climate change essay anecdote

By Victoria Seabook, climate reporter

"Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a now problem," Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said when she announced her team's latest annual assessment of countries' promises on cutting emissions. Talking about climate change in abstract terms like "net zero by 2050" and "keep 1.5 degrees alive" can make it "hard for us to relate," says neuroscientist Kris de Meyer from King's College London. But it is a "matter of justice" that the voices of those affected are heard, argues Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network (CAN), which represents environmental NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in UN climate talks like COP26 in Glasgow. She says: "It might seem like a distant problem to many and that is because it is often framed as an 'event' that will happen at mid-century or at the end of the century.

"But this is not how climate change works.

"The impacts we are experiencing now is a result of historical emissions that have already been locked in." Here, six people around the world share their experiences of global heating, and how it has changed them.

In 2018, Yurshell Rodríguez and 24 other young people filed a lawsuit against the Colombian government, arguing that failing to stop deforestation in the rainforest was incompatible with its Paris Agreement commitments. People used to ask why she, as an islander from Providencia in the Caribbean, was campaigning to protect the Colombian Amazon, roughly 1,000 miles away. She would tell them: "Saving the Amazon is a part of saving my own island. "All the ecosystems are connected. So if you harm somewhere, if you do something good somewhere, it ripples through the other parts." The prescience of that response was sadly crystallised last year when a Category 4 storm, Hurricane Iota, thundered through the Caribbean and Central America. Most people took refuge in the bathrooms, which tend to be built from concrete and cement rather than the wood of the rest of the house, she explains. She ran to her neighbour's house for safety, as his had two storeys and hers only one. "We were in their for hours," she tells Sky News, and afterwards "everything was gone".

In Providencia, a 17 km² hilly island home to 5,000 people, some 98% of the infrastructure was damaged.

It was the first year since records began that two hurricanes formed in the Atlantic in November, past the normal height of storm season. Warmer seas, driven by climate change, contributed to the strength of the hurricane. Since then, her family has been living in a tent. "It's like being like in a refugee camp," she says.

Yurshell is a Raizal, the indigenous population descended from settlers and enslaved Africans. "We have been living on our island for more than 400 years and we have lived so in harmony [with nature]... but things still are happening to us like hurricanes." It's frustrating, she says, because "we are not the bigger part of the problem that's causing it". CAN's Tasneem Essop says this is the "fundamental climate injustice". "Those living in poverty, suffering inequality, women, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, children, the elderly - all those who are generally marginalised or vulnerable... bear the brunt of climate impacts that they are least responsible for causing and are least able to recover or rebound."

Ken Donnell, a luthier from Greenville, California, says the devastating Dixie Fire, the largest in the state's history, taught him "the best lesson I ever got". And that's despite it burning everything he owned, including instruments he had inherited from his grandfather and his entire shop, Musicland. Even his getaway car, packed with his most important possessions to aid a swift escape from a fire, did not get away. For on a hot August day this summer, Ken was running an errand out of town, just when the Dixie Fire burned almost the entire historic mining town to the ground.

But, in his soft Texan accent, Ken explains he has "come to realise that that stuff began to own me more than I owned it". "And being free of it just means that I get to go have a new adventure in life, and I have my health and I have my sanity." The drought, combined with hot weather, strong winds, and exceptionally dry vegetational fuelled the fire, allowing it to become at least the second largest single wildfire in California's history. It burned 963,309 acres.

He says he was a happy person before the fire. "And why should I stop being a happy person after the fire?" But, he warns: "Please, wake up. It's going to happen to you soon, one way or another. "Water is going to become scarcer. Storms are going to become stronger."

The Dixie Fire started on 13 July. It was finally contained on 25 October.

Masudio Margaret is on her way to Glasgow to raise the voices of small-scale women farmers from Uganda. Her campaigning has taken her all over Africa but this will be her first time in the UK, to deliver her message to the world at COP26. Women are "the food producers, feeding millions of people, but badly affected" by climate change, she tells Sky News.

Both drought and flooding have hit her home in the Adjumani district of northwest Uganda in recent years, triggering hunger but also associated diseases like malaria. Crops and houses have been washed away by the floods, leaving families living in classrooms with nowhere else to go. "Women are the most affected" by climate change, she says, as the primary labour force on small-scale farms. "When the children cry of hunger, it's the women who hear their cry… when a woman is not healthy, food production is reduced because they are the major source of labour in the field."

Smallholder farmers are one of the most at-risk groups to climate change, along with river and coastal and urban poor communities, according to Nigel Topping, UK High Level Climate Action Champion for the COP26 climate talks. "You can't sugarcoat it," he says. But don't see this as "helpless people standing around waiting for help. There's amazing resourcefulness and resilience, and we need more solidarity". Margaret works with local groups to train farmers on the return to traditional farming methods that are more resistant to weather extremes. She uses organic fertiliser and pesticides and in the dry season mulches her garden so that it's more resilient. She is bringing back indigenous foods which are resilient to climate change and always available to ensure food security. As for what world leaders are doing, that's what she wants to hear from COP26. "To hear what best solution is derived to stop causes of climate change and how the impacts of climate change are going to be financed."

In January 2020, Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist in Canberra, Australia, found herself telling patients not to exercise. All her career she'd been telling patients how good it was for their heart, diabetes and mental health. But when the worst bushfire in living memory blanketed huge parts of the country in smoke, suddenly that changed. "We've never experienced bushfire smoke like we had over that summer in Australian history," she says. "It was beyond the imagination of our previous experience. It was something totally new." But where previous fires had burned for a day or so, this one blazed for months. Her photos show the same view from the hospital where she was working on a normal day and during the fire.

A staggering 1.8 million hectares burned in 'high-severity' fires during Australia's 'Black Summer'. The bushfires killed or displaced an estimated three billion animals, scorched rainforests and ruined 3,000 homes.

Climate change had driven record-breaking drought and prime conditions for fires. The blazes released 80% more carbon dioxide than Australia's normal annual fire and fossil fuel emissions. The smoke was "everywhere", says Dr Hunter. "It was as in all the buildings. There was no safe environment." It was even in the hospital, infiltrating ventilation systems and disrupting medical equipment. On New Year's Eve, the MRI machine began to struggle. In almost every patient, she began to notice a "thumbprint, if not a handprint" in their hospital admission from the smoke. Whether a fall, a broken leg, a skin infection or confused spell, "each one of those things was made statistically more likely by the unfolding environmental catastrophe outside," she says.

Tuki Rani left Ghormara, a 1.8 square mile island in the Indian Sundarbans, when she lost her home to rising sea levels. "All our possessions were washed away," says Tuki. She and her husband set up home on Sagar Island, the largest and most populated of the more than 100 islands in the Sundarbans. But now "Sagar Island has also started crumbling", she says.

Global heating has already increased global sea levels by 20cm on average, according to UN scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It expands water as well as melting ice. When it rains, the canals around Tuki's house swell. She shelters under the roof of a nearby school, because it is too dangerous to stay at home with her two daughters, she says. Her husband is a "zero hours" labourer, picking up whatever projects he can find. He moved to Hyderabad on the mainland, as the work on both islands had dried up, Tuki says. She sees him three or four times a year. "When I was young, I dreamt of having a prominent house and very happy family but the river has crushed my house as well as my dreams."

"We no longer hear birds in the trees and cicadas," says Rula Manti, and she no longer meets her neighbours in the streets of Varybombi, Attica, northeast of Athens. Many people have left the area since their houses burnt down this summer in Greece's devastating wildfires. "And many of them couldn't bear to live here anymore," she says. At 1.15pm on 3 August it was about 43C when the fire broke out, about 200 metres from the home she shares with her partner Sotiris Bardis. It wasn't that strong and there was no wind, so they thought it would quickly be put out. But the fire burned in her hometown for three days, taking the vegetable shop Sortiris runs in the main square.

On 4 August another fire broke out, which "destroyed what was left from the first wildfire", says Rula.

This was not the only wildfire Greece suffered this season amid its worst heatwave in decades. Though fires are a part of the ecosystem, climate breakdown is bringing hotter, drier weather, making fires burn more intensely and quickly and harder to extinguish. British firefighters were sent Greece to help battle the fires. Rula explains: "It was a big shock for all of us because we never thought that this wonderful forest would, literally, vanish. "It is very difficult to describe the emotions after the fire. "The route I took to get to Varybombi was in a dense green forest. "Now to come to my house I drive through a deserted area where you see only burnt trees, burnt houses, cars and no more green. Our everyday life changed from colourful to black and white within a few hours. "Of course, afterwards, we saw that we were in a way the lucky ones, because half of Attica was eventually burnt."

Reporting: Victoria Seabrook Additional reporting: Katerina Vittozzi Designers: Arianne Cantwell and Celt Iwan With thanks to: Oxfam, Climate Action Network Picture credits: Google Streetview

9 powerful stories about climate change

By Corinna Keefe — Contributing Writer

Climate change: two small words that represent a radical transformation of our planet, billions of data points, millions of climate scientists and campaigners, and a limitless number of stories from around the world. 

Climate change stories are the best tools we have to help people understand the climate emergency and take action — whether you have research to share, work for a non-profit, or shape government policy to reduce carbon emissions and fossil fuel use.

But we still face the barriers of misinformation, apathy, climate denial, and slow-moving responses. As the effects of climate change begin to be felt, engaging science communication has literally become a matter of life or death. When we tell climate change stories, we need to reach people on an intellectual and emotional level, using all the digital storytelling tricks at our disposal. 

In this piece, we celebrate some of the best climate change stories on the web. We look at what makes them work, and how you can tell stories about our changing climate that will make a difference. 

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Storytelling and climate change

Scientists, policy-makers, and campaigners have already learned that the bare facts are not enough. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate reports — which model rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide to limit warming below two degrees celsius — have been well reported. 

People can be shocked or scared by data — but they are rarely moved, inspired, or excited. 

But climate change stories (with data to back them up) can influence people towards climate action. Engaging feature stories with an emotional appeal and human interest can have real impact.

The vast majority of people these days are aware of global warming, often from seeing the impacts of climate change in their own lives — from heat waves to extreme weather events. They’re just not sure how to respond. When you tell a story about climate action, you offer a guide for people who want to help in the fight against climate change.

Science communication and climate change stories

We’ve known about the climate emergency for decades. But it’s taken some time for science communication and data journalism to catch up. 

A lot of climate research and data remains closed off to the public. It appears behind paywalls, written in complex academic language, and often presented as inaccessible scholarly publications. The science itself might be thrilling — but the communication leaves something to be desired. 

That approach is no longer good enough, for several reasons:

• Most scientific research is ultimately funded by the public. So it should be accessible to the public, too.
• Poor science communication slows down climate action, because people don’t understand the research or simply don’t hear about it. 
• We know that different people process information in different ways — whether they’re visual, aural, or even kinaesthetic learners. Visual storytelling and creative science comms are completely valid ways to present research. “Serious” doesn’t have to mean “Times New Roman, 12pt, black and white”.

When scientists and climate campaigners go the extra mile to tell climate change stories, they get results. Opening up data to the public, using images and video, and finding a human angle to research can all make a big difference.

In an article for The Conversation , communications expert Kamyar Razavi identified several key elements of effective climate change stories.

• Clear communication of the facts about global warming. Data storytelling is a key part of climate stories.
• An appeal to readers’ emotions, both positive and negative. Fear, grief, and anger are all appropriate responses to the climate emergency; but hope, determination, and wonder can be even more motivating. 
• Everyday protagonists that readers can recognise and relate to. Stories about local people taking action on local problems are often the most inspirational.
• Open and honest communication about the impacts of climate change and the challenges ahead. 

With those elements in mind, we’ve picked out 9 climate change stories which are examples of great science comms. They’re taken from news sites, NGOs, universities, and governments. Most importantly, they’re creative, memorable, emotional, and use all the features of digital storytelling to engage readers.

9 powerful climate change stories

Glasgow: the last best hope to fight climate change (BBC)

This article brought the COP26 climate conference into focus by looking at the climate crisis from the perspective of the conference’s host city: Glasgow. The story of this industrial powerhouse is also the story of how human activity has transformed the environment and the climate.

The feature is illustrated with photographs from throughout Glasgow’s history. As you scroll down, black-and-white images from the last century are replaced with colourful images of the city today. Close-ups of antique paintings and modern blueprints show how people have imagined Glasgow’s future over time. 

And, like the most effective climate change stories, the feature offers hope as well as a clear appraisal of the challenges ahead. 

Down under: the community most-exposed to sea-level rise is also one of the poorest (Stuff)

The opening paragraphs of this climate change feature read like a true-crime story. 

And according to some residents of Dunedin, that’s exactly what it is.

Catastrophic flooding in this New Zealand community is the final chapter in a long story of climate change, poor urban planning, and socio-economic deprivation. This is a disaster that didn’t have to happen, and many people share the responsibility.

