Climate change is the long-term alteration of temperature and typical weather patterns in a place. Climate change could refer to a particular location or the planet as a whole. Climate change has been connected with damaging weather events such as more frequent and more intense hurricanes, floods, downpours, and winter storms. Together with expanding ocean waters due to rising temperatures melting polar ice, the resulting rise in sea level has begun to damage coastlines as a result of increased flooding and erosion. The cause of current climate change is largely human activity, like burning fossil fuels, like natural gas, oil, and coal. Burning these materials releases what are called greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. There, these gases trap heat from the sun’s rays inside the atmosphere causing Earth’s average temperature to rise.
Over time, the buildup of greenhouse gases has created an excess of heat energy in Earth’s system leading to our current period of global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes scientists from around the world who study climate science believes that there is now overwhelming evidence that human-caused climate change is happening. They predict that without significant emissions reductions this century, global average temperatures could increase by as much as 2°C above preindustrial levels by 2100 resulting in even more extreme weather conditions and impacts on human health, economies, ecosystems, and wildlife.