.

Building embryos

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How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD

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We need to find a way for human societies to prosper while the planet heals. So far we can’t even think clearly about it

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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. We exploit natural variability in global temperature and rely on time-series variation. A 1°C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world GDP. Global temperature shocks correlate much more strongly with extreme climatic events than the country-level temperature shocks commonly used in the panel literature, explaining why our estimate is substantially larger. We use our reduced-form evidence to estimate structural damage functions in a standard neoclassical growth model. Our results imply a Social Cost of Carbon of $1,056 per ton of carbon dioxide. A business-as-usual warming scenario leads to a present value welfare loss of 31%. Both are multiple orders of magnitude above previous estimates and imply that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.

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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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Global Warming — Argumentative Essay On Global Warming

Argumentative Essay on Global Warming

• Categories: Climate Change Environmental Issues Global Warming

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Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 879 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

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What is climate change mitigation and why is it urgent?

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• Climate change mitigation involves actions to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.
• Mitigation efforts include transitioning to renewable energy sources, enhancing energy efficiency, adopting regenerative agricultural practices and protecting and restoring forests and critical ecosystems.
• Effective mitigation requires a whole-of-society approach and structural transformations to reduce emissions and limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
• International cooperation, for example through the Paris Agreement, is crucial in guiding and achieving global and national mitigation goals.
• Mitigation efforts face challenges such as the world's deep-rooted dependency on fossil fuels, the increased demand for new mineral resources and the difficulties in revamping our food systems.
• These challenges also offer opportunities to improve resilience and contribute to sustainable development.

What is climate change mitigation?

Climate change mitigation refers to any action taken by governments, businesses or people to reduce or prevent greenhouse gases, or to enhance carbon sinks that remove them from the atmosphere. These gases trap heat from the sun in our planet’s atmosphere, keeping it warm. 

Since the industrial era began, human activities have led to the release of dangerous levels of greenhouse gases, causing global warming and climate change. However, despite unequivocal research about the impact of our activities on the planet’s climate and growing awareness of the severe danger climate change poses to our societies, greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. If we can slow down the rise in greenhouse gases, we can slow down the pace of climate change and avoid its worst consequences.

Reducing greenhouse gases can be achieved by:

• Shifting away from fossil fuels : Fossil fuels are the biggest source of greenhouse gases, so transitioning to modern renewable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal power, and advancing sustainable modes of transportation, is crucial.
• Improving energy efficiency : Using less energy overall – in buildings, industries, public and private spaces, energy generation and transmission, and transportation – helps reduce emissions. This can be achieved by using thermal comfort standards, better insulation and energy efficient appliances, and by improving building design, energy transmission systems and vehicles.
• Changing agricultural practices : Certain farming methods release high amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, which are potent greenhouse gases. Regenerative agricultural practices – including enhancing soil health, reducing livestock-related emissions, direct seeding techniques and using cover crops – support mitigation, improve resilience and decrease the cost burden on farmers.
• The sustainable management and conservation of forests : Forests act as carbon sinks , absorbing carbon dioxide and reducing the overall concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Measures to reduce deforestation and forest degradation are key for climate mitigation and generate multiple additional benefits such as biodiversity conservation and improved water cycles.
• Restoring and conserving critical ecosystems : In addition to forests, ecosystems such as wetlands, peatlands, and grasslands, as well as coastal biomes such as mangrove forests, also contribute significantly to carbon sequestration, while supporting biodiversity and enhancing climate resilience.
• Creating a supportive environment : Investments, policies and regulations that encourage emission reductions, such as incentives, carbon pricing and limits on emissions from key sectors are crucial to driving climate change mitigation.

Photo: Stephane Bellerose/UNDP Mauritius

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What is the 1.5°C goal and why do we need to stick to it?

In 2015, 196 Parties to the UN Climate Convention in Paris adopted the Paris Agreement , a landmark international treaty, aimed at curbing global warming and addressing the effects of climate change. Its core ambition is to cap the rise in global average temperatures to well below 2°C above levels observed prior to the industrial era, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C.

