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Last year was the hottest year on record, and this year’s temperatures may reach even higher.
With so many extraordinary heat waves, floods, and storms piling up, one may wonder: Just how much warmer is the Earth going to get?
The answer hinges on two main factors: how much more heat-trapping gasses humans will emit, and how the planet will respond.
Whether humanity continues to dawdle or actually takes aggressive action to cut emissions is the biggest source of uncertainty in the future of the planet since the bulk of the warming we’re experiencing is due to the waste gasses from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’s climate science team, has chalked out five scenarios with different levels of action needed from global leaders to curb climate change to plug into its climate models.
On the other side of the equation, scientists have been working to narrow […]
I never remember so many rain days in the summer (especially the late summer than this year. I cannot even get the days in which I need to paint/repaint my house in various places which need it.