Global Warming

Food choices shape far more than our health. They influence land use, water resources, and the amount of heat-trapping pollution released into the atmosphere. Because of this wide-reaching impact, scientists have begun to measure just how much dietary change is needed to slow climate change.

Global surface temperature is the average temperature of the Earth’s surface at a given time. It is a combination of the near-surface air temperature over land and the sea surface temperature, weighted by their respective areas. Global temperature records, using modern instruments for consistent worldwide data, officially began in 1880. So, there is nearly a 150-year continuous record.

The changing climate poses a major threat to polar bear survival. But new research suggests that rising temperatures may be altering polar bear DNA in ways that help them adapt and endure in increasingly challenging environments.

Somewhere between 97% and 99.9% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and is primarily caused by human activities. However, while science is based on observations and evidence, politics is not.

According to a new study, mountains around the world are warming faster than surrounding lowlands. The increased heat at higher elevations is melting glaciers and reducing snowfall. This threatens a vital source of fresh water for more than a billion people.

The final agreement produced at the COP30 meeting where representatives of nearly 200 countries met to address the issue of climate change makes no mention of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

In 2015, a report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the world was headed towards 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius of warming if stronger actions were not taken to cut emissions. This level of increased temperature (as much as nearly 9 degrees Fahrenheit) was described as being incompatible with an organized, equitable, and civilized global community. In short, the consequences would be dire.

In the 1990s, the Greenland Ice Sheet as well as the rest of the Arctic region were observed to be measurably thawing as a result of human-caused global warming. At that time, most of Antarctica’s vast ice cap seemed to be securely frozen. Conventional wisdom was that Antarctica’s ice sheets were going to remain stable and were not going to melt much.

There are over 3,500 species of mosquitoes. It’s nearly impossible to estimate how many individual mosquitoes there are worldwide. Estimates range from 110 trillion to over a quadrillion. Mosquitoes are found literally everywhere on Earth with only two exceptions: Antarctica and Iceland. Except now they have been sighted in Iceland.

Switzerland has over 1,400 glaciers. Some of them are world famous, including the largest one, the Aletsch Glacier, which is a World Heritage Site located in the Barnese Alps. At its deepest point, it is about 3,000 feet thick. But like other glaciers in Switzerland, the Aletsch is shrinking – by more than 150 feet per year due to global warming. In total, more than 1,000 small glaciers have melted away entirely since the 1970s.