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By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under stress conditions. [43] By 2050, more than half of the world's population will live in water-stressed areas, and another billion may lack sufficient water, MIT researchers find. [44]
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.
The five components of the climate system all interact. They are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. [1]: 1451 Earth's climate system is a complex system with five interacting components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth's upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things).
The study found that, between 1982 and 2015, 6% of the world's drylands underwent desertification driven by unsustainable land use practices compounded by anthropogenic climate change. Despite an average global greening , anthropogenic climate change has degraded 12.6% (5.43 million km 2 ) of drylands, contributing to desertification and ...
In 2004, the IGBP published "Global Change and the Earth System, a planet under pressure." [10] The publication's executive summary concluded: "An overall, comprehensive, internally consistent strategy for stewardship of the Earth system is required". It stated that a research goal is to define and maintain a stable equilibrium in the global ...
The same report predicted that global warming of 2 °C would expose roughly 1-4 billion people to water stress. This would depend on regional patterns of climate change and the socio-economic scenarios. [8]: 558 On water scarcity which is one factor in water insecurity the report finds 1.5-2.5 billion people live water scarce areas.
Climatology and climate change have been central to Earth System science since its inception, as evidenced by the prominent place given to climate change in the early NASA reports discussed above. The Earth's climate system is a prime example of an emergent property of the whole planetary system, that is, one which cannot be fully understood ...
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 ...