IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
On 7 August 2024, Canada experienced an intense heatwave and several wildfires seen in this satellite photo of Great Bear Lake in Canada's north-west territories.
The temperature in Inuvik, an Arctic town located less than 100 km from the Arctic Ocean, reached a record high of 34.8°C.
In this section, we'll look at the wide-ranging impacts of the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most obvious of these is rising global temperature which in turn is leading to a profusion of secondary impacts.
Click on the links below to explore each of the major impacts of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.
Every time a major environmental catastrophe occurs, one question is asked more frequently than any other: Did it occur as a result of climate change? Until recently, there was no way of knowing with any degree of certainty whether or not global warming had played any part in these events. Climate change deniers would point to previous similar, perhaps even more extreme events in centuries past when carbon dioxide levels were far lower than they are today.
In 2004, a ground-breaking paper was published in Nature which led to the birth of a new science - Extreme Weather Attribution. For the first time, it became possible to estimate the likelihood that climate change played a role in any particular event. Click here to learn more about Extreme Weather Attribution.