Climate change

Today, it is a scientific fact that humans have caused climate change. The main reason is because many human activities release greenhouse gases. The emissions are causing global warming and the current changes in the climate.

Greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere naturally. However, human activities lead to an abundance of them. The gases warm the climate through the greenhouse effect. Today, the warming is happening rapidly, putting the Earth out of its natural balance. It threatens life as we know it.

IPCC & climate change

In 2023 the IPCC, meaning the UN’s climate panel, concluded that it is beyond doubt that human activities have caused global warming, mainly through greenhouse gas emissions. Human-caused warming has already reached around 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels. To work with this, the UN organises international environmental meetings. These are called COP meetings. The Paris Agreement from 2015 is one of the most famous outcomes of these gatherings. This deal states that nearly every UN member (193 of 195 countries) will work together to reduce emissions, particularly greenhouse gases such as CO2. The agreement's goal is to keep the global temperature rise well below 2° Celsius, and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5° Celsius. A temperature rise above this risks biodiversity loss and causes changes in the climate with severe consequences.

Climate change & global warming

Some use climate change as a synonym for global warming. However, climate change can also refer to other types of changes in the climate. For example, changes that occur naturally, without human influence. For example, natural variations and patterns in the Earth’s climate. There can be many different reasons for these changes. Such as differences in solar activity or geological processes.

A changing climate

Scientists predict that global warming will have severe consequences, such as increased extreme weather and rising sea levels. For example, warmer temperatures lead to more extreme droughts, floods and storms. While rising sea levels make many of the world’s cities unhabitable since they are right next to the water level. Hence, they will end up underwater. Cities like Miami, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro risk this outcome. More so, the extreme weather and rising sea levels will likely lead to millions of climate refugees.

Climate refugees

If the development continues like today, there will be an enormous number of climate refugees in the future. The World Bank estimates that climate change could push over 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050, across regions including Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This figure covers internal displacement (people moving within their own country, not necessarily crossing borders), and it's a conservative estimate, since it doesn't capture cross-border movement.