Climate Change

Facts about Climate Change

Consider these facts from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an objective scientific panel set up at the request of United Nation member governments:

1. Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer, and the period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.
2. Since the beginning of the industrial era, oceanic uptake of CO2 has resulted in a 26% increase in acidification of ocean surface water, which poses substantial risks to marine ecosystems, especially polar ecosystems and coral reefs from phytoplankton to animals.
3. Arctic sea-ice extent has decreased in every season and in every successive decade since 1979.
4. Since 1870, sea levels have risen approximately 7.5 inches.
5. Impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability.

Suggested reading:  The Sixth Extinction, An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert