What are climate signals?

How do climate signals help explain climate change impacts in real time?

Climate signals serve as the middle links between greenhouse gas emissions and individual climate events. Climate events are environmental hazards or processes that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have made more likely, severe, or damaging, such as heat waves, extreme storms or glacial retreat.

Rather than waiting for scientists to conduct a formal attribution analysis for a climate event, the Climate Signals platform links individual events to climate change by demonstrating how an event exemplifies, or is consistent with, long-term trends or changes expected in a warmer world as determined by attribution science as well as observations, modeling, and basic physics.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Heat trapping gasses, such as CO2 and methane, drive rising temperatures. Emission of CO2 also drives acidification of oceans.
Long-term trends, model projections, and basic physics link climate change to individual events.
Long-term trends, model projections, and basic physics link climate change to individual events.
Long-term trends, model projections, and basic physics link climate change to individual events.

Climate Signals

Climate Event

Events are shaped by many factors. Increasingly climate change is a factor, particularly when climate change pushes systems past tipping points.