Much of this melting ice contributes to sea-level rise. Global sea levels are rising 0. Rising temperatures are affecting wildlife and their habitats. As temperatures change, many species are on the move. Some butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants have migrated farther north or to higher, cooler areas. Precipitation rain and snowfall has increased across the globe, on average.
Yet some regions are experiencing more severe drought , increasing the risk of wildfires, lost crops, and drinking water shortages.
Some species—including mosquitoes , ticks , jellyfish , and crop pests—are thriving. Booming populations of bark beetles that feed on spruce and pine trees, for example, have devastated millions of forested acres in the U. Share Tweet Email.
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Below are some of the impacts that are currently visible throughout the U. Global Change Research Program :. Heat waves, heavy downpours and sea level rise pose growing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.
Changes in the timing of streamflow reduce water supplies for competing demands. Sea level rise, erosion, inundation, risks to infrastructure and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire, insect outbreaks and tree diseases are causing widespread tree die-off. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.
Extreme heat, heavy downpours and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also exacerbate a range of risks to the Great Lakes. Increased heat, drought and insect outbreaks, all linked to climate change, have increased wildfires.
Declining water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, health impacts in cities due to heat, and flooding and erosion in coastal areas are additional concerns.
Taken as a whole, the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time. An indicator of current global sea level as measured by satellites; updated monthly. GISS climate models. Climate Time Machine. The National Research Council deemed many of these rapid climate surprises unlikely this century, but a real possibility farther into the future.
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Share this story Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share All sharing options Share All sharing options for: What impacts will global warming have in the future? This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Until recently, most discussions of modern global warming have looked only as far ahead as AD. Now, new investigations by pioneering climate modelers are beginning to tell another story, one in which the legacy of our heat-trapping carbon emissions lasts not just decades or centuries but long enough to interfere with future ice ages.
As science-journalist Mason Inman puts it, with only slight exaggeration, "carbon is forever. But the basics of that future boil down to one simple principle: what goes up must come down. Greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperatures will not increase indefinitely — today's carbon dioxide buildup and warming trend must eventually top out and then reverse as the atmosphere gradually recovers.
The first stage of this process will occur when the rate at which we burn coal, oil, and natural gas levels off and then declines, either because we switch to alternative energy sources soon, or because we run out of affordable fossil fuels later. As a result, CO 2 concentrations in the atmosphere will also eventually peak and then decline.
This, in turn, will cause a series of linked environmental responses in which other currently rising trends reverse one by one in a "climate whiplash" phase that follows the lead of our carbon emissions. For example, as CO 2 dissolves into the oceans, it combines with water to form carbonic acid, which alters the chemistry of seawater and makes limestone, chalk, and other carbonate-rich substances more likely to dissolve.
Ocean acidification will peak shortly after atmospheric CO 2 concentrations do, threatening marine species that have acid-soluble carbonate shells or skeletons, including corals, shellfish, and crustaceans Figure 1. Figure 1: Staghorn coral near Key West, Florida.
Ocean acidification threatens these and other marine organisms that depend on acid-soluble carbonate supporting structures and shells. Some rights reserved. After a delay due to slow response times in the atmosphere and oceans Wigley , global average temperatures will pivot into cooling mode as CO 2 concentrations continue to fall.
However, global mean sea level will still rise long after the thermal peak passes, because even though temperatures will be falling, they will still be warmer than today. Therefore, land-based glacial ice will continue to melt and the oceans will continue to expand even though Earth's atmosphere has begun to recover. Sea level will only return to today's position when it finally becomes cool enough for large, