气候变化领域集成服务门户

“Of course we need to protect our home,” the guide remarks on page four in an acknowledgement of environmental responsibility that advocates for recycling and energy conservation. But when it moves on to describing climate change, it asserts that “the climate has always changed — long before humans walked the earth — and it continues to change.” Such rhetoric, a hallmark of many media campaigns that minimize the severity of climate change, ignores the scientific consensus that temperatures in the past century rose almost 10 times faster than the average warming after ice ages during the past million years, and that the increasing heat correlates with global carbon emissions, which are higher than they’ve ever been in human history. Warming during the next century is projected to progress 20 times faster than it did in the last two million years.