Global warming article

You can also search for this author in • • David G. Victor is adjunct professor of climate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, USA; professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego; and co-chair of the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, USA. Buy or subscribe Prepare for the “new abnormal”. That was what California Governor Jerry Brown told reporters last month, commenting on the deadly wildfires that have plagued the state this year. He’s right. California’s latest crisis builds on years of record-breaking droughts and heatwaves. The rest of the world, too, has had more than its fair share of extreme weather in 2018. The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Global Warming of 1.5 °C (IPCC, 2018). • Le Quéré, C. et al. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 10, 405–448 (2018). • Smith, D. M. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL079362 (2018). • Karplus, V. J., Zhang, S. & Almond, D. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, 7004–7009 (2018). • Burnett, R. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, 9592–9597 (2018). • Salzmann, M. Sci. Adv. 2, e1501572 (2016). • Meehl, G. A., Hu, A. & Teng, H. Nature Commun. 7, 11718 (2016). • Chen, X. & Tung, K.-K. Nature 559, 387–391 (2018). • Henley, B. J. & King, A. D. Geophys. Res. Lett. 44, 4256–4262 (2017). • Xu, Y. & Ramanathan, V. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 103...

Climate is the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area. Weather can change from hour to hour, day to day, month to month or even from year to year. For periods of 30 years or more, however, distinct weather patterns occur. A desert might experience a rainy week, but over the long term, the region receives very little rainfall. It has a dry climate. Because climates are mostly constant, living things can adapt to them. Polar bears have adapted to stay warm in polar climates, while cacti have evolved to hold onto water in dry climates. The enormous variety of life on Earth results in large part from the variety of climates that exist. Climates do change, however—they just change very slowly, over hundreds or even thousands of years. As climates change, organisms that live in the area must adapt, relocate, or risk going extinct. Earth’s Changing Climate Earth’s climate has changed many times. For example, fossils from the Cretaceous period (144 to 65 million years ago) show that Earth was much warmer than it is today. Fossilized plants and animals that normally live in warm environments have been found at much higher latitudes than they could survive at today. For instance, breadfruit trees ( Artocarpus altilis), now found on tropical islands, grew as far north as Greenland. Earth has also experienced several major ice ages—at least four in the past 500,000 years. During these periods, Earth’s temperature decreased, causing an expansion of ice sheets and glaciers. T...

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