The mechanics of flooding and sea-level rises can be complex to explain. This reporting uses animated map overlays and diagrams to show the science, matched with photographs and videos from Dunedin residents whose livelihoods have been impacted by the floods. It’s a powerful mix of data and experience that stays with the reader. 

Displaced by the climate (Sky News)

This extensive piece of climate reporting from Sky News focused on how global warming is forcing people to leave their homes, all over the world. 

It starts off on a global scale, with animated maps and charts that focus on data journalism. But then it zooms in on individual communities from Vanuatu to Boston. Each section is illustrated with timelines, photographs, and personal interviews that show the human toll behind the statistics. 

The piece ends with a section titled “What can be done?” This isn’t just passive reporting; this is climate storytelling as a call to action.

Climate stories: meet the people affected by extreme weather (WaterAid)

The title of this collection of climate change stories from WaterAid says it all. Instead of quoting facts and figures, they want you to meet the real people suffering the impacts of global warming, drought, and extreme weather. 

Big, eye-catching images are overlaid with animations and diagrams that show how landscapes are being lost to droughts or flooding. In a reversal of the technique used by Sky News, this climate feature starts with personal stories, and then moves on to statistics and infographics later in the piece. It’s the same mix of scientific data and individual experiences, just presented in a different way to reflect the different aims of the NGO. 

A growing toxic threat — made worse by climate change (NBC News)

Our next climate change story is a piece of investigative journalism from 2020, when scientists and campaigners were raising the alarm about the Trump administration’s approach to climate change in the US. 

At a first glance, the climate feature is laid out like a classic front-page news story. There’s lots of whitespace and a dramatic lede.

But it also mixes in elements of the latest moves in digital publishing. The complex reporting and in-depth data behind the piece is made visible through photographs, animations, and maps and charts which can be toggled to show different data sets.

All the information is there, but it’s been presented in visual, interactive ways that help the reader to process the story on their own terms. 

Meet the family on a mission to restore the desert eco-system (UNSW Sydney)

You can’t get more local than the story of a single family. This climate change story from the University of New South Wales highlights the efforts of two ecologists — and their small children — to reintroduce endangered native species to a degraded desert ecosystem. 

Their work is fascinating in itself. But this article makes it even more gripping by talking about the challenges around their tasks: isolation, accessing medical care, and even finding a playgroup for their kids.

By framing the piece as a 'slice of life' article, the rigorous science and hard work behind the reintroduction project is made accessible and exciting.

The people racing to replant Africa (Pioneers Post)

Many climate change stories focus on what’s happening on the Arctic and Antarctic poles. In this feature , Pioneers Post covers one of the most ambitious but least-known climate change stories: the Great Green Wall of Africa. 

The plan has been in motion for several decades. Governments, NGOs, scientists, and local communities are working together to replant a vast zone across the continent and hold back the tide of desertification. 

It’s a fascinating tale that mixes science, politics, and personal stories. And it’s been illustrated throughout with candid photos and portraits of the people who are responsible for growing the Wall.

What the Olympics could look like in 2048 (WWF)

So far, we’ve seen examples of data journalism, climate change storytelling, and investigative reports. But here’s something a little different: a dispatch from the future.

In this climate change story , the WWF took the Olympics — a cultural reference point that belongs to everyone, all over the world — and imagined how sporting events would look if the climate emergency goes unchecked. 

Glossy photos of pristine swimming pools and sports stadiums are suddenly choked with rubbish or covered by floodwaters. As readers scroll through the article, they see a horrifying glimpse of one potential future. Those images are backed by statistics and evidence from around the world. 

However, we know that just showing the worst side of the climate emergency isn’t always motivating. That’s why the piece ends with a note of hope: an invitation to sign a petition addressed to world leaders and start taking action.

9 things you can do about climate change (Imperial College London)

A lot of climate coverage focuses on the macro, such as the latest IPCC report, the Paris Agreement, or government climate policy. This brief climate feature from Imperial College London isn’t just local, it’s personal. It’s about what you, the reader, can do to reduce global warming. 

Sustainability tips range from leaving the car at home to investing in renewable energy sources, such as solar panels.

The piece goes straight for emotional appeal. It’s written in the second person, addressing readers as directly as possible. Each idea is illustrated with animations and supported with a range of links, so that you can get learning, donating, and campaigning right awa

Corinna Keefe is a freelance writer specialising in tech, heritage and education. Originally from the UK, she has lived and worked in 10 different countries.

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10 Example-Hooks for the Introduction to Climate Change College Essay

An essay is only as strong as its hook. If you can’t grab your reader’s attention right within the first few sentences, you won’t have it throughout the rest of the essay, either. Don’t bore your reader! Instead, use a captivating hook to ensnare them from the first few words.

A hook can be something that is intriguing, hilarious, or even shocking. The goal of a hook is to create a powerful emotional connection with the reader. As the writer, you have a few options. You might consider beginning with a series of questions, a challenging statement, a little-known fact, a quotation, or some fascinating background information. For an essay containing an introduction to climate change, consider a few of the following hooks.

Start with a Quote

Find out a famous person who has touched the discussed issue. Make your audience mull over his/her words as well as provide their own thoughts.

• Start with a quote : “Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.”-Bill Nye
• Start with a quote : “Humanity faces many threats, but none is greater than climate change. In damaging our climate, we are becoming the architects of our own destruction. We have the knowledge, the tools, and the money (to solve the crisis).”-Prince Charles, U.K.
• Start with a quote : “Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.”- James Hansen

Start with a Fact

Provide some interesting information about the particular issue you disclose. This will make your listeners and readers involved in the problem. Make sure the fact is on point and fresh that no one knows about.

• Start with a fact : “The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by two degrees Fahrenheit since the 1900s. This change is unrivaled by any others in recorded–or estimated–history.”
• Start with a fact : “2016 was the warmest year on record, with eight months setting record temperature highs around the globe.”

Start with a Question

Make your audience discuss the issue. This will help you not only make them interested in the problem but also present their own thoughts that might be also quite catchy to discuss.

• Start with a question : “What have you done lately to help prevent global warming?”
• Start with a question : “Think about how the weather has changed since you were a child. Has the weather gradually turned warmer? Colder? Perhaps you notice more snowfall or hotter summer temperatures. These are all caused directly by climate change and global warming.”
• Start with a question : “How does climate change affect you personally?”

Shock Your Audience

Tell something that will shock your audience. It will make them interested. But again, this has to be a real shock, not something that everyone is talking about for the last three years.

• Start with a shock : “Global sea levels have risen eight inches over the last century. In the last two decades alone, the rate of rise has nearly doubled. This is a direct cause of melting ice caps and increased global temperatures. If this rise continues, entire countries, such as Bangladesh, could be underwater.”
• Start with a shock : “If everyone in the world lives as Americans do, it would take five Earths to produce enough resources. Just five countries, including the United States, contribute to more than 50 percent of the world’s harmful CO2 emissions.”

What do all of these hooks have in common? They tell you just enough information to get you interested but want to learn more at the same time. It is often difficult to write a stellar hook until you have already–or nearly–finished writing your essay. After all, you often don’t know the direction your paper is going to take until it is completed. Many strong writers wait to write the hook last, as this helps guide the direction of the introduction. Consider drafting a few sample hooks and then choose the best. The best essay will be the one that involves revision and updating–keep trying new hooks until you find the perfect, most intriguing, hook of them all.

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Leave ‘em laughing instead of crying: Climate humor can break down barriers and find common ground

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Director, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado Boulder

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Climate change is not inherently funny. Typically, the messengers are serious scientists describing how rising greenhouse gas emissions are harming the planet on land and at sea , or assessing what role it played in the latest wildfire or hurricane .

Society may have reached a saturation point for such somber, gloomy and threatening science-centered discussions. This possibility is what inspires my recent work with colleague Beth Osnes to get messages out about climate change through comedy and humor.

I have studied and practiced climate communication for about 20 years. My new book, “ Creative (Climate) Communications ,” integrates social science and humanities research and practices to connect people more effectively through issues they care about. Rather than “dumbing down” science for the public, this is a “smartening up” approach that has been shown to bring people together around a highly divisive topic.

Why laugh about climate change?

Science is critically important to understanding the enormity of the climate challenge and how it connects with other problems like disasters, food security, local air quality and migration. But stories that emanate from scientific ways of knowing have failed to significantly engage and activate large audiences.

Largely gloomy approaches and interpretations typically stifle audiences rather than inspiring them to take action. For example, novelist Jonathan Franzen recently published an essay in The New Yorker titled “ What If We Stop Pretending? ” in which he asserted:

“The goal (of halting climate change) has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it.”

Social science and humanities research have shown that this kind of framing effectively disempowers readers who could be activated and moved by a smarter approach.

Comics took a different path when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report in 2018 warning that the world only had until about 2030 to take steps that could limit warming to manageable levels. Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” observed:

“You know the crazy people you see in the streets shouting that the world is ending? Turns out, they’re all actually climate scientists .”

On ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Kimmel commented:

“There’s always a silver lining. One planet’s calamity is another planet’s shop-portunity.”

He then cut to a going-out-of-business advertisement for Planet Earth that read:

“Everything must go! 50% of all nocturnal animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians … priced to sell before we live in hell. But you must act fast because planet Earth is over soon. And when it’s gone, it’s gone .”

It’s getting hot in here

Social science and humanities scholars have been examining new, potentially more effective ways to communicate about climate change. Consistently, as I describe in my book, research shows that emotional, tactile, visceral and experiential communication meets people where they are. These methods arouse action and engagement .

Scholars have examined how shows like “ Saturday Night Live ,” “ Last Week Tonight ,” “ Jimmy Kimmel Live ,” “ Full Frontal ” and “ The Daily Show ” use jokes to increase understanding and engagement. In one example, former Vice President Al Gore appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in 2017 and took turns with Colbert serving up climate change pickup lines over saucy slow-jam background music:

Gore: “Are you climate change? Because when I look at you, the world disappears.”

Colbert: “I’m like 97% of scientists, and I can’t deny … it’s getting hot in here.”

Colbert: “Is that an iceberg the size of Delaware breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf, or are you just happy to see me?”

Gore: “I hope you’re not powered by fossil fuels, because you’ve been running through my mind all day.”

Comedian Sarah Silverman took time during her 2018 Hulu show “ I Love You America ” to address the need for climate action. In her monologue, she focused on how climate change is driven “by the interests of a very small group and absurdly rich and powerful people.” She added:

“The disgusting irony of all of it is that the billionaires who have created this global atrocity are going to be the ones to survive it. They are going to be fine while we all cook to death in a planet-sized hot car.”

Breaching barriers and finding common ground

Research shows that in a time of deep polarization, comedy can lower defenses . It temporarily suspends social rules and connects people with ideas and new ways of thinking or acting.

Comedy exploits cracks in arguments. It wiggles in, pokes, prods and draws attention to the incongruous, hypocritical, false and pretentious. It can make the complex dimensions of climate change seem more accessible and its challenges seem more manageable.

Many disciplines can inform comedy, including theater, performance and media studies. With my colleagues Beth Osnes , Rebecca Safran and Phaedra Pezzullo at the University of Colorado, I co-direct the Inside the Greenhouse initiative, which uses insights from creative fields to develop effective climate communication strategies.

For four years we have directed “Stand Up for Climate Change,” a comedy project. We and our students write sketch comedy routines and perform them in front of live audiences on the Boulder campus. From those experiences, we have studied the content of the performances and how the performers and audience respond. Our work has found that humor provides effective pathways to greater awareness, learning, sharing of feelings, conversations and inspiration for performers and audiences alike.

A comic approach might seem to trivialize climate change, which has life-and-death implications for millions of people, especially the world’s poorest and most vulnerable residents. But a greater risk would be for people to stop talking about the problem entirely, and miss the chance to reimagine and actively engage in their collective futures.

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News • December 28, 2016

These Are the 10 Most Important Climate Stories of 2016

By Brian Kahn

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This year is likely to remembered as a turning point for climate change. It’s the year the impacts of rising carbon pollution became impossible to ignore. The world is overheating and vast swaths of the planet have suffered the consequences. At the same time, it’s also a year where world leaders crafted and agreed on a number of plans to try to turn the tide of carbon pollution and move toward a clean energy future. It’s clear 2016 was a year where planetary peril and human hope stood out in stark contrast. Here are the 10 most important climate milestones of the year.

The world struck an airline carbon pollution deal

The friendly skies got slightly friendlier. Air travel counts for about 7 percent of carbon emissions globally. That number will need to come down in the coming decades, and the International Civil Aviation Organization, the world’s governing body for airlines, put a plan in place to start that transition. The plan, which was signed off on by 191 countries, is focused on letting airlines buy credits that will help fund renewable energy projects to offset airplane emissions. It isn’t a perfect solution since it doesn’t directly reduce carbon pollution from air travel, but it’s a first step for an industry that will have to find novel, carbon-free ways to produce the fuel needed to fly you home for Christmas vacation.

