Climate Change Cheat Sheet: Learn the Vocab

The risks are much greater over the long run than over the next few decades, but the emissions that create those risks are happening now.

Over the coming 25 or 30 years, scientists say, the climate is likely to resemble that of today, although gradually getting warmer.

Scientists also worry about other wild-card scenarios like the predictable cycles of Asian monsoons becoming less reliable.

So in the view of the experts, simply banking on a rosy scenario without any real plan would be dangerous.

In many other cases, though, the linkage to global warming for particular trends is uncertain or disputed.

Scientists fear climate effects so severe that they might destabilize governments, produce waves of refugees, precipitate the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in Earth’s history, and melt the polar ice caps, causing the seas to rise high enough to flood most of the world’s coastal cities.

The number of hurricanes and typhoons may actually fall, but the ones that do occur will draw energy from a hotter ocean surface, and therefore may be more intense, on average, than those of the past.

So any disruptions to monsoons would have catastrophic consequences to those populations.

If you want to offset your emissions, you can buy certificates, with the money going to projects that protect forests, capture greenhouse gases and so forth.

Leading corporations are making bold promises to switch to renewable power and stop forest destruction.

That causes severe effects on coastlines, forcing governments and property owners to spend tens of billions of dollars fighting erosion.

Global warming has intensified droughts in regions like the Middle
East, and it may have strengthened the drought in California.

But if that rate continued, it would probably be manageable, experts say.

This uncertainty means that computer forecasts can give only a range of future climate possibilities, not absolute predictions.

In the best case that scientists can imagine, several things happen: Earth turns out to be less sensitive to greenhouse gases than currently believed; plants and animals manage to adapt to the changes that have already become inevitable; human society develops much greater political will to bring emissions under
control; and major technological breakthroughs occur that help society both to limit emissions and to adjust to climate change.