Human impacts on the climate

• Human activities that involve burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) for generating electricity, transport and industry all add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
• These activities have led to a large rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air over the last 150 years.
• Over the same time the average temperature of the surface of the Earth has risen. The scientific consensus is that this is more than correlation and that the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations has caused the rise in temperature
• Climate describes the long-term patterns of weather in different parts of the world. Climate change is shown by changes to patterns in measures of such things as air temperature, rainfall, sunshine and wind speed.
• Scientists analyse data on climate change using computer models based on the physics that describes the movements of mass and energy in the climate system.
• Many complex changes on Earth affect the climate, and detailed data about the scale of the changes is not available from all over the world.
• Also, when predicting climate change, scientists have to make assumptions about future greenhouse gas emissions. This means that there are uncertainties in the predictions