An extremely potent greenhouse gas is also on its way out

Hydrofluorocarbons are the chemicals in your air conditioner that help keep you cool in the summer (and the food in your refrigerator cool year round). Ironically, they’re also a greenhouse gas that’s thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. Reducing them is critical to keep the planet from heating up much more and in October, international negotiators struck a deal to do phase them out. Countries still have to ratify the agreement — and it could face a major roadblock in the U.S. Senate — in order for it to take effect, but if approved, it will provide strong targets and a timetable to find replacement chemicals to keep you cool in a warming world.

July was the hottest month ever recorded. Then August tied it

The Arctic had a crazy heat wave this winter, but the planet as a whole really roasted through July and August. The summer is usually the warmest time of the year by dint of the fact that there’s more land in the northern hemisphere. But this summer was something else. July was the hottest month ever recorded, and it was followed by an August — usually a bit cooler than July — that was just as scorching. Those epically hot months helped set this year up for record heat (but more on that in a bit).

Arctic sea ice got weird. Really weird

The Arctic was probably the weirdest place on the planet this year. It had a record-low peak for sea ice in the winter and dwindled to its second-lowest extent on record. The Northwest Passage also opened in August, allowing a luxury cruise ship to pass through. Those milestones themselves are a disconcerting harbinger of a warming world, but November brought an even more bizarre event. Normally it’s a time when night blankets the region and temperatures generally plummet to allow the rapid growth of ice. But a veritable heat wave ratcheted temperatures 27°F above normal, hitting pause on ice growth and even causing ice loss for a few days. December has seen a similar warm spell that scientists have found would be virtually impossible if it wasn’t for climate change. The Arctic is the most rapidly warming region on the planet and 2016 served as a reminder that the region is being dramatically reshaped by that warming.

Divestment and clean energy investments each hit a record

Climate change is a huge, pressing economic issue as countries will have to rejigger their economies to run on renewables and not fossil fuels. Investors are attacking that switch at both ends, and 2016 stands out for the record pace at which they’re doing it. On the fossil fuel side, investors representing $5.2 trillion in assets have agreed to divest from fossil fuels. That includes massive financial firms, pension funds, cities and regional governments, and a host of wealthy individuals. Not bad for a movement that only got its start in 2011. On the flip side, a report showed that investors poured $288 billion into new renewable projects in 2015, also a record. That’s helping install 500,000 solar panels a day around the world and ensuring that 70 percent of all money invested into energy generation is going to renewables.

The Great Barrier Reef was decimated by warm waters

Coral has had a rough go of it around the world for the past three years . El Niño coupled with climate change has caused a massive coral bleaching event around the globe. Nowhere have the impacts been more stark than the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Up to 93 percent of the reef was rocked by coral bleaching as record-warm waters essentially boiled coral to death. A third of the reef — including some of the most protected areas — are now dead. Researchers found that climate change made the record heat up to 175 times more likely , offering a glimpse into the dystopian future reefs face. A 1.5°C rise in the global average temperature would essentially mean game over for corals around the world.

The world breached the 1.5°C climate threshold

So about 1.5°C. It’s a threshold that’s crucial for low-lying island states to continue their existence (to say nothing of Miami or other coastal cities). Passing it would mean essentially issuing a death sentence for these places, corals and Arctic sea ice and other places around the world. The globe got its first glimpse of 1.5°C in February and March this year . Climate change, riding on the back of a super El Niño, helped crank the global average temperature to 1.63°C above normal in February and 1.54°C above normal in March compared to pre-industrial times. While the abnormal heat has since subsided a bit, it’s likely that 1.5°C will be breached again and again in the coming years and could become normal by 2025-30.

Carbon dioxide hit 400 ppm. Permanently

Scientists measure carbon dioxide in parts per million and in 2016, and it hit a not-so-nice round number at the Earth’s marquee carbon observatory: 400 ppm. Despite the seasonal ebb and flow, there wasn’t a single week where carbon dioxide levels dipped below 400 ppm. It’s the first time on record that’s happened. Because carbon pollution continues to rise, the world isn’t going to see carbon dioxide dip below 400 ppm again in our lifetimes (and likely a lot longer than that). Carbon dioxide also breached the 400 ppm threshold in Antarctica , the first time that’s happened in human history (and likely a lot longer). And in a report that was published this year , the World Meteorological Organization revealed that carbon dioxide passed the 400 ppm milestone globally in 2015. So yeah, 400 ppm was kind of a thing this year.

The Paris Agreement got real

The world got together to deliver the Paris Agreement in 2015 , but the rubber really hit the road in 2016. Nearly 120 countries have ratified the agreement, putting it into force on Nov. 4. That includes big carbon pollution emitters like China, the U.S. and the European Union, and tiny ones like Mongolia, the Cook Islands and Sierra Leone. While there’s concern that President-elect Trump could pull the U.S. out of the agreement, signatories have stressed that they’ll go forward to meet their pledges regardless. With the rubber on the road, the next step is to get the wheels spinning.

It was the hottest year on record. Again

In case it wasn’t clear, the clearest sign of climate change is heat. And this year had lots of it. Hot Arctic, hot summer, hot water, and so it’s only fitting that the biggest climate milestone of the year (in a year that itself is a milestone) is record heat . Of course, that was the biggest story in 2014 . And 2015 for that matter . This year marks the third year in a row of record-setting heat, an unprecedented run. It’s a reminder that we’ve entered a new era, where our actions have changed the world we call home. We also have the ability to decide what comes next.

You May Also Like: The U.S. Has Been Overwhelmingly Hot This Year Warming is Sending Mountain Glaciers ‘Off a Cliff’ Temperatures Are Soaring at the North Pole . . . Again Obama Bars Arctic Drilling Ahead of Trump Inauguration

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The many stories of climate change

Over 40,000 delegates from 195 countries meet in Paris this week to legally commit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent global temperature increases above 2 degrees Celsius. Although the prevention of 2 degree warming may not be possible , such emissions reduction agreements are a crucial step to stop global warming above 3-5 degrees that could lead to massive displacement of coastal populations, droughts, and severe natural disasters. In the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, this meeting is both a "test" and a "great opportunity" for all nations to work together towards a globally unifying goal.

In honor of these talks, I hope to emphasize a few stories about how climate change impacts lives around the world and how each of us can contribute to the cause of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. From global leaders to individual citizens of the world, we all play a role.

1) The Drowning Nations

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, an archipelago of skinny islands is home to a nation fighting valiantly against the effects of global warming. Workers regularly repair walls made of construction scraps that have been erected in shallow waters to push back the tides now flooding coastal homes. Citizens are already thinking of emigration as the final solution.

This is the Marshall Islands, a nation perched only six feet above sea level. Recent changes in trade winds (which scientists are now studying to connect to climate change) have increased flooding, and predicted sea level rises due to climate change will drown most of the land in the coming decades. It should not be surprising, then, that the nation has sent a delegate to the Paris talks to seek reparations for the loss and damage caused by fossil fuel emissions from richer countries . The final agreement could require industrialized countries to give aid to smaller island nations that are especially vulnerable.

And it is not just the Marshall Islands. Over 15 percent of land in Bangladesh could be submerged by 2050 . And unlike the Marshall Islands, which holds military ties with the US that allows its citizens to emigrate and escape the encroaching waters, Bangladeshis do not have an easy route of retreat. Kiribati, another island nation in the Pacific, is the home of 100,000 people who will also seek refuge soon from rising waters .

For many of us, global warming is still a dream of what may come, but the Paris conference gives us a chance to recognize all those nations that face a climate crisis now. How will the world decide to help them?

2) The Eating Habits of Citizens

With so many world leaders meeting in Paris, it's easy to see global warming as a problem solved between nations. But many individual actions can transform into a large collective movement. In particular, our consumer power can change how companies sustainably produce products, offer fair wages to workers, or be transparent regarding business practices.

In this regard, changing what we choose to eat may be one of the most powerful forces to stop global warming. Professor Michelle Holdsworth from the University of Sheffield has joined the Paris conference to discuss this issue, highlighting her research 1,2 about the connection between a sustainable, plant-based diet and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. As she writes, livestock production is carbon-intensive, with significant emissions arising from the required feed, transportation and meat storage, and even flatulence. Research has consistently shown that plant-based diets reduce greenhouse gas emissions , which gives every person on the planet a way to help the cause.

Here are some of Holdsworth's tips to reduce your diet's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions:

eat lots of fruit and vegetables

limit red meat and eat more beans and nuts for protein

limit energy-dense processed foods like sweetened drinks

eat sustainably sourced fish

eat locally and seasonally

avoid food waste

drink tap water

3) The Women and the Mangroves

Along the coasts of Cambodia and Vietnam, representatives from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have taught local women how to plant mangrove trees in shallow waters and sustainably harvest crabs and shrimp from the surrounding area. The success of this program will not only help local communities but also have a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Why are mangrove trees so important to to combat global warming?

Straddling the boundary between water and land, mangrove trees have traditionally protected inland areas from flooding while also providing habitat for crabs, shrimp, and other wildlife. Coastal communities in many Asian countries rely on mangrove forests to support fishing industries. But these same forests are also an important soldier in the battle against global warming. Soil near mangrove roots store 3-5 times as much carbon as the same soil in tropical forests, making them a perfect natural trap to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Rampant economic development threatens this vital role as carbon sink. Entire forests have been cut down to develop golf courses or other infrastructure in the name of increasing the gross domestic product, removing as much as half of the world's mangroves over the past 50 years. And as more mangroves are destroyed, more carbon escapes into the atmosphere.

To combat these trends, international development groups like USAID have sought the help of women from local communities, who traditionally manage the fishing among the forests. With the help of aid groups, they have been replanting mangroves, learning sustainable fishing practices, aiding scientists in studying forest health, and becoming advocates for both their own economic longevity and the planet.

4) The Imprisoned Advocate

Six years ago, the leader of Maldives donned a scuba mask and descended into the water with a pen in his hand. Five meters below the surface, he and his cabinet signed an agreement to fight for the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions during an upcoming UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

This is just one example of the theatrics used by the former Maldives president, Mohamed Nasheed, to draw international attention to the fate of the island nation just off the coast of India. Similar to the Marshall Islands, the islands making up Maldives rest only several meters above sea level, and Nasheed had fought relentlessly for global recognition of the nation's inevitable fate due to sea level rises from global warming. During his tenure, he installed solar panels on government buildings and vowed to make Maldives carbon-neutral.

Unfortunately, Nasheed could not hold his presidential office long enough to continue this vision. In 2012, a military coup removed him from office and replaced him with a dictator now catering to bids for oil drilling among the nation's many shores.

Such a story shows that even in a nation like Maldives, which sees the proximal threat of global warming so clearly, human avarice can conquer the need for long-term economic and social change. But it is also a story of courage in the face of opposition. Nasheed continues to advocate for massive greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy from prison, a beacon of resilient hope that humans can overcome their own greed.

5) The Interconnected Planet

It is easy to focus only on the effects of climate change on human civilization. But the future of the entire planet is at stake, this unquantifiably complex network of animals and plants, soil and trees, wind and ice, which James Lovelock first described as the superorganism Gaia. What direction will Gaia take as temperatures rise?

A recent study 3 of the waters in the North Atlantic Ocean gives just one example of the unexpected results that arise when global warming perturbs such a complex system. As carbon dioxide loads the atmosphere and seeps into the ocean, the water is expected to acidify and make it more difficult for creatures like mollusks, corals, and plankton to create their calcium carbonate shells. But scientists have now discovered that coccolithophores, a type of calcifying plankton, have blossomed in the Atlantic over the last fifty years. After assessing more than 20 environmental factors that could affect this population boom, the researchers determined that increased CO 2 levels and temperature have both contributed to this growth, contradicting traditional thinking that acidification effects would lower growth.

Scientists are still exploring why acidification is not the dominant factor, but it appears that the plankton are more resilient to waters dense with carbon dioxide than previously thought, and that the increases in temperature could boost population growth enough to counteract any detrimental acidification effects.

This is but one recent example of how global warming can have unexpected trends, leading to phytoplankton blooms that can be seen from miles above the surface (see image above). We can do our best to prepare for the future we expect from current trends - moderate temperature increases, more severe natural disasters, and the like - but such unpredictability in the Gaia organism should make us that much more motivated to prevent further emissions as quickly as possible. In most other areas, policy is developed to prepare for the worst-case scenario; too many politicians do not hold to the same standard when it comes to climate change.

These stories highlight the complexity of the global warming crisis, creating problems as permanent as the drowning of entire islands and global changes as large as massive phytoplankton blooms. The solutions are equally diverse, from eating less meat to protecting mangrove forests in Asia. Political complexities hinder progress, as advocates for change are imprisoned in some cases and ridiculed in others. But delegates in Paris can set a precedent of global cooperation between nation leaders, citizens, and scientists around the world that will meet the challenge of solving this complex geopolitical reality. Global warming has arrived - now let us see how our civilization can respond.

