How does industrialization affect global warming

About half was dissolved relatively quickly in the ocean or absorbed into the land-based biosphere, while the remainder stayed in the atmosphere.

As a result, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose from parts per million ppm in to ppm globally now. The rate at which the concentration is rising is also rising, moving from 1 ppm per year in to nearly 3 ppm per year. This process is shifting the carbon equilibrium that has existed since the start of the current inter-glacial warm period known as the Holocene.

In turn, this will have an observable impact on other features of the same equilibrium, including the surface temperature of the planet, as described by Arrhenius. It is this process that is leading to climate change. Since the days of Arrhenius, a great deal of work has been done on the relationship between the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the resulting temperature change. More recently, the focus has been on how much the temperature will rise for a given cumulative release of carbon dioxide over time.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC , the carbon dioxide released to the end of had raised the average surface temperature by about 1. In the nations of the world established the Paris Agreement in which they have pledged to work together to limit warming to 1. But if current emissions of some 40 Gt of carbon dioxide per year continue unchanged, the Gt threshold will be exceeded by Thinking about climate change as a stock problem rather than a flow problem changes the nature of the solution and the approach.

The stock perspective means that a truly comprehensive international treaty on climate change needs to consider the point at which carbon dioxide emissions reach zero, or net-zero, being a zero sum of emission sources and sinks. When net-zero emissions is reached, accumulation ceases and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stabilizes. Remarkably, the Paris Agreement does incorporate such a goal. The most prevalent is water vapour, but it changes dynamically with temperature and so reinforces the role that carbon dioxide plays in climate change.

But several other greenhouse gases have become problematic over the last century as a result of human activity. Perhaps the most important of these is methane. The gas is different from carbon dioxide because it presents us with more of a flow problem than a stock problem due to its breakdown in the atmosphere. Methane is naturally emitted, but human activities have added to this. The largest anthropogenic sources are agricultural methane from belching cows as they digest food, rice paddies and fossil methane natural gas from fugitive sources in the global oil, gas and coal industry.

But how should we think about the impact of global warming and the consequent climate change? Many commentators now refer to the problem as a climate crisis but offer no frame of reference for consideration other than extreme weather events.

Our findings show that warming did not develop at the same time across the planet. The tropical oceans and the Arctic were the first regions to begin warming, in the s. Europe, North America and Asia followed roughly two decades later. Surprisingly, the results show that the southern hemisphere began warming much later, with Australasia and South America starting to warm from the early 20th century.

This continental-scale time lag is still evident today: while some parts of Antarctica have begun to warm, a clear warming signal over the entire continent is still not detectable. The warming in most regions reversed what would otherwise have been a cooling trend related to high volcanic activity during the preceding centuries. According to our evidence, in all regions except for Antarctica, we are now well and truly operating in a greenhouse-influenced world.

We know this because the only climate models that can reproduce the results seen in our records of past climate are those models that factor in the effect of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by humans.

But recent variations in the Earths temperature, weather events, sea levels and sea ice are indicating there is a catastrophic change happening to our environment. In the last Glacial Maximum, around 21, years ago, both poles were covered by ice sheets that were expanding and much of the continents in the northern hemisphere were covered by ice. In the past 10, years, due to Milankovitch cyclicity changes in the Earth orbit around the sun the Earth has naturally warmed and should still do so for approximately another 40, years before we would expect to see these effects reversed and the Earth once again move towards another ice-age.

It would take several more decades before scientists realized the full extent of their accumulation in the atmosphere, and their resulting relation to global warming. The second half of the global temperature graph is marked by World War II and its aftermath.

As the dust settled, nations began to build themselves back up, and things really kicked into hyperdrive with the Third Industrial Revolution. As globalization and trade progressed following the s, people and goods began moving around more than ever before.

In addition, population growth peaked at 2. Industrialization patterns began to intensify further to meet the demands of a rising global population and our modern world. The history of human development is intricately linked with global warming.

The following graph from Reddit user bgregory98 , which leverages an extensive data set published in Nature Geoscience provides a more dramatic demonstration. It looks at the escalation of global temperatures over two thousand years.

In this expansive time frame, eight of the top ten hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade alone. Click here to view the full graph animation. Global warming and climate change are some of the most pressing megatrends shaping our future. However, with the U. Iman Ghosh , Author, Visual Capitalist.