Climate Questions: What's going on with climate change?

Addressing climate change — a now ubiquitous term for the warming of the planet caused by humans emitting carbon dioxide and methane from coal, oil and natural gas into the atmosphere — is becoming exponentially more pressing, with the language of scientists, officials and activists becoming more serious with every passing year.

The most recent report by the world’s top body of climate scientists gave a damning assessment of where the world is headed if more isn't done to curb global warming. Already, more extreme weather events are happening across the globe, from longer, more intense and more frequent droughts and heat waves to devastating floods and wetter hurricanes, attributed at least in part to climate change.

How the planet got here, the current and future effects of climate change, and what to do next, are all questions that experts have been researching for decades.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.

___

There may be an uptick in climate-related policy, discussions and activism, but the science isn't all that new.

Scientists in the early 1800s began to recognize that some gasses and water vapor could trap heat in the atmosphere. And for the last sixty years, researchers could definitively measure that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were rising, thanks to a CO2-monitoring station at Mauna Loa in Hawaii.

Meteorologists in the middle of the twentieth century also started to understand the climate as a “system that is dynamic, constantly changing, and perhaps also vulnerable to external forcing and alteration,” said Martin Mahony, a lecturer of human geography at the...