Holdsworth M and Bricas N. "Impact of climate change on food consumption and nutrition." Climate Change and Agriculture Worldwide, 227-238, 2015.

Clonan A and Holdsworth M. "The challenges of eating a healthy and sustainable diet." The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 96(3) , 459-460, 2012.

Rivero-Calle S et al. " Multidecadal increase in North Atlantic coccolithophores and the potential role of rising CO2 ." Science, published online Nov 26, 2015.

Photo Credit

Photo of Marshall Islands beach courtesy of Stefan Lins via Flickr

Photo of fruit stand courtesy of Daderot via Wikipedia

Photo of mangroves courtesy of Boricuaeddie via Wikipedia

Photo of President Nasheed courtesy of Presidency Maldives via Flickr

Photo of phytoplankton bloom in Barents Sea courtesy of NASA Earth Observator y via Wikipedia

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Home / News & Events / What Makes Yale Climate Connections Stories Work?

Blog · January 23, 2024

What makes yale climate connections stories work, by cora hagens , natasha feshbach , mallika talwar and joshua low.

Key Takeaways for Impactful Climate Storytelling

• Tell personal stories that connect with people through shared values and emotions.
• Connect the dots for your listeners. Relate lived experiences to the reality of climate change. 
• Feature voices from diverse communities.
• Share stories of hope that emphasize the fact that every listener can make a difference.

In December 2022, Wired published an essay entitled “ Storytelling Will Save the Earth. ” The article emphasized the need to connect emotionally and harness the “power of motivation, imagination, and personal values, which drive the most powerful and permanent forms of social change.” Storytelling is the perfect tool for this, as it helps us make sense of the world around us, bringing more salience and emotion to the climate crisis than abstract statistics. While the power of storytelling may not be surprising, it might be hard to imagine how to produce effective climate stories. Yale Climate Connections (YCC), Yale’s climate news service, models effective climate communication through its radio program, podcast, website, and YouTube channel. YCC’s stories feature diverse people and organizations describing the impacts of climate change on the people, places, and things they care about, right here, right now. YCC stories also profile diverse people and organizations describing how they are taking action to reduce carbon emissions or prepare for climate impact – role modeling active citizenship for a national audience. 

Editor-in-Chief Sara Peach and her team use the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s (YPCCC) Six Americas segmentation to produce stories designed to resonate with specific audiences. Because YCC’s web content tends to be sought out by Alarmed or Concerned audiences, web articles are more in-depth and focus on solutions and resources. The 90-second radio show, hosted by Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of YPCCC, broadcasts a new story each weekday on over 700 English- and Spanish-language radio stations ( Interactive Map ) nationwide. The radio audience includes members from all of Global Warming’s Six Americas, so the stories feature diverse voices from every part of the country! 

So, what can climate communicators learn from YCC’s experience? Let’s take a closer look at a recent YCC story that exemplifies some of the structural patterns that make these stories so effective.

YCC Story: Fewer Ducks are Wintering in the Deep South

Mississippi birder Jeff Harris has noticed fewer ducks visiting his home state over the past three winters. Research supports Harris’ observation and has found that as winters warm, many species of migratory duck populations in the Southern and coastal U.S. are decreasing while the populations are increasing further north and at higher elevations. Let’s take a closer look at some of the specific elements that make this story work: 

Now that we’ve broken it down, let’s look at some broader takeaways from this story:

Featuring Personal Stories

YCC features diverse voices telling personal stories about the impacts of climate change on their communities, and sharing their efforts to reduce global warming. Research has shown that personal stories are particularly powerful because they bridge the psychological distance of climate impacts. To many people, climate change seems distant in time and space with scattered effects, which undermines a sense of urgency. Personal stories, especially when told by individuals themselves, help us recognize the immediacy of the climate crisis and its impacts, and increase our empathetic response to such events. Some other recent YCC episodes have featured a pastor from North Carolina preparing his congregation for climate change , a veterinarian advocating for greater heat protection for racehorses , a new video game called “Highwater” that immerses players in a world ravaged by climate change , and a school in New Mexico helping its students recover from wildfire trauma .

In the story “Fewer Ducks are Wintering in the Deep South,” YCC relates the personal story of Jeff Harris, a man from Mississippi who enjoys birding and has observed the dwindling duck population. His testimony about his love for observing ducks and his dismay at their gradual disappearance makes this story tangible for the listener. We can tell that the dwindling duck numbers are already having an impact on Jeff Harris’ life, and presumably on the lives of many other people in the deep South.

Rooted in Climate Science

While highly personal, YCC’s stories are always evidence-based. Many stories illustrate the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening or report recent research from the enormous field of climate science, impacts, and solutions. 

Critically, YPCCC and George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) (GMU 4C) ‘s most recent Climate Change in the American Mind survey found that only a third of American adults hear about climate change at least once a week in the news. Many media services report on extreme weather events, but many fail to connect those events to the changing climate. YCC, however, uses a “climate frame” to talk about extreme events, explicitly linking them to climate change, thereby increasing the salience of climate change in the media and the American mind. Further, YCC stories help audiences realize that climate change is about more than just extreme weather –it is connected to almost every aspect of our lives, from public health, food and water, the economy, and national security, to the creative arts, religious and moral values, and much, much more. In “Fewer Ducks are Wintering in the Deep South”, YCC incorporates research that supports Jeff Harris’ observations. By citing this research, the story succeeds in connecting Harris’ personal story to larger climate trends, thereby emphasizing how climate change is affecting the daily lives of everyday Americans. 

Harris’ story is only one of thousands broadcast by YCC over the years. Here are some additional elements of effective storytelling that are commonly found in YCC stories:

Featuring Voices from Diverse Communities  

Climate Connections’ radio program helps listeners “connect the dots” between climate change and events happening to real, relatable people all across America, which helps to frame climate change as a global, national, and local issue. The most recent Climat e Change in the American Mind survey found that while 57% of Americans agreed that global warming was already harming people in the U.S., and nearly 70% believed that it would harm people in developing countries, only 47% of Americans thought that climate change would personally affect them. YCC’s stories communicate that climate change is already having effects all around us, even in nearby communities. While it’s crucial that we care about how climate change is severely impacting communities worldwide, seeing others similar to us being affected by climate change is particularly effective at minimizing the psychological distance of climate change and increasing willingness to take action. 

A YPCCC study conducted in 2021 found that YCC radio program s featuring Republicans and conservatives talking about their concerns about climate change or the pro-climate actions they are taking were able to increase conservatives’ perception of how many Republicans are worried about climate change. Seven of the twelve programs tested in the study produced this effect, demonstrating that it was effective in shifting their perception of Republican social norms about climate change. While podcast listeners and website visitors are more likely to be Alarmed and Concerned voters, YCC’s radio programs reach a more diverse audience, including many conservatives. Featuring voices from all over the country and from all over the political spectrum makes climate change a more accessible and relatable topic to these listeners. 

Many YCC radio programs also feature the voices and stories of diverse people across race, ethnicity, age, gender, socio-economic class, region of the country, and profession, helping listeners understand that climate change affects everyone, and especially those who have contributed least to the problem, but are being hit first and worst by the impacts.

Centering Hope and Optimism

Yale Climate Connections’ programs “confront reality and share stories of hope.” While they tell difficult truths about the way that our world is already changing as a result of climate change, they also emphasize hope by profiling community changemakers, promoting innovative solutions, and helping each listener understand their ability to help create change. 

One recent episode about Phoenix residents battling urban heat features a local initiative, the Phoenix Revitalization Corporation, which partnered with the Nature Conservancy to create the Urban Heat Leadership Academy. The five-month online program has already been completed by about 100 residents, and teaches participants how to protect their communities from the impacts of urban heat. By employing a problem-solution narrative structure, this story makes people aware of a challenging reality but inspires them that communities are taking action and finding solutions. Stories like this inform, reassure, and inspire listeners, and show them that their actions, no matter how small, can have a positive impact. 

Boosting accessibility with succinct stories

YCC has made a strategic choice in the format and length of its media: a national radio program of 90-second stories. Radio reaches all of the Six Americas, whereas climate-related online news is rarely sought out by the Doubtful and Dismissive. Further, the YCC radio audience includes a high concentration of opinion leaders, including business leaders, influential civic and community activists, and early adopters. 

Other notable radio programs that talk about climate change are often targeted towards educated, Alarmed listeners, and run in hour-long episodes. Although brief, the 90-second story is well-suited to maintain listener attention while still efficiently communicating the most crucial aspects of each topic. In recent years, the trend toward short-form social media posts has forced other media creators to condense their own content to fit the attention spans and expectations of the modern-day listener. The effect this has on the efficacy of YCC’s programs is a seemingly positive one: their stories must be succinct, but that makes them accessible and engaging for many listeners across the Six Americas. 

Learn more about Climate Connections and access their archived episodes on their website: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/

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The Climate Stories Our World Needs Now

S o often, articles and essays such as this begin with a gathering of unnerving statistics. Most of us don’t need those anymore: changes brought about by the climate crisis are becoming more tangible with the passing of each year. We smell it in the smoke-tinged air . We feel it in the seasons gone askew.

We exist in a place where all the problems of the universe are present. And the problems we have today really can seem too great to surmount. Too vast for any of us to do anything about. But that’s just it. We think only of the inadequacy of what we alone can do. This is partly because, over the past several generations, we’ve been taught to think of ourselves as individuals—pitted against one another to take what we can, while we can.

A poll conducted by Yale and George Mason University researchers in December 2022 found that nearly 70% of Americans were worried about climate change, and 35% described themselves as “angry” about it. But if we channel our anger into the decision to pursue transformational change, it can infuse us with meaning and possibility. Shifting toward the realization that we—having invented all of the ways we go about modern life—can change those systems, we arguably make a sustainable future more likely. Conversely, the opposite is true. If we believe staving off catastrophe is futile, that belief infuses our thinking, paralyzing our decisions. In other words, if we think we can’t, or think we can, we are right.

And we can, because alongside all the problems that exist only here on earth, there also sit, conveniently, all the solutions we need. While so many of us argue about whose version of the climate story is “right,” others are just quietly problem-solving the myriad issues we face in practical terms, one by one.

There is a scene in the film 1917 in which a soldier on a solitary, highly classified mission gets a lift in a truck with a group of weary fellow soldiers. Their truck gets stuck in the mud after a few miles. The exhausted soldiers in the vehicle are resigned to this fate and seemingly indifferent to their new circumstances. But there is a desperate, pleading urgency in the eyes of the soldier on the mission. As a result, something changes: grasping the importance of the moment, despite not knowing the details, the tired troops suddenly pitch in with everything they have to free the truck. And they succeed.

Right now, when it comes to real climate action, the majority of us are stuck in the mud. We are the soldiers beaten weary by the chaos of our lives, with no room to fit the massiveness of a world-size problem. We feel left out or apathetic because we don’t see where we fit into any “climate community,” or don’t know what we could realistically do as an individual to make a difference . We worry that any necessary changes in behavior would involve a sacrifice, or that we’d lose face by betraying one tribe to go to the “other side.” These problems require story-based solutions.

This moment in history could be the moment when we flick the switch to change tracks—a moment when those with the privilege and agency to do so decide that we’re going to create a new story for today: a story of possibility, opportunity, hope, empathy, and connection. A story that includes everyone. A story in which now is a turning point.

There are hundreds, thousands, millions of brave individuals, communities, companies, and activists already shaping a regenerative future . Getting out of the way of their own egos. Perhaps you are one of them! These are the people, like the soldier on that mission, with the glint in their eyes and the most seductive calls to action—because they’re already taking it.

The results of their courageous efforts are palpable. Despite the many headlines of doom, 2023 has been an astounding year for progress on climate solutions. The inexorable, exponential shift from fossil-fueled power to renewable power has passed a positive tipping point. Same goes for the shift from internal-combustion engines to electric vehicles . Both are epoch-defining success stories for human and planetary health. Solutions exist all around us.

What the world needs is a collective agreed-upon urgency that celebrates our capacity to collaborate. With this comes renewed purpose.

If we root our despair in climate change, then we must root our hopes in its solutions. It’s time to intentionally put our efforts into creating and sharing stories of what is possible. Stories that bring out the most extraordinary aspects of humanity: compassion, kindness, ingenuity, and creativity. These are the stories we can choose to tell. And we must choose to tell them together.

Rivett-Carnac, a member of the TIME CO2 Advisory Council, is an environmental strategist and podcaster. Jeffers is an artist and writer

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Essay on Climate Change

Climate Change Essay - The globe is growing increasingly sensitive to climate change. It is currently a serious worldwide concern. The term "Climate Change" describes changes to the earth's climate. It explains the atmospheric changes that have occurred across time, spanning from decades to millions of years. Here are some sample essays on climate change.

100 Words Essay on Climate Change

200 words essay on climate change, 500 words essay on climate change.

The climatic conditions on Earth are changing due to climate change. Several internal and external variables, such as solar radiation, variations in the Earth's orbit, volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics, etc., are to blame for this.