The 1.5°C goal is extremely important, especially for vulnerable communities already experiencing severe climate change impacts. Limiting warming below 1.5°C will translate into less extreme weather events and sea level rise, less stress on food production and water access, less biodiversity and ecosystem loss, and a lower chance of irreversible climate consequences.

To limit global warming to the critical threshold of 1.5°C, it is imperative for the world to undertake significant mitigation action. This requires a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent before 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.

What are the policy instruments that countries can use to drive mitigation?

Everyone has a role to play in climate change mitigation, from individuals adopting sustainable habits and advocating for change to governments implementing regulations, providing incentives and facilitating investments. The private sector, particularly those businesses and companies responsible for causing high emissions, should take a leading role in innovating, funding and driving climate change mitigation solutions. 

International collaboration and technology transfer is also crucial given the global nature and size of the challenge. As the main platform for international cooperation on climate action, the Paris Agreement has set forth a series of responsibilities and policy tools for its signatories. One of the primary instruments for achieving the goals of the treaty is Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) . These are the national climate pledges that each Party is required to develop and update every five years. NDCs articulate how each country will contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhance climate resilience.   While NDCs include short- to medium-term targets, long-term low emission development strategies (LT-LEDS) are policy tools under the Paris Agreement through which countries must show how they plan to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century. These strategies define a long-term vision that gives coherence and direction to shorter-term national climate targets.

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At the same time, the call for climate change mitigation has evolved into a call for reparative action, where high-income countries are urged to rectify past and ongoing contributions to the climate crisis. This approach reflects the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which advocates for climate justice, recognizing the unequal historical responsibility for the climate crisis, emphasizing that wealthier countries, having profited from high-emission activities, bear a greater obligation to lead in mitigating these impacts. This includes not only reducing their own emissions, but also supporting vulnerable countries in their transition to low-emission development pathways.

Another critical aspect is ensuring a just transition for workers and communities that depend on the fossil fuel industry and its many connected industries. This process must prioritize social equity and create alternative employment opportunities as part of the shift towards renewable energy and more sustainable practices.

For emerging economies, innovation and advancements in technology have now demonstrated that robust economic growth can be achieved with clean, sustainable energy sources. By integrating renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind and geothermal power into their growth strategies, these economies can reduce their emissions, enhance energy security and create new economic opportunities and jobs. This shift not only contributes to global mitigation efforts but also sets a precedent for sustainable development.

What are some of the challenges slowing down climate change mitigation efforts?

Mitigating climate change is fraught with complexities, including the global economy's deep-rooted dependency on fossil fuels and the accompanying challenge of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. This reliance – and the vested interests that have a stake in maintaining it – presents a significant barrier to transitioning to sustainable energy sources.

The shift towards decarbonization and renewable energy is driving increased demand for critical minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth metals. Since new mining projects can take up to 15 years to yield output, mineral supply chains could become a bottleneck for decarbonization efforts. In addition, these minerals are predominantly found in a few, mostly low-income countries, which could heighten supply chain vulnerabilities and geopolitical tensions.

Furthermore, due to the significant demand for these minerals and the urgency of the energy transition, the scaled-up investment in the sector has the potential to exacerbate environmental degradation, economic and governance risks, and social inequalities, affecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and workers. Addressing these concerns necessitates implementing social and environmental safeguards, embracing circular economy principles, and establishing and enforcing responsible policies and regulations .

Agriculture is currently the largest driver of deforestation worldwide. A transformation in our food systems to reverse the impact that agriculture has on forests and biodiversity is undoubtedly a complex challenge. But it is also an important opportunity. The latest IPCC report highlights that adaptation and mitigation options related to land, water and food offer the greatest potential in responding to the climate crisis. Shifting to regenerative agricultural practices will not only ensure a healthy, fair and stable food supply for the world’s population, but also help to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  

Photo: UNDP India

Photo: Nino Zedginidze/UNDP Georgia

What are some examples of climate change mitigation?

