Global Warming: Bringing Certainty and Clarity to what was once a theory.

In 2021, climate change, or global warming, has become more prominent in everyday life. From flash floods to extreme drought, global warming has caused different dramatic weather patterns all over the world.

The summer of 2021 had a dramatic increase in temperatures, specifically at night. In cities, the temperatures are increasingly worse compared to small towns or farmhouses. A study conducted by the Global Historical Climatology Network found from 1960 until 2021 temperatures now are immensely hotter.

Many cities in the United States have been taken over by concrete buildings and streets with very little room to grow trees. This is detrimental to climate change since trees bring in shade and moisture. 

Concrete buildings and streets attract heat from the sun in the daytime, then release it at night. This is the suspected to be the cause of cities becoming hotter at night, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network. 

“It’s the extremes – that is, the number of abnormally hot nights – that are rising the fastest. A small shift in the average can mean a large change in the frequency of extreme events, with big consequences for climate change.”, said Aatish Bhatia and Josh Katz reported in the New York Times.

The Pacific Northwest experienced a record-breaking heatwave in June of 2021, and the west coast is in the midst of a historic drought. An analysis from an international team of climate researchers said it would have been “virtually impossible without climate change” for the heatwave to occur.

The average global temperatures have risen by 2-degrees Fahrenheit, according to the same study done by the Global Historical Climatology Network, and if the temperature increases by another 1.4-degrees we would see a “drastic drop in greenhouse gas emissions.” 

Another factor in global warming is precipitation. In the United States, one-half of the country is experiencing flash floods, hurricanes, and thunderstorms while the other half is in an extreme drought. 

Global warming has been affecting every continent on Earth. According to an article by Aatish Bhatia and Nadja Popovich in the New York Times, since 1950 Northern and Central Europe and Asia have had an increase in precipitation, whilst the Mediterranean, eastern Australia, and Africa have become drier.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been emitting even more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, which causes more heat and water to get trapped. It is important to know, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are gases trapped in our atmosphere. 

An article from the New York Times written by Julia Rosen says, “We know this is true thanks to an overwhelming body of evidence that begins with temperature measurements taken at weather stations and on ships starting in the mid-1800s. Later, scientists began tracking surface temperatures with satellites and looking for clues about climate change in geologic records. Together, these data all tell the same story: Earth is getting hotter.”

In the last sixty years, the Arctic’s temperature has risen by 4-degrees Fahrenheit, causing animal extinctions and ocean levels to rise. 

There is an overwhelmingly high number of meteorologists who believe the cause of Earth heating is due to human activity. The main cause is due to humans burning fossil fuels since the late 1880s. The likelihood of global warming occurring without humans emitting greenhouse gas is less than one in one-hundred thousand.