There are strategies for climate change reduction. If not implemented, the weather might get worse, there might be water scarcity, there could be lower agricultural output, and it might affect people's ability to make a living. In order to breathe clean air and drink pure water, you must concentrate on limiting human activity. These are the simple measures that may be taken to safeguard the environment and its resources.

The climate of the Earth has changed significantly over time. While some of these changes were brought on by natural events like volcanic eruptions, floods, forest fires, etc., many of the changes were brought on by human activity. The burning of fossil fuels, domesticating livestock, and other human activities produce a significant quantity of greenhouse gases. This results in an increase of greenhouse effect and global warming which are the major causes for climate change.

Reasons of Climate Change

Some of the reasons of climate change are:

Deforestation

Excessive use of fossil fuels

Water and soil pollution

Plastic and other non biodegradable waste

Wildlife and nature extinction

Consequences of Climate Change

All kinds of life on earth will be affected by climate change if it continues to change at the same pace. The earth's temperature will increase, the monsoon patterns will shift, the sea level will rise, and there will be more frequent storms, volcano eruptions, and other natural calamities. The earth's biological and ecological equilibrium will be disturbed. Humans won't be able to access clean water or air to breathe when the environment becomes contaminated. The end of life on this earth is imminent. To reduce the issue of climate change, we need to bring social awareness along with strict measures to protect and preserve the natural environment.

A shift in the world's climatic pattern is referred to as climate change. Over the centuries, the climate pattern of our planet has undergone modifications. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has significantly grown.

When Did Climate Change Begin

It is possible to see signs of climate change as early as the beginning of the industrial revolution. The pace at which the manufacturers produced things on a large scale required a significant amount of raw materials. Since the raw materials being transformed into finished products now have such huge potential for profit, these business models have spread quickly over the world. Hazardous substances and chemicals build up in the environment as a result of company emissions and waste disposal.

Although climate change is a natural occurrence, it is evident that human activity is turning into the primary cause of the current climate change situation. The major cause is the growing population. Natural resources are utilised more and more as a result of the population's fast growth placing a heavy burden on the available resources. Over time, as more and more products and services are created, pollution will eventually increase.

Causes of Climate Change

There are a number of factors that have contributed towards weather change in the past and continue to do so. Let us look at a few:

Solar Radiation |The climate of earth is determined by how quickly the sun's energy is absorbed and distributed throughout space. This energy is transmitted throughout the world by the winds, ocean currents etc which affects the climatic conditions of the world. Changes in solar intensity have an effect on the world's climate.

Deforestation | The atmosphere's carbon dioxide is stored by trees. As a result of their destruction, carbon dioxide builds up more quickly since there are no trees to absorb it. Additionally, trees release the carbon they stored when we burn them.

Agriculture | Many kinds of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere by growing crops and raising livestock. Animals, for instance, create methane, a greenhouse gas that is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The nitrous oxide used in fertilisers is roughly 300 times more strong than carbon dioxide.

How to Prevent Climate Change

We need to look out for drastic steps to stop climate change since it is affecting the resources and life on our planet. We can stop climate change if the right solutions are put in place. Here are some strategies for reducing climate change:

Raising public awareness of climate change

Prohibiting tree-cutting and deforestation.

Ensure the surroundings are clean.

Refrain from using chemical fertilisers.

Water and other natural resource waste should be reduced.

Protect the animals and plants.

Purchase energy-efficient goods and equipment.

Increase the number of trees in the neighbourhood and its surroundings.

Follow the law and safeguard the environment's resources.

Reduce the amount of energy you use.

During the last few decades especially, climate change has grown to be of concern. Global concern has been raised over changes in the Earth's climatic pattern. The causes of climate change are numerous, as well as the effects of it and it is our responsibility as inhabitants of this planet to look after its well being and leave it in a better condition for future generations.

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December 27, 2023

The Most Important Climate Stories of 2023 Aren’t All Bad News

In 2023 climate news was a mixed bag: we saw unrelenting heat but also glimmers of hope of progress toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions

By Andrea Thompson

A person rides a bicycle as heat waves shimmer, causing visual distortion, as people walk in “the Zone,” Phoenix, Ariz.’s largest homeless encampment, amid the city’s worst heat wave on record on July 25, 2023.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

To say the year in climate has been a mixed bag is an understatement. There have been glimmers of hope alongside stark reminders of the peril we all face if we don’t quickly slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Early in the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the final installment of its Sixth Assessment Report, which was, as United Nations secretary-general António Guterres put it, “a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb .” As 2023 came to a close, there was some encouraging, if modest, movement forward on international and U.S. climate action. But this will also be the hottest year on record, driving home how inadequate that action has been to date.

Here, Scientific American rounds up this year’s biggest climate stories.

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If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

“Gobsmackingly Bananas” Heat

Record-shattering extreme heat was a constant in the news this year. There were numerous record-breaking heat waves around the world, from the U.S. Southwest to Europe to China. There were even summerlike temperature during winter in South America . Researchers concluded several heat waves were made many times more likely by climate change—some would have even been “virtually impossible” without global warming . Extreme heat is particularly dangerous for the very old, the very young and low-income communities that may not have access to air-conditioning. In some places, such as Europe, punishing summer heat stretched hospital capacity to COVID-era levels.

Every month from June to November was the hottest such month on record. Even more stunning, July was the hottest month ever recorded on the planet—and likely the hottest in at least 120,000 years—by a wide margin of 0.2 degree Celsius (about 0.4 degree Fahrenheit). And September was the most anomalously warm month , measuring about 0.5 degree C (0.9 degree F) hotter than the previous hottest September in 2020. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), climate scientist Zeke Hausfather called that record “ absolutely gobsmackingly bananas .”

Though a burgeoning El Niño , part of a natural climate cycle, has contributed a little heat to the planet, the exceptional global temperatures in 2023 are largely driven by the 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) of warming since preindustrial times. This year should serve as a warning of the future we face if we don’t take rapid, ambitious action to cut emissions generated by burning fossil fuels. “This is what the world looks like when it’s 1.5 degrees [C] hotter in a year, and it’s terrible,” climate scientist Kate Marvel told Scientific American .

Success or a COP-Out?

The international climate summit that convenes every year to hash out how the world will address the climate crisis is always subject to lofty goals but frequently ends with little concrete accomplishment. In November this year’s event—the 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP28—took some steps toward action to prevent warming of more than 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels yet still left many climate experts and environmental advocates cold.

The massive conference (with some 100,000 attendees) opened with the approval of a fund to compensate communities for unavoidable climate change —referred to as a “loss and damage” fund in U.N. parlance—something many developing countries have been advocating for years. These countries shoulder a disproportionate burden of climate change’s effects despite having contributed very little to global warming . Several countries, including COP28’s controversial host nation, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), pledged tens of millions of dollars to the fund. The U.S. pledged only $17.5 million. Though welcome, the funding is well short of what is needed —something it has in common with most other funding slated to help countries adapt to climate change and develop renewable energy sources.

Activists protest against fossil fuels on day 10 of the COP28 climate conference in Dubai on December 10, 2023. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The nonbinding deal that emerged from the conference included historic language on “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” the first time those fuels were explicitly singled out. Previous deals discussed reducing emissions but not how those reductions should come about, which left the door open for participants to continue to burn fossil fuels and either capture the emitted carbon (a technology that is not yet fully developed to run at scale) or offset the emissions with sometimes dubious carbon credit schemes.

While the new agreement acknowledged the need to stop burning coal, oil and gas, it still sanctioned the use of those fuels during the transition to clean energy and was gaveled in before some countries who did not fully support the text could enter the room. And the language stands in contrast to the billions of dollars that countries such as the UAE, the U.S. and China have slated to develop further fossil fuel resources .

Insurance Underwater

Homeowners and businesses often pay for insurance policies so that they can be financially protected in the event of disaster, whether it’s a tornado or inundation by muck-filled floodwaters . But this year it became very clear that climate change is catching up with the insurance industry .

Climate change is exacerbating many natural hazards, from flood-causing extreme downpours to damaging thunderstorms to devastating wildfires . The onslaught of such disasters in recent years has left insurers in California, Florida and Louisiana with huge losses and several bankruptcies. Some insurance companies have said they will not sell or renew policies in California and Florida because of high risks from extreme events. Other insurers have raised their premiums, which can make the policies unaffordable for some people. This year the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced a plan to require 213 large insurers to provide information on what policies they sell and where so that the government can glean if particularly vulnerable communities are underinsured.

Without private insurance, more people will rely on public insurance programs or postdisaster funds, which don’t always have adequately robust coffers. In early 2023 Florida’s public insurer warned earlier that Hurricane Ian had “significantly depleted” its reserves, which might mean it will have to increase fees for policyholders And as of that time, a state-run plan in California had a $332-million deficit. Additionally, postdisaster funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are limited in scope and subject to budget battles in Congress .

Such developments in the insurance industry this year—which set a record for the number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. —could be a harbinger of the physical and financial risks that lie ahead.

Biden’s Ambition

In 2023 the Biden administration continued to plug away on rulemaking, executive action and international diplomacy to help reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (which were projected to fall by 3 percent this year ). Its efforts only mark a beginning, and they are somewhat counteracted by practices such as continuing to hold auctions for leases to develop fossil fuels. But nevertheless, they are by far the most ambitious climate actions the country has ever taken.

At the COP28 climate meeting, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its finalized rule to significantly cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, in part by addressing leaks in pipelines and other infrastructure. For the first time ever, such rules cover facilities built before 2015.

And the U.S.’s frosty relations with China thawed a bit, at least on the climate front, with an agreement between the world’s two largest emitters to grow renewable energy and develop carbon capture technologies.

The administration also expanded environmental justice protections and authorized the creation of an American Climate Corps , which, following in the footsteps of the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps, will hire thousands of young people to work on wind and solar energy projects, make homes more energy-efficient and restore ecosystems.

The durability of this progress made under Biden will depend in large part on how the 2024 election shakes out because Republican candidates have vowed to try to undo many of his efforts. But if all goes right, the country could still meet his goal of reducing U.S. emission by half .

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Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.

"My message is that we'll be watching you.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

'This Is All Wrong,' Greta Thunberg Tells World Leaders At U.N. Climate Session

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

"Thank you."

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the people who have contributed the least to the climate emergency are suffering most. Photo: Watipaso Kaliwo/Oxfam

Climate change isn't a looming crisis — it's a destructive force affecting millions of lives right now. And the people who have contributed the least to the climate emergency are suffering most.

Life is already a struggle for poor communities. But the climate crisis is making things so much harder. Droughts and floods are becoming increasingly frequent, while growing seasons for crops are more and more unpredictable. It means millions of people are going hungry.

People living in poverty are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change for many reasons. They're often forced to live in makeshift homes, on land prone to flooding, storms and landslides. Making a living is hard – so few will have insurance or savings to fall back on in an emergency. And when disasters strike, poor diet, sanitation and health care mean that diseases spread rapidly.

These activities and real-life stories from Malawi support learners aged 9 to 14 to learn and think about the human impact of climate change.

• Use an agreement line to consider and discuss ideas and opinions about climate change (p.2).
• Use stories and role play to find out how some communities in Malawi are being affected by the climate crisis (p.3).
• Play a vulnerability game to understand that climate change doesn’t affect everyone equally and poor communities are impacted the most (p.4).
• Make a wristband to show solidarity with those most impacted by the climate emergency (p.5).

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What is the Story With Climate Change?

by Andrew Jorgensen

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Climate refers to long-term weather and related natural events, including rainfall and storms. Over the billions of years of Earth’s existence, climate has changed significantly.

It is affected by the amount of energy arriving from the sun, the path of Earth around the sun, and the composition of the atmosphere.

Although the first two factors have changed over geological time, they have been quite constant in recent years. What has not been constant, however, is the composition of the atmosphere.

If we had no atmosphere, the average temperature of Earth would be near that of freezing water, 32 °F (0 °C). Fortunately, the atmosphere contains greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as CO 2 .

These gases absorb some of the sun’s energy and keep that energy from escaping into space. This Greenhouse Effect acts like a “blanket” to warm Earth to an average of about 55 °F (13 °C).

Recently, however, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has changed substantially. The concentration of CO 2 has increased by approximately 40% in the past 100 years to the highest level in more than 1 million years.

This creates an Enhanced Greenhouse Effect, which acts like a second “blanket” and causes an increase in the average temperatures of the oceans and land.

Effects of Climate Change

This increase in the amount of CO 2 has led to an increase in the Earth’s temperature by about 2 °F (1.1 °C). This may not sound like much, but the change has upset the balance that existed. For example, the higher temperature of the oceans has caused hurricanes to have more energy, which produces stronger and more destructive storms.

Higher temperatures mean that more water evaporates from soil, which increases drought conditions. The consequences of drought include a reduction in crop production and an increase in the number and intensity of forest fires.

