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Ma means "million years ago". The natural history of Earth concerns the development of planet Earth from its formation to the present day. [1] [2] Nearly all branches of natural science have contributed to understanding of the main events of Earth's past, characterized by constant geological change and biological evolution.
In the past, abrupt climate change has likely caused wide-ranging and severe impacts as follows: Mass extinctions, most notably the Permian–Triassic extinction event (often referred colloquially to as the Great Dying) and the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse, have been suggested as a consequence of abrupt climate change. [3] [20] [19]
In geology, catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has largely been shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. [1] This contrasts with uniformitarianism (sometimes called gradualism ), according to which slow incremental changes, such as erosion , brought about all the Earth's geological features.
However, only around half of CO 2 emissions continually reside in the atmosphere in the first place, as the other half is quickly absorbed by carbon sinks in the land and oceans. [6]: 450 Further, the warming per unit of greenhouse gases is also affected by feedbacks, such as the changes in water vapor concentrations or Earth's albedo ...
Most environmental scenarios involve one or more of the following: Holocene extinction event, [39] scarcity of water that could lead to approximately half the Earth's population being without safe drinking water, pollinator decline, overfishing, massive deforestation, desertification, climate change, or massive water pollution episodes.
Attribution studies generally proceed in four steps: (1) measuring the magnitude and frequency of a given event based on observed data, (2) running computer models to compare with and verify observation data, (3) running the same models on a baseline "Earth" with no climate change, and (4) using statistics to analyze the differences between the ...
In the absence of a magnetic field, charged particles from the Sun will deplete the atmosphere and further increase the Earth's temperature to an average of around 420 K (147 °C, 296 °F) in 2.8 billion years, causing the last remaining life on Earth to die out. This is the most extreme instance of a climate-caused extinction event.
Climate change can also be used more broadly to include changes to the climate that have happened throughout Earth's history. [32] Global warming—used as early as 1975 [33] —became the more popular term after NASA climate scientist James Hansen used it in his 1988 testimony in the U.S. Senate. [34] Since the 2000s, climate change has ...