Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record (NASA)
Ocean Warming Intensified Wind Speed for All Atlantic Hurricanes in 2024 (Earth Org)
World on Track for 3.1C Warming, UN Report Warns (UNEP)
The year 2024 was another year of “unprecedented” climate incidents highlighted again and again by headlines like the above. These headlines often rely on evidence from climate data and models which seem to spit out vague predictions based on complicated computer models which the average person will never understand. It can be very confusing to read the headlines and think, “ how accurately can scientists really predict our future climate?”
Whilst climate science has evolved greatly as our technological capabilities grow, one thing has remained the same: the solution to mitigating the climate crisis must be through global collaboration.
A bit of climate science history
To detail the history of climate science, we begin in 1856 with American scientist Eunice Foote who discovered that carbon dioxide takes longer to cool than other atmospheric gases. In her paper, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays” she concluded that “an atmosphere of carbon dioxide would give our earth a high temperature”.
Three years later, John Tyndall published his famous paper, Note on the Transmission of Radiant Heat through Gaseous Bodies. The paper identified the gases responsible for the greenhouse effect on the Earth’s atmosphere. He also importantly linked infrared radiation (the form of heat radiated from the planet towards space) with the planet warming.
The point being, we have known the impact of greenhouse gases on global temperatures for over a hundred years. This knowledge is compounded by the Industrial Revolution which kicked off in the mid-18th century. Humans discovered that by burning coal and other fossil fuels, we can be even more economically efficient. This transformed our mainly rural agrarian economies into industrialized urban ones. An unknown (at the time) impact is that as we burned more fossil fuels to be more efficient, we added more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere.
The graph above shows the intersection between the activities occurring at the time of the Industrial Revolution and the increase of global temperatures due to greenhouse gases. Using carbon dioxide (CO2) levels as a proxy for earth’s temperature, NASA illustrates that about a century after the start of the Industrial Revolution, we exceeded the CO2 average of the previous millennia.
Now that we’ve set the historical stage for why climate scientists are tracking weather patterns and greenhouse gas emissions – let’s look at how we’re tracking climate impacts today.
Our passion for the weather helps climate science
Humanity has been obsessed with the weather since the dawn of time. It determines so many factors of our daily lives from economic to social. Globally, we’ve been recording temperature measurements at weather stations and in shipping logs since the mid-1800’s. As our technology advanced, so did our ability to record and predict local weather, which scientists used to piece together a global climate picture.
While scientists might have known since the mid-1850s that greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet, we didn’t have the tools or technology in place to really understand the big picture impacts of global warming on our planet. Enter satellites.
Since the first satellites were launched in the 1960s, scientists have been able to use imaging tools like lasers, radar, and cameras to collect visuals and other data points which had previously taken months and years of field work to collect. Since then, scientists have been able to measure sea level change to a single millimeter, assess the temperature of land and oceans, and look at the spread of pollutants and greenhouse gases. All this is thanks to the machines we control from space.
Today, we are able to collect more weather data than ever. Armies of satellites patrol space to beam data back to Earth, helping scientists reach the conclusion that our planet is changing due to human activities emitting greenhouse gases.
Five satellite images that show how fast our planet is changing. Check it out to see how satellites compile images which show our planet changing!
How do we know that the data trends are accurate?
Dozens of climate agencies around the world use supercomputers and complex algorithms to process the monumental amount of climate data beaming from about 100 dedicated satellite instruments in space. Once analyzed, all of these agencies have the same conclusion: the planet is being warmed at unprecedented levels.
We can conclusively say this because each agency uses their own methodology. So while different agencies might differ in the temperature number our planet is warming, the overall consensus is that the world is getting hotter.
Those 100 satellites are continuing the work to measure and record variables which scientists can use to predict the effects of the climate crisis. Using infrared sensors, the satellites detect the amount of heat emitted from Earth’s surface back into the atmosphere. Radar systems beam down onto our oceans and land surfaces and then back up into space, telling climate scientists the changes in measurement of our polar ice caps.
NASA’s Landsat Program takes images tracking the changes to the Earth’s surface. In 2021, NASA launched the Landsat 9 satellite which contains many scientific instruments. This includes a land imager and a thermal infrared sensor, which monitors and reports the light reflected from the planet in various wavelengths. This is then analysed to assess minute changes in the world’s lakes, rivers, and forests.
Data collection is the just beginning of climate science. While each agency has its own methods, we only know global trends in our climate because these agencies share data with one another. It takes international cooperation and transparency of data and outcomes to reach the conclusions we’ve reached about our changing climate.
The importance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. Per its website, the IPCC was created to ‘provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options.’
What does this mean? Well, the IPCC assesses the plethora of findings from climate scientists across the globe to identify where the scientific community agrees on topics related to climate change and where further research is needed. They’re basically the global auditor for climate science. In a world rampant with skepticism and misinformation, the importance of the IPCC cannot be understated.
The IPCC releases assessment reports which summarize scientific agreement around issues relating to climate change. The reports involve volunteer experts who assess thousands of scientific papers published each year. The process involves a thorough, open, and transparent review to ensure a wide reflection of views and expertise. In other words, we can trust that the conclusions reached in the IPCC assessment reports are accurately reflecting the conclusions reached by the global scientific community.
The last report published by the IPCC was the Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. This report summarized the key findings from the Sixth Assessment Report which was an eight-year-long undertaking (2015 to 2023). The evidence in the report was collected from scientists around the world and it cited several points of verification for global warming.
- Concentrations of carbon dioxide have been unmatched for at least 2 million years.
- Glacial retreat has been unmatched for 2000+ years.
- The last decade was warmer than any period for ~125,000 years.
- Global sea level has risen faster than any prior century for 3,000 years.
- Our oceans are warming faster than at any time since the end of the last ice age.
What can we expect from this? The IPCC warns that the impacts from the climate crisis on people and ecosystems are more widespread and severe than expected by scientists. Every increase in temperature, no matter how minute, will escalate future risks..
A warning call for climate science
The IPCC is currently in its seventh assessment cycle which began in July 2023 and is expected to end early 2029. However, this cycle is off to a rocky start. Climate scientists were scheduled to meet in late February in China to discuss the research. Due to the Trump administration’s stop-work order, US government scientists participating in the IPCC global assessments were unable to attend. This included NASA’s chief scientists Kate Calvin who has a leadership role on the seventh assessment report.
Director of the Earth Observatory in Singapore, Benjamin Horton, noted that “without the US, the IPCC fails. The US puts in more money, more personnel, collects more data, and runs more models for climate science than the rest of the world combined.” According to Carbon Brief, about 18% of IPCC authors have been from the US.
In order to tackle the climate crisis, we need global cooperation and transparency of scientific collaborations. In early February, scientists at the forecasting agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were told to record and clear all international contacts and communication. As Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, noted that “weather does not respect political boundaries. It is not possible to predict the weather in the United States without cooperation from other parts of the world.”
Be Curious!
- Read more about the IPCC
- Listen to this podcast from Columbia University, where scholar and author Jay Hakes discusses his book, “The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush.”
- Are you obsessed with the weather? Join your nearest weather club!
- Those in the United States, find your local chapter of the American Meteorological Society!
- In the United Kingdom? The Royal Meteorological Society accepts anyone with an interest in weather and climate.
Featured image by Gilles Rolland-Monnet, via Unsplash
