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In common usage, climate change describes global warming —the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate.
Ozone depletion is not a primary cause of climate change, however there exists a physical science connection between the two phenomena. The Earth's atmospheric ozone has two major effects on the Earth's temperature balance. Firstly, it absorbs solar ultraviolet radiation, leading to the heating of the stratosphere.
Global warming is an aspect of modern climate change, a term that also includes the observed changes in precipitation, storm tracks and cloudiness. As a consequence, glaciers worldwide have been found to be shrinking significantly .
Definition. The global warming potential (GWP) is defined as an "index measuring the radiative forcing following an emission of a unit mass of a given substance, accumulated over a chosen time horizon, relative to that of the reference substance, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). The GWP thus represents the combined effect of the differing times these ...
Climate change scenarios can be thought of as stories of possible futures. They allow the description of factors that are difficult to quantify, such as governance, social structures, and institutions. There is considerable variety among scenarios, ranging from variants of sustainable development, to the collapse of social, economic, and ...
The Kyoto Protocol ( Japanese: 京都議定書, Hepburn: Kyōto Giteisho) was an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and that human-made CO 2 ...
The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy ...
Created, caused, or strongly influenced by humans or human activities; man-made. Climate change with the presumption of human influence, usually warming. Global warming with the presumption of human influence. The cooling effect an atmosphere has on the ambient temperature of the planet.