In Mauritius , UNDP, with funding from the Green Climate Fund, has supported the government to install battery energy storage capacity that has enabled 50 MW of intermittent renewable energy to be connected to the grid, helping to avoid 81,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. 

In Indonesia , UNDP has been working with the government for over a decade to support sustainable palm oil production. In 2019, the country adopted a National Action Plan on Sustainable Palm Oil, which was collaboratively developed by government, industry and civil society representatives. The plan increased the adoption of practices to minimize the adverse social and environmental effects of palm oil production and to protect forests. Since 2015, 37 million tonnes of direct greenhouse gas emissions have been avoided and 824,000 hectares of land with high conservation value have been protected.

In Moldova and Paraguay , UNDP has helped set up Green City Labs that are helping build more sustainable cities. This is achieved by implementing urban land use and mobility planning, prioritizing energy efficiency in residential buildings, introducing low-carbon public transport, implementing resource-efficient waste management, and switching to renewable energy sources. 

UNDP has supported the governments of Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Indonesia to implement results-based payments through the REDD+ (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries) framework. These include payments for environmental services and community forest management programmes that channel international climate finance resources to local actors on the ground, specifically forest communities and Indigenous Peoples. 

UNDP is also supporting small island developing states like the Comoros to invest in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure. Through the Africa Minigrids Program , solar minigrids will be installed in two priority communities, Grand Comore and Moheli, providing energy access through distributed renewable energy solutions to those hardest to reach.

And in South Africa , a UNDP initative to boost energy efficiency awareness among the general population and improve labelling standards has taken over commercial shopping malls.

What is UNDP’s role in supporting climate change mitigation?

UNDP aims to assist countries with their climate change mitigation efforts, guiding them towards sustainable, low-carbon and climate-resilient development. This support is in line with achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly those related to affordable and clean energy (SDG7), sustainable cities and communities (SDG11), and climate action (SDG13). Specifically, UNDP’s offer of support includes developing and improving legislation and policy, standards and regulations, capacity building, knowledge dissemination, and financial mobilization for countries to pilot and scale-up mitigation solutions such as renewable energy projects, energy efficiency initiatives and sustainable land-use practices. 

With financial support from the Global Environment Facility and the Green Climate Fund, UNDP has an active portfolio of 94 climate change mitigation projects in 69 countries. These initiatives are not only aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also at contributing to sustainable and resilient development pathways.

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• Published: 14 May 2024

2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years

• Jan Esper   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3919-014X 1 , 2 ,
• Max Torbenson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2720-2238 1 &
• Ulf Büntgen 2 , 3 , 4  

Nature ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

• Climate change
• Palaeoclimate

Including an exceptionally warm Northern Hemisphere (NH) summer 1 ,2 , 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record 3-5 . Contextualizing recent anthropogenic warming against past natural variability is nontrivial, however, because the sparse 19 th century meteorological records tend to be too warm 6 . Here, we combine observed and reconstructed June-August (JJA) surface air temperatures to show that 2023 was the warmest NH extra-tropical summer over the past 2000 years exceeding the 95% confidence range of natural climate variability by more than half a degree Celsius. Comparison of the 2023 JJA warming against the coldest reconstructed summer in 536 CE reveals a maximum range of pre-Anthropocene-to-2023 temperatures of 3.93°C. Although 2023 is consistent with a greenhouse gases-induced warming trend 7 that is amplified by an unfolding El Niño event 8 , this extreme emphasizes the urgency to implement international agreements for carbon emission reduction.

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Department of Geography, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

Jan Esper & Max Torbenson

Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic

Jan Esper & Ulf Büntgen

Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Ulf Büntgen

Department of Geography, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

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Esper, J., Torbenson, M. & Büntgen, U. 2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07512-y

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Received : 16 January 2024

Accepted : 02 May 2024

Published : 14 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07512-y

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