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The water cycle is essential to life on Earth and plays a large role in the global climate system and ocean circulation. The warming of our planet is expected to be accompanied by changes in the water cycle for various reasons. [3] For example, a warmer atmosphere can contain more water vapor which has effects on evaporation and rainfall.
Humanity has thrown the global water cycle off balance “for the first time in ... global warming. In turn, climate change-fueled heat is drying out landscapes, reducing moisture and increasing ...
The runoff from the land flows into streams and rivers and discharges into the ocean, which completes the global cycle. [26] The water cycle is a key part of Earth's energy cycle through the evaporative cooling at the surface which provides latent heat to the atmosphere, as atmospheric systems play a primary role in moving heat upward. [26]
Publicity has surrounded claims of a global warming hiatus during the period 1998–2013. The exceptionally warm El Niño year of 1998 was an outlier from the continuing temperature trend, and so subsequent annual temperatures gave the appearance of a hiatus: by January 2006, it appeared to some that global warming had stopped or paused. [2]
Phase I (1990–2002), also called the "Build-Up Phase", was designed to determine the hydrological cycle and energy fluxes by means of global measurements of atmospheric and surface properties. GEWEX was also designed to model the global hydrological cycle and its impact on the atmosphere, oceans and land surfaces.
In the 1980s, the terms global warming and climate change became more common, often being used interchangeably. [29] [30] [31] Scientifically, global warming refers only to increased surface warming, while climate change describes both global warming and its effects on Earth's climate system, such as precipitation changes. [28]
World leaders are meeting in Paris this month in what amounts to a last-ditch effort to avert the worst ravages of climate change. Climatologists now say that the best case scenario — assuming immediate and dramatic emissions curbs — is that planetary surface temperatures will increase by at least 2 degrees Celsius in the coming decades.
Ward and Brownlee predict that there will be two variations of the future warming feedback: the "moist greenhouse" in which water vapor dominates the troposphere and starts to accumulate in the stratosphere and the "runaway greenhouse" in which water vapor becomes a dominant component of the atmosphere such that the Earth starts to undergo ...