Because more water is evaporated from a warmer Earth, the atmosphere holds more water. When it rains, the amount of rain is greater. This is another instance of upsetting the balance.

Consider a house plant that does well with watering once per week, but if you increase to twice per week, you may kill the plant or at least cause it to be stressed.

The increased temperature also affects crop growth. Plants develop based on the temperatures of their particular locations. When the temperature changes, the existing types of plants may have reduced productivity.

A critical change due to the warming Earth is the increased melting of glaciers and ice. This has led to rising sea levels, which could have major consequences for the hundreds of millions of people who live on or near the coasts.

Ice also has the advantage of reflecting sunlight into space. With less ice, less solar energy is reflected.

Another factor contributing to the problem of climate change is that a small amount of carbon dioxide dissolves in water.

The increased concentration of CO 2 in the atmosphere causes more to be dissolved in the oceans. This change in the oceans’ chemistry is harmful to some living creatures such as coral.

Causes of Climate Change

For more than 150 years, humans have removed fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—from Earth and burned them to produce energy. Unfortunately, these substances were created from the fossils of living plants and animals and hidden from the atmosphere for millions of years.

When a fossil fuel is burned, it adds carbon that has been out of the system for eons. This increase in atmospheric CO 2 is the primary cause of climate change, though there are other GHGs, such as methane (CH 4 ). In 2022, the release of CO 2 by human activity increased by an estimate of 1% to a new record high amount of CO 2  emissions.

Questions on Climate Change

A number of years ago some scientists thought that the change in climate was due to nonhuman factors, such as the amount of energy coming from the sun.

At present, however, the role of burning fossil fuel by humans has been shown to be the primary cause of climate change to a high degree of certainty.

The true story of climate change is clear, what we do about it is open for discussion. Two things are certain, one is that all of us has a part to play, and the other is we must all take action. 

Andrew Jorgensen , Ph.D., is an associate professor emeritus at the University of Toledo, Ohio

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How did we get here the roots and impacts of the climate crisis.

People’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels and the cutting down of carbon-storing forests have transformed global climate.

For more than a century, researchers have honed their methods for measuring the impacts of human actions on Earth's atmosphere.

Sam Falconer

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By Alexandra Witze

March 10, 2022 at 11:00 am

Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver, Portland and Seattle baked in record temperatures that killed hundreds of people. On June 29, Lytton, a village in British Columbia, set an all-time heat record for Canada, at 121° Fahrenheit (49.6° Celsius); the next day, the village was incinerated by a wildfire.

Within a week, an international group of scientists had analyzed this extreme heat and concluded it would have been virtually impossible without climate change caused by humans. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900. The reason: People are loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and from cutting down forests.

To celebrate our 100th anniversary, we’re highlighting some of the biggest advances in science over the last century. To see more from the series, visit Century of Science .

A little over 1 degree of warming may not sound like a lot. But it has already been enough to fundamentally transform how energy flows around the planet. The pace of change is accelerating, and the consequences are everywhere. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting .

The roots of understanding this climate emergency trace back more than a century and a half. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began the detailed measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide that would prove how much carbon is pouring from human activities. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers started developing comprehensive computer models that now illuminate the severity of the changes ahead.

Today we know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. The emissions that people have been putting into the air for centuries — the emissions that made long-distance travel, economic growth and our material lives possible — have put us squarely on a warming trajectory . Only drastic cuts in carbon emissions, backed by collective global will, can make a significant difference.

“What’s happening to the planet is not routine,” says Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “We’re in a planetary crisis.”

Setting the stage

One day in the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and a women’s rights activist living in upstate New York, put two glass jars in sunlight. One contained regular air — a mix of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases including carbon dioxide — while the other contained just carbon dioxide. Both had thermometers in them. As the sun’s rays beat down, Foote observed that the jar of CO 2 alone heated up more quickly, and was slower to cool down, than the one containing plain air.

The results prompted Foote to muse on the relationship between CO 2 , the planet and heat. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in an 1856 paper summarizing her findings .

Three years later, working independently and apparently unaware of Foote’s discovery, Irish physicist John Tyndall showed the same basic idea in more detail. With a set of pipes and devices to study the transmission of heat, he found that CO 2 gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate.

Today Tyndall is widely credited with the discovery of how what we now call greenhouse gases heat the planet, earning him a prominent place in the history of climate science. Foote faded into relative obscurity — partly because of her gender, partly because her measurements were less sensitive. Yet their findings helped kick off broader scientific exploration of how the composition of gases in Earth’s atmosphere affects global temperatures.

Heat-trapping gases 

In 1859, John Tyndall used this apparatus to study how various gases trap heat. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with gas and measured the resulting temperature changes. Carbon dioxide and water vapor, he showed, absorb more heat than air does.

Carbon floods in

Humans began substantially affecting the atmosphere around the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain. Factories burned tons of coal; fueled by fossil fuels, the steam engine revolutionized transportation and other industries. Since then, fossil fuels including oil and natural gas have been harnessed to drive a global economy. All these activities belch gases into the air.

Yet Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius wasn’t worried about the Industrial Revolution when he began thinking in the late 1800s about changes in atmospheric CO 2 levels. He was instead curious about ice ages — including whether a decrease in volcanic eruptions, which can put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, would lead to a future ice age. Bored and lonely in the wake of a divorce, Arrhenius set himself to months of laborious calculations involving moisture and heat transport in the atmosphere at different zones of latitude. In 1896, he reported that halving the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere could indeed bring about an ice age — and that doubling CO 2 would raise global temperatures by around 5 to 6 degrees C.

It was a remarkably prescient finding for work that, out of necessity, had simplified Earth’s complex climate system down to just a few variables. But Arrhenius’ findings didn’t gain much traction with other scientists at the time. The climate system seemed too large, complex and inert to change in any meaningful way on a timescale that would be relevant to human society. Geologic evidence showed, for instance, that ice ages took thousands of years to start and end. What was there to worry about?

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One researcher, though, thought the idea was worth pursuing. Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, had tallied weather records over time, obsessively enough to determine that average temperatures were increasing at 147 weather stations around the globe. In a 1938 paper in a Royal Meteorological Society journal, he linked this temperature rise to the burning of fossil fuels . Callendar estimated that fossil fuel burning had put around 150 billion metric tons of CO 2 into the atmosphere since the late 19th century.

Like many of his day, Callendar didn’t see global warming as a problem. Extra CO 2 would surely stimulate plants to grow and allow crops to be farmed in new regions. “In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely,” he wrote. But his work revived discussions tracing back to Tyndall and Arrhenius about how the planetary system responds to changing levels of gases in the atmosphere. And it began steering the conversation toward how human activities might drive those changes.

When World War II broke out the following year, the global conflict redrew the landscape for scientific research. Hugely important wartime technologies, such as radar and the atomic bomb, set the stage for “big science” studies that brought nations together to tackle high-stakes questions of global reach. And that allowed modern climate science to emerge.

The Keeling curve

One major effort was the International Geophysical Year, or IGY, an 18-month push in 1957–1958 that involved a wide array of scientific field campaigns including exploration in the Arctic and Antarctica. Climate change wasn’t a high research priority during the IGY, but some scientists in California, led by Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, used the funding influx to begin a project they’d long wanted to do. The goal was to measure CO 2 levels at different locations around the world, accurately and consistently.

The job fell to geochemist Charles David Keeling, who put ultraprecise CO 2 monitors in Antarctica and on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa. Funds soon ran out to maintain the Antarctic record, but the Mauna Loa measurements continued. Thus was born one of the most iconic datasets in all of science — the “Keeling curve,” which tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 .

When Keeling began his measurements in 1958, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Within just a few years it became clear that the number was increasing year by year. Because plants take up CO 2 as they grow in spring and summer and release it as they decompose in fall and winter, CO 2 concentrations rose and fell each year in a sawtooth pattern. But superimposed on that pattern was a steady march upward.

“The graph got flashed all over the place — it was just such a striking image,” says Ralph Keeling, who is Keeling’s son. Over the years, as the curve marched higher, “it had a really important role historically in waking people up to the problem of climate change.” The Keeling curve has been featured in countless earth science textbooks, congressional hearings and in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth .

Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016, it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. Today it is at 413 ppm. (Before the Industrial Revolution, CO 2 levels in the atmosphere had been stable for centuries at around 280 ppm.)

Around the time that Keeling’s measurements were kicking off, Revelle also helped develop an important argument that the CO 2 from human activities was building up in Earth’s atmosphere. In 1957, he and Hans Suess, also at Scripps at the time, published a paper that traced the flow of radioactive carbon through the oceans and the atmosphere . They showed that the oceans were not capable of taking up as much CO 2 as previously thought; the implication was that much of the gas must be going into the atmosphere instead.

Steady rise 

Known as the Keeling curve, this chart shows the rise in CO 2 levels as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii due to human activities. The visible sawtooth pattern is due to seasonal plant growth: Plants take up CO 2   in the growing seasons, then release it as they decompose in fall and winter.

Monthly average CO 2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory

“Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future,” Revelle and Suess wrote in the paper. It’s one of the most famous sentences in earth science history.

Here was the insight underlying modern climate science: Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and humans are causing the buildup. Revelle and Suess became the final piece in a puzzle dating back to Svante Arrhenius and John Tyndall. “I tell my students that to understand the basics of climate change, you need to have the cutting-edge science of the 1860s, the cutting-edge math of the 1890s and the cutting-edge chemistry of the 1950s,” says Joshua Howe, an environmental historian at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Evidence piles up

Observational data collected throughout the second half of the 20th century helped researchers gradually build their understanding of how human activities were transforming the planet.

Ice cores pulled from ice sheets, such as that atop Greenland, offer some of the most telling insights for understanding past climate change. Each year, snow falls atop the ice and compresses into a fresh layer of ice representing climate conditions at the time it formed. The abundance of certain forms, or isotopes, of oxygen and hydrogen in the ice allows scientists to calculate the temperature at which it formed, and air bubbles trapped within the ice reveal how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were in the atmosphere at that time. So drilling down into an ice sheet is like reading the pages of a history book that go back in time the deeper you go.

Scientists began reading these pages in the early 1960s, using ice cores drilled at a U.S. military base in northwest Greenland . Contrary to expectations that past climates were stable, the cores hinted that abrupt climate shifts had happened over the last 100,000 years. By 1979, an international group of researchers was pulling another deep ice core from a second location in Greenland — and it, too, showed that abrupt climate change had occurred in the past. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a pair of European- and U.S.-led drilling projects retrieved even deeper cores from near the top of the ice sheet, pushing the record of past temperatures back a quarter of a million years.

Together with other sources of information, such as sediment cores drilled from the seafloor and molecules preserved in ancient rocks, the ice cores allowed scientists to reconstruct past temperature changes in extraordinary detail. Many of those changes happened alarmingly fast. For instance, the climate in Greenland warmed abruptly more than 20 times in the last 80,000 years , with the changes occurring in a matter of decades. More recently, a cold spell that set in around 13,000 years ago suddenly came to an end around 11,500 years ago — and temperatures in Greenland rose 10 degrees C in a decade.

Evidence for such dramatic climate shifts laid to rest any lingering ideas that global climate change would be slow and unlikely to occur on a timescale that humans should worry about. “It’s an important reminder of how ‘tippy’ things can be,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

More evidence of global change came from Earth-observing satellites, which brought a new planet-wide perspective on global warming beginning in the 1960s. From their viewpoint in the sky, satellites have measured the rise in global sea level — currently 3.4 millimeters per year and accelerating, as warming water expands and as ice sheets melt — as well as the rapid decline in ice left floating on the Arctic Ocean each summer at the end of the melt season. Gravity-sensing satellites have “weighed” the Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets from above since 2002, reporting that more than 400 billion metric tons of ice are lost each year.

Temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world also confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005 . And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

Worrisome predictions

By the 1960s, there was no denying that the planet was warming. But understanding the consequences of those changes — including the threat to human health and well-being — would require more than observational data. Looking to the future depended on computer simulations: complex calculations of how energy flows through the planetary system.

A first step in building such climate models was to connect everyday observations of weather to the concept of forecasting future climate. During World War I, British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson imagined tens of thousands of meteorologists, each calculating conditions for a small part of the atmosphere but collectively piecing together a global forecast.

But it wasn’t until after World War II that computational power turned Richardson’s dream into reality. In the wake of the Allied victory, which relied on accurate weather forecasts for everything from planning D-Day to figuring out when and where to drop the atomic bombs, leading U.S. mathematicians acquired funding from the federal government to improve predictions. In 1950, a team led by Jule Charney, a meteorologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., used the ENIAC, the first U.S. programmable, electronic computer, to produce the first computer-driven regional weather forecast . The forecasting was slow and rudimentary, but it built on Richardson’s ideas of dividing the atmosphere into squares, or cells, and computing the weather for each of those. The work set the stage for decades of climate modeling to follow.

By 1956, Norman Phillips, a member of Charney’s team, had produced the world’s first general circulation model, which captured how energy flows between the oceans, atmosphere and land. The field of climate modeling was born.

The work was basic at first because early computers simply didn’t have much computational power to simulate all aspects of the planetary system.

An important breakthrough came in 1967, when meteorologists Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald — both at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, a lab born from Charney’s group — published a paper in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences that modeled connections between Earth’s surface and atmosphere and calculated how changes in CO 2 would affect the planet’s temperature. Manabe and Wetherald were the first to build a computer model that captured the relevant processes that drive climate , and to accurately simulate how the Earth responds to those processes.

The rise of climate modeling allowed scientists to more accurately envision the impacts of global warming. In 1979, Charney and other experts met in Woods Hole, Mass., to try to put together a scientific consensus on what increasing levels of CO 2 would mean for the planet. The resulting “Charney report” concluded that rising CO 2 in the atmosphere would lead to additional and significant climate change.

In the decades since, climate modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated . And as climate science firmed up, climate change became a political issue.

The hockey stick 

This famous graph, produced by scientist Michael Mann and colleagues, and then reproduced in a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, dramatically captures temperature change over time. Climate change skeptics made it the center of an all-out attack on climate science.

The rising public awareness of climate change, and battles over what to do about it, emerged alongside awareness of other environmental issues in the 1960s and ’70s. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring , which condemned the pesticide DDT for its ecological impacts, catalyzed environmental activism in the United States and led to the first Earth Day in 1970.

In 1974, scientists discovered another major global environmental threat — the Antarctic ozone hole, which had some important parallels to and differences from the climate change story. Chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, of the University of California, Irvine, reported that chlorofluorocarbon chemicals, used in products such as spray cans and refrigerants, caused a chain of reactions that gnawed away at the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer . The resulting ozone hole, which forms over Antarctica every spring, allows more ultraviolet radiation from the sun to make it through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface, where it can cause skin cancer and eye damage.

Governments worked under the auspices of the United Nations to craft the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which strictly limited the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons . In the years following, the ozone hole began to heal. But fighting climate change is proving to be far more challenging. Transforming entire energy sectors to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions is much more difficult than replacing a set of industrial chemicals.

In 1980, though, researchers took an important step toward banding together to synthesize the scientific understanding of climate change and bring it to the attention of international policy makers. It started at a small scientific conference in Villach, Austria, on the seriousness of climate change. On the train ride home from the meeting, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin talked with other participants about how a broader, deeper and more international analysis was needed. In 1988, a United Nations body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was born. Bolin was its first chairperson.

The IPCC became a highly influential and unique body. It performs no original scientific research; instead, it synthesizes and summarizes the vast literature of climate science for policy makers to consider — primarily through massive reports issued every couple of years. The first IPCC report, in 1990 , predicted that the planet’s global mean temperature would rise more quickly in the following century than at any point in the last 10,000 years, due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

IPCC reports have played a key role in providing scientific information for nations discussing how to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. This process started with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 , which resulted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Annual U.N. meetings to tackle climate change led to the first international commitments to reduce emissions, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 . Under it, developed countries committed to reduce emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases. By 2007, the IPCC declared the reality of climate warming is “unequivocal.” The group received the Nobel Peace Prize that year, along with Al Gore, for their work on climate change.

The IPCC process ensured that policy makers had the best science at hand when they came to the table to discuss cutting emissions. Of course, nations did not have to abide by that science — and they often didn’t. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, international climate meetings discussed less hard-core science and more issues of equity. Countries such as China and India pointed out that they needed energy to develop their economies and that nations responsible for the bulk of emissions through history, such as the United States, needed to lead the way in cutting greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, residents of some of the most vulnerable nations, such as low-lying islands that are threatened by sea level rise, gained visibility and clout at international negotiating forums. “The issues around equity have always been very uniquely challenging in this collective action problem,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass.

By 2015, the world’s nations had made some progress on the emissions cuts laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, but it was still not enough to achieve substantial global reductions. That year, a key U.N. climate conference in Paris produced an international agreement to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees C, and preferably 1.5 degrees C , above preindustrial levels.

Every country has its own approach to the challenge of addressing climate change. In the United States, which gets approximately 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, sophisticated efforts to downplay and critique the science led to major delays in climate action. For decades, U.S. fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil worked to influence politicians to take as little action on emissions reductions as possible.

Biggest footprint 

These 20 nations have emitted the largest cumulative amounts of carbon dioxide since 1850. Emissions are shown in billions of metric tons and are broken down into subtotals from fossil fuel use and cement manufacturing (blue) and land use and forestry (green).

Total carbon dioxide emissions by country, 1850–2021 

Such tactics undoubtedly succeeded in feeding politicians’ delay on climate action in the United States, most of it from Republicans. President George W. Bush withdrew the country from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 ; Donald Trump similarly rejected the Paris accord in 2017 . As late as 2015, the chair of the Senate’s environment committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, brought a snowball into Congress on a cold winter’s day to argue that human-caused global warming is a “hoax.”

In Australia, a similar mix of right-wing denialism and fossil fuel interests has kept climate change commitments in flux, as prime ministers are voted in and out over fierce debates about how the nation should act on climate.

Yet other nations have moved forward. Some European countries such as Germany aggressively pursued renewable energies, including wind and solar, while activists such as Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg — the vanguard of a youth-action movement — pressured their governments for more.

In recent years, the developing economies of China and India have taken center stage in discussions about climate action. China, which is now the world’s largest carbon emitter, declared several moderate steps in 2021 to reduce emissions, including that it would stop building coal-burning power plants overseas. India announced it would aim for net-zero emissions by 2070, the first time it has set a date for this goal.

Yet such pledges continue to be criticized. At the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, India was globally criticized for not committing to a complete phaseout of coal — although the two top emitters, China and the United States, have not themselves committed to phasing out coal. “There is no equity in this,” says Aayushi Awasthy, an energy economist at the University of East Anglia in England.

Past and future 

Various scenarios for how greenhouse gas emissions might change going forward help scientists predict future climate change. This graph shows the simulated historical temperature trend along with future projections of rising temperatures based on five scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

Historical and projected global temperature change

Facing the future

In many cases, changes are coming faster than scientists had envisioned a few decades ago. The oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb CO 2 , harming tiny marine organisms that build protective calcium carbonate shells and are the base of the marine food web. Warmer waters are bleaching coral reefs. Higher temperatures are driving animal and plant species into areas in which they previously did not live, increasing the risk of extinction for many.

No place on the planet is unaffected. In many areas, higher temperatures have led to major droughts, which dry out vegetation and provide additional fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years.

Then there’s the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average and communities are at the forefront of change. Permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. Caribou and reindeer herders worry about the increased risk of parasites for the health of their animals. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea . It will need to move from its sand-barrier island to the mainland.

“We know these changes are happening and that the Titanic is sinking,” says Louise Farquharson, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who monitors permafrost and coastal change around Alaska. All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first.

“We are going to warm,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “There is no question about it. The only thing that we can hope to do is to warm a little more slowly.”

That’s one reason why the IPCC report released in 2021 focuses on anticipated levels of global warming . There is a big difference between the planet warming 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees or 2.5 degrees. Each fraction of a degree of warming increases the risk of extreme events such as heat waves and heavy rains, leading to greater global devastation.

The future rests on how much nations are willing to commit to cutting emissions and whether they will stick to those commitments. It’s a geopolitical balancing act the likes of which the world has never seen.

Science can and must play a role going forward. Improved climate models will illuminate what changes are expected at the regional scale, helping officials prepare. Governments and industry have crucial parts to play as well. They can invest in technologies, such as carbon sequestration, to help decarbonize the economy and shift society toward more renewable sources of energy.

Huge questions remain. Do voters have the will to demand significant energy transitions from their governments? How can business and military leaders play a bigger role in driving climate action? What should be the role of low-carbon energy sources that come with downsides, such as nuclear energy? How can developing nations achieve a better standard of living for their people while not becoming big greenhouse gas emitters? How can we keep the most vulnerable from being disproportionately harmed during extreme events, and incorporate environmental and social justice into our future?

These questions become more pressing each year, as carbon dioxideaccumulates in our atmosphere. The planet is now at higher levels of CO 2 than at any time in the last 3 million years.

At the U.N. climate meeting in Glasgow in 2021, diplomats from around the world agreed to work more urgently to shift away from using fossil fuels. They did not, however, adopt targets strict enough to keep the world below a warming of 1.5 degrees.

It’s been well over a century since chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized the consequences of putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Yet the world has not pulled together to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

Time is running out.

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Rebuilding Kenya Stronger: Here's What's Needed to Rebound After Catastrophic Floods

• restoration
• Forest and Landscape Restoration

In Kenya and throughout East Africa , flooding this past April and May wreaked havoc, leaving a path of deadly destruction. The unprecedented deluge of heavy rainfall resulted in a catastrophe that many in Kenya have never witnessed.

According to a June 18 report by the Kenya Red Cross , the staggering toll from this disaster includes 294 fatalities, 162 missing persons, 101,132 affected households, 151 school disruptions, 45 affected healthcare facilities and 65,0377 acres of decimated farmland. The start of the school year’s second term had to be postponed by two weeks and infrastructure, such as roads, railways and bridges were also severely impacted. 

Some of the highest impacts from the floods are being felt by people living in informal settlements. In Nairobi, the country’s capital city, over 40,000 households living in informal settlements have been displaced. The Kenyan government has since decided to demolish houses (largely focused on informal settlements) that were built 30 meters on either side of the major rivers of Nairobi. 

In addition, these communities have lost sanitation facilities, multiple informal schools that plug the gap of the public school system and spaces where many of the residents earn a living. As a result, the humanitarian crisis for these highly vulnerable communities continues to be dire.

Although heavy rains due to El Niño were predicted, the intensity of the storms have far surpassed its projections, demonstrating how climate change can exacerbate extreme weather phenomena. In fact, these same El Niño effects are also causing the worst drought in 40 years for countries in Southern Africa.

This is not the first time Kenya has suffered from devastating floods. An El Niño 1997 and 1998 also resulted in many fatalities and detrimental destruction. The recent destruction witnessed in Kenya is a testament to the urgent need to rebuild better than in the past. As climate change continues to influence severe storms, Kenya is likely to have more catastrophic climate events.

What Makes Kenya’s Landscapes So Vulnerable?

Kenya’s landscapes are interconnected. The very denuded hills in the Great Rift Valley and the Aberdare Ranges contribute to rapid run-off into rivers downstream that fuels flooding in Nairobi and surrounding peri-urban areas.

Likewise, towns like Narok, located about 142km (88 miles) west of Nairobi, experience cyclical flash flooding because of the degraded water catchments in upstream areas.  

These floods have exposed Kenya’s vulnerabilities, poor implementation of plans (such as the 2015-2045 National Spatial Plan and the 2018 Thematic Plan for Disaster Risk Management ) and the country’s inadequate disaster preparedness, especially impacting its poorest population.

Nationally, over 38% of the population is characterized as poor , with this figure rising to more than 60% in cities. These communities are disproportionately affected by the floods and have limited capacity to economically cope with climate disasters (through savings or insurance). Yet in most instances, they are the most exposed to climate shocks. Many settlements and low-income housing are also found in the areas most prone to floods and landslides, such as along riverbanks, in flood plains and along dangerously steep slopes.

The major challenge behind Kenya’s multiple development plans is their implementation. Different spatial plans at the national, county and urban levels, for instance, have proposed conserving water catchment areas, climate-proofing infrastructure, introducing early warning systems and creating social safety nets for the poorest. Yet, most of these proposals only collect dust on shelves. For example, despite early warning systems during the most recent floods, the government was slow to respond .

Garbage collection also remains a big problem, especially in large cities like Nairobi. Trash finds its way down rivers to different parts of the city where garbage collection services do not exist. 

With a struggling economy, Kenya will need major finances to rebuild its infrastructure at the expense of planned development initiatives. Crops washed away from the floods will mean a huge drop in harvests. Many will go hungry , while farmers will lose income. Rivers are heavily silted because fertile topsoil has been washed away. People will need to borrow or dip into their savings, if any, to restore their homes.

How Kenya Can Build Back Better

To effectively rebuild from this disaster, Kenya will need to intentionally take measures to strengthen its resilience to the impacts of future floods and other weather-related disasters, which are projected to be exacerbated by climate change. Here are the measures it should take:

Nature-based Solutions to Restore Ecosystems 

In the immediate aftermath of the floods, Kenya’s government announced a public holiday on May 10 to show respect for those affected by the floods and encouraged people in Kenya to plant trees to help mitigate climate change.

Indeed, carefully planned ecosystem restoration — including in urban areas — will help enhance the resilience of landscapes, reduce erosion and sedimentation, improve water infiltration and provide valuable ecosystem services that help to mitigate flood risks and protect communities and infrastructure from the impacts of flooding.

Furthermore, national and county governments should promote green infrastructure and nature-based solutions , such as wetlands restoration, floodplain reconnection and riparian buffers, to enhance natural flood management and reduce flood risks.

These approaches harness the capacity of ecosystems to absorb, retain, and slow down floodwaters while providing additional benefits such as water purification, habitat conservation and recreational opportunities. However, this is only possible if the country plants the right tree species in the right areas, and robustly monitors landscape restoration, while ensuring that the needs and interests of local communities are safeguarded.

Proper urban planning will help protect infrastructure. County governments must step up compliance, especially in the cities where flooding has been catastrophic. Green spaces in the city must be preserved and construction guidelines should be respected. Most of what happens in cities is directly linked to upstream landscapes where nature-based solutions such as landscape protection and ecosystem restoration can significantly mitigate the impacts of floods and climate change. It is critical that Kenya’s efforts to restore forests and landscapes are kept on course.

As part of its Urban Water Resilience and Cities4Forests initiatives, WRI is providing support to the city of Nairobi and the Nairobi Rivers Commission to increase adoption and investment in community-led solutions for urban river regeneration. 

Secure Adaption Financing

Kenya must push for implementation of the Loss and Damage Fund established at COP28 to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure, although the pledges are woefully inadequate . More than ever, the government must mainstream adaptation into its planning processes, coupled with increased access to adaptation finance. The African Adaptation Acceleration Program , for instance, offers an opportunity to scale up nature-based solutions for adapting the continent’s urban and rural infrastructure to climate. The African Development Bank has already surpassed its target of 40% of its total financing to climate finance to 55%. This demonstrates the opportunity for countries to tap into financing for climate adaptation.

Kenya needs to do more robust climate risk assessments and plans to widen the country’s access to adaptation financing opportunities. WRI, through its New Climate Economy program , and the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) , have created a cross-economy analysis of the existing macro, climate-related and green economic modeling in Kenya, which identified several data management, research, tools and capacity gaps that the government can use to shift to a green economy.

Further measures to enhance the adaptive capacity of economic sectors that are highly sensitive to climate shocks, such as agriculture and tourism, are necessary. The recent floods, for example, necessitated the evacuation of tourists from the world-famous Maasai Mara game reserve during the floods.

Establish and Adopt Effective Early Warning Systems

Early warning systems that provide timely and accurate information about impending floods to at-risk communities can go a long way in helping communities prepare for floods, evacuate safely and minimize loss of life. With climate shocks projected to increase in the future, Kenya should particularly prioritize early warning systems that work for multiple climate hazards, such as droughts, landslides, coastal storms, among others. 

Efforts should also be made to conduct comprehensive climate-risk assessments and mapping to identify disaster-prone areas and assess the potential impacts on communities, infrastructure and the environment. This information will serve as the basis for effective flood-risk management planning and decision-making.

Improve Community Engagement

Both the national and county governments should engage with local communities to raise awareness about flood risks, build capacity for preparedness and response, and empower residents to take proactive measures to protect themselves and their properties. Community-based initiatives, such as flood awareness campaigns, training workshops and neighborhood resilience projects, strengthen social cohesion and resilience to floods.

During the recent floods, community-based organizations were the first responders to the crisis. In Nairobi, these groups organized community members to quickly evacuate and also collected data of affected households with speed. These local community groups became the custodians of already established informal mechanisms of warning dissemination and response that can be tapped, enhanced and scaled. Communities must also be empowered to co-develop disaster response strategies and plans together with government agencies.

For a Climate Resilient Future, Kenya Must Act Now 

The trail of destruction is already impacting Kenya’s economy. For example, about $8 million will be needed to repair a washed-away railway line important for exporting goods to neighboring Uganda. Nearly $300 million will be needed to fix a network of roads damaged by the floods. And in June, funding was released to reconstruct the schools damaged by the floods.

At the heart of all the proposed solutions must be a nationwide behavioral change: Kenya must stop the indiscriminate dumping of solid waste into storm waterways, corruption and greed that result in ignored regulations or poor-quality works. Lives were lost when buildings collapsed , so building regulations must also be followed to prevent destruction and fatalities when disasters strike. 

A collective effort among Kenya’s government and its people will be key to preventing future destruction. Through stewardship, people will thrive with nature and make the world a better place for future generations. We must all step up now.

WRI India’s Walter Samuel, Bina Shetty and Vaibhav Shrivastava contributed to the maps on this page.

CORRECTION 7/15/2024: An earlier version of this article stated that Nairobi’s government decided to demolish houses that were built within 30 meters of the Mathare River. The scope of the demolition was larger, encompassing homes 30 meters on either side of all of Nairobi's major rivers and the decision was made by the Kenyan government, coordinated by the Nairobi Rivers Commission. 

Relevant Work

How improved housing in under-served communities can strengthen climate resilience, photo essay: poor communities in surat, india, take climate resilience into their own hands, statement: global commission on adaptation covid-19 call to action, as cities grow across africa, they must plan for water security, how you can help.

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We the People Are on Our Own

And that’s not nearly as depressing as it sounds.

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

My question at this point in the presidential election , when it’s so devastatingly clear that no current candidate has united our country, is not whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden can win. After an attempt on Trump’s life and amid forceful calls for the president to end his campaign, it feels impossible to believe that either man could bring us together, if any president ever really can. So what will it take for us to reconcile our own differences? I believe that too many of us have forgotten our agency, or forsaken it.

I wish I could say I’m surprised that it’s come to this. The state of our politics was already alarming and exasperating. In general, so much is changing, without ceremony or mercy. Old traditions, industries, and technologies are giving way to new ones. Social norms are shifting. Our planet itself is becoming inhospitable as climate change accelerates. Some aspects of our economic, legal, and political systems are unrecognizable. In the course of what passes for governance these days, too few of our leaders have found effective ways to unite us around a common pursuit of our shared ideals. Some of those ideals, which previous generations literally fought to enshrine, have been revoked or come under attack. So it’s no wonder that, in the face of all this, many people are choosing to disengage.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans—some 65 percent—say they “always or often feel exhausted” when contemplating politics, and more than half reported feeling angry, according to a Pew survey last year. Only 10 percent reported feeling hopeful about politics, and even fewer—4 percent—told Pew they felt excited. Too many people have come to believe that they’re powerless to help themselves, much less society. This is the phenomenon that Robert F. Kennedy referred to as “the danger of futility” in a 1966 speech in South Africa. He warned against “the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence,” and urged people to remember that “many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man.”

Michael Powell: The worst is not inevitable

I believe that We the People are still the answer, individually and collectively, to so many of the challenges we’re facing now. I realize this may sound overly earnest to some, but as we have seen, cynicism and despair can be powerful and dangerous accelerants to division, with tragic consequences. Reversing the alienation from our political processes starts with rebuilding faith in its efficacy—faith that individuals who come together within communities, working toward a common goal, can overcome lack of education, social isolation, a dearth of role models, and other conditions that serve as barriers to political engagement. To find consensus in a divided society, we have to seek common ground despite, if not because of, our opposing beliefs. We can begin to heal our divisions—emphasis on the word begin —by making an attempt. We can get along better by trying. We can connect with others despite painful breaches caused by closed minds or power gaps.

Recently, I got to know Maine Governor Janet Mills, who told me that one of her constituents, a young mother named Ashirah Knapp, had sent her weekly letters of support through the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The governor’s show of emotion was so striking and unusual that I asked to see the letters. In one dispatch, Knapp wrote, “If people looked deeply enough into themselves, a lot of them would find that they are frustrated, angry, scared” and “displacing those feelings onto you or others when actually there really was no other sane choice” for how to keep people safe. She promised to write to the governor “until we get through this time, to keep reminding you of the many people who approve of the path you are choosing.”

Mills, like many of her counterparts, and other officials in both parties, faced sustained criticism for her decisions during the early pandemic. She endured backlash ranging from mobs of protesters, some of them armed, to threats of violence, calls for her impeachment, and then-President Trump’s dig that she “doesn’t know what she’s doing … She’s like a dictator.” But she led Maine through the crisis with some of the lowest numbers of infections and deaths of any state, adjusted for population, as well as one of the most robust economic recoveries, and was reelected by a historic margin. Even when Knapp disagreed with some aspect of the Mills administration’s COVID response, she encouraged the governor to trust her intuition and pledged to keep finding her own ways to help, however small. “There are so many brilliant and loving people in the world right now, but it often feels like there are a lot more hurtful and violent ones,” she wrote during the summer of 2020. “It doesn’t feel like all the little actions will ever be enough, yet it’s all we can do.”

Knapp filled her letters with ordinary stories of raising farm animals, an adopted dog, and two adolescent children while running a small business with her husband. Her anecdotes were sometimes poignant, often hilarious, and always relatable. Governor Mills wrote back when she could, noting in her final response that Knapp’s letters—“handwritten, heartfelt and real—have helped keep me grounded.” I was so moved by their correspondence that I wrote a book about it. While promoting the book this past year, I’ve met audiences who reacted with surprise and disbelief. Most seemed desperate for positive examples of leadership, and to feel it at work around them. It’s easy to understand why people believe that these examples are hard to find. Our information systems are inundated with partisan junk, juvenile flamethrowing, extremist manifestos, propaganda from foreign adversaries, and who-knows-how-much artificial intelligence.

When people would ask me how to find hope in such a nasty political and ideological environment, I’d tell them to be wary of social media’s echo chamber and the cacophony of apocalyptic headlines and apoplectic opinions. I’d remind them that there are untold numbers of good people and politicians in our country who are using their agency for the common good—not just for the good of those who agree with them.

Writing a letter may seem like a small act, but that’s the point. Americans need more demonstrations of shared humanity and more outreach to one another in difficult times. As we’ve seen throughout history, our nation can work together to solve problems that seem impossible. Audacious goals can be achieved by people who start in small places and do what they can, regardless of whether the results can be measured. We’ve made stunning progress, both over time and overnight, thanks to individuals who faced change with curiosity and creativity and took action where others balked.

David A. Graham: How to save democracy

In order to move forward, Americans also need to face the sad fact that the fundamental nature and tenor of how we get along has changed. You know that menacing sign you see at airport car-rental agencies, warning you that you can’t go back without shredding your tires? Too many of us have already driven over the security spikes—seen things in one another that we can’t unsee, said things to one another that cannot be taken back. Some of us have bought into unthinkable narratives and done appalling things to one another, compelled by fear, shame, or desperation.

Many of us know from painful personal experience that not every issue in a relationship is resolvable. But there is tremendous power in acknowledging that something is not working, and in being open to the ideas of those around you about how to fix it. Democratic renewal in America will also require empathy, respect for one another’s dignity, and deference to one another’s humanity. These feelings are automatic when someone stops to help a stranger at the scene of an accident. People don’t ask before offering assistance whether the elderly woman who’s just dropped her groceries voted for the candidate they support. Unifying the country is going to require actively seeking common ground, even the smallest, barest, hardscrabble patch of it, and starting there, with willingness to compromise.

Now is the time to use our agency—to be more civically involved, not less; to have the uncomfortable conversations we’ve been avoiding; to stop setting intellectual traps for those who are less informed; to listen for the sake of learning, instead of waiting for our turn to speak; to do meaningful things for one another, no matter how small or local the upside. That is what it would look like “to lead the land we love,” as Senator Kennedy said in that 1966 speech, “with a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds.” Imagine what you could do if you took those words to heart. Now imagine if each of us did. Maybe this election is what it will take for us to remember we can.

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J.D. Vance on the Issues, From Abortion to the Middle East

Like Donald J. Trump, the Ohio senator has been skeptical of American intervention overseas and argues that raising tariffs will create new jobs.

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By Adam Nagourney

• Published July 15, 2024 Updated July 17, 2024

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Donald J. Trump’s newly chosen running mate, has made a shift from the Trump critic he was when he first entered politics to the loyalist he is today. It was a shift both in style and substance: Now, on topics as disparate as trade and Ukraine, Mr. Vance is closely aligned with Mr. Trump.

Here’s a look at where the senator stands on the issues that will most likely dominate the campaign ahead and, should Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance win in November, their years in the White House.

Mr. Vance opposes abortion rights, even in the case of incest or rape, but says there should be exceptions for cases when the mother’s life is in danger. He praised the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. As he ran for Senate in 2022, a headline on the issues section of his campaign website read simply: “Ban Abortion.”

Mr. Vance has said that he would support a 15-week national ban proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He has also said the matter is “primarily a state issue,” suggesting states should be free to make more restrictive laws. “Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable, he said in an interview with USA Today Network in October 2022.

Mr. Vance has been one of the leading opponents of U.S. support for Ukraine in the war with Russia. “I think it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine,” he said in a podcast interview with Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser and longtime ally. “I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

He led the battle in the Senate, unsuccessfully, to block a $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine. “I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war,” he wrote in an opinion essay for The New York Times early this year challenging President Biden’s stance on the war. “Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.”

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

Chapter: conclusion, c onclusion.

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

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

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

F OR FURTHER READING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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