Dire Climate Impacts Distract From Even More Dire Warnings
Extreme weather continues to swell like US coastlines during high tide. And with it comes the realization that the climate changes we were warned about are already here. For decades the core question in the public debate over global warming was: Will all these scientific projections come true?
Now, Britain has had its hottest summer ever and New Zealand its third-warmest winter in a row. The Rhine, Danube, Yangtze, and Colorado rivers dried out, interrupting commerce and power generation. Heat records were smashed.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.