Climate change is the term used to describe a trend in the overall warming of the Earth. Although the Earth goes through warming and cooling cycles on scales of hundreds of thousands of years, the current situation is concerning to scientists because the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been rising at an alarming rate. It usually takes thousands of years for greenhouse gases to reach the levels they are currently at, which only took decades to do. There is consensus among climate scientists as to the cause of global warming: they are nearly certain that it is caused by human activity of burning fossil fuels and other methods of adding pollution to the air. Computer models predict that the rate of warming and adding greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will only increase.
Hurricane Joaquin brought historic levels of flooding to South Carolina in early October 2015.This tropical cyclone was a “thousand-year storm”, which means that there is only a 0.1% chance of such a storm occurring in each year.As global temperatures continue to increase, human activity contributing to this effect and the intensifying weather patterns associated with it are becoming more of a concern.
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is human-caused warming of average Earth temperatures. According to Elizabeth Kolbert, “people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to the combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, and even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled.” Earth is leaving the Holocene, the current epoch “which began at the conclusion of the last ice age, 11,700 years ago,” and is entering into the Anthropocene, a “human-dominated geological epoch.”
Climate scientists attribute the more extreme weather patterns seen in recent years to AGW, and predict future intensifying weather patterns likely and such patterns will be attributable to human-related global warming.
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