The temperature of the earth is rising at nearly twice the rate it was 50 years ago. This rapid rate and pattern of warming, scientists have concluded, cannot be explained by natural cycles alone. The only way to explain the pattern is to include the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted by humans. To come to a conclusion on climate change, the United Nations formed a group of scientists called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The IPCC meets every few years to review ...

The temperature of the earth is rising at nearly twice the rate it was 50 years ago. This rapid rate and pattern of warming, scientists have concluded, cannot be explained by natural cycles alone. The only way to explain the pattern is to include the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted by humans.

To come to a conclusion on climate change, the United Nations formed a group of scientists called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The IPCC meets every few years to review the latest scientific findings and write a report summarizing all that is known about global warming. Each report represents a consensus, or agreement, among hundreds of leading scientists.

One of the first things the IPCC learned is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, factories and electricity production. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, also called CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills and agriculture, especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes, and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2.

Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can even trap more heat than CO2. A molecule of methane produces more than 20 times the warming of a molecule of CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2.

Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer, have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their concentrations are much lower than CO2, none of these gases adds as much warmth to the atmosphere as CO2 does.

In order to understand the effects of all the gases together, scientists tend to talk about all greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. Since 1990, yearly emissions have gone up by about 6 billion metric tons of “carbon dioxide equivalent” worldwide, more than a 20 percent increase.

(Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/)

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