Climate scientists at the United Nations say it is either now or never to stop catastrophic temperature rises and a breakdown of the climate systems that depend on us. There are reports of bomb-like storms and hot, dry weather that paints a frightening picture of climate change. Is the weather getting worse?
The answer is no. Spencer Weart, a historian and retired director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, told Live Science that weather is getting worse.
Earth has a long and dramatic history of natural climate change. The period may have ended with a million-year rainstorm. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period plunged parts of the sky into cold darkness for years under dense clouds of ash and particles.
Our current appetite for fossil fuels is setting in motion a rapid swing that could have dire consequences for humanity, as major climatic swings are nothing new to our planet.
Has the Earth been this hot before?
Modern records show an unnatural global warming trend taking hold of Earth. Humans are sending heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Climate models suggest that this warming will affect weather in a variety of ways, making it hotter and colder, more extreme, and more chaotic. Dry and wet areas get different degrees of precipitation. Heavy snowfall can be caused by more moist atmosphere in a warming planet.
There have been hurricanes in the Caribbean and the U.S. in recent years, as well as hurricanes around the world.
We are not seeing an increase in the number of hurricanes, but the bad ones are getting more severe.
The strongest hurricanes in Category 5 have winds of at least 156 mph. The Saffir-Simpson scale only deals with wind and the damage it causes is the same as a Category 6 storm.
Weart noted that record-breaking weather events, such as the heatwave in Japan that killed more than 1,000 people, are likely to become more common. In a study published in the journal Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere, researchers found that the heatwave could not have happened without human-caused global warming. A study published in the journal Nature Communications found that heatwaves are increasing around the world.
Global warming could be causing colder snaps. Climate scientists are still debating a link between a warming polar region and more extreme winters in the Northern Hemisphere, despite a study published in the journal Science in 2021.
Live Science previously reported that climate change could cause the weather systems to be disrupted so much that Earth becomes a chaotic world. A study published in the preprint database arXiv found that if we don't reduce our emissions, humans will run the risk of Earth's temperature changing chaotically.
What are we doing to combat climate change so that we don't end up with more bad weather? The Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015, and the nations agreed to keep warming to below 2 degrees C. The UN Secretary-General said at the Economist Summit that the 1.5 degree goal was on life support and that we were sleepwalking to climate change.
According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, if we are to stay within 1.5 C of warming, world leaders need to ensure that global carbon dioxide emissions begin declining by 2025.
Weart said it was like we had become a main character in a science fiction movie.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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