Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Heat trapping gasses, such as CO2 and methane, drive rising temperatures. Emission of CO2 also drives acidification of oceans.
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.
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.
Earth Systems Signals
Global warming is causing widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere.
Heat Signals
The Earth is getting hotter due to human activities that release heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
Drought Signals
Climate change is making droughts more likely to occur, and more severe when they do.
Wildfires Signals
Climate change is increasing the size, frequency, intensity and seasonality of wildfires.
Hurricanes Signals
Warmer temperatures increase the rate of water evaporation, which feeds moisture and energy into storms.
Floods Signals
Worsening floods due to climate change are putting a growing number of communities at risk.
