Spreading climate doom may make it harder to halt global warming - New Scientist
Spreading climate doom may make it harder to halt global warming | New Scientist
Protestor at an unofficial temperature record in Death Valley, California on 16 July RONDA CHURCHILL/AFP via Getty Images
Protestor at an unofficial temperature record in Death Valley, California on 16 July
RONDA CHURCHILL/AFP via Getty Images
Will 2023 mark the arrival of the climate apocalypse – and with it, a call to action? With extreme events and record-breaking temperatures across the world, there is certainly a “pervasive sense of doom” among the general public, says Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania. “There is understandable worry over whether it’s too late, whether we’ve crossed some tipping point.”
The answer to that is complex, but as the emerging El Niño climate pattern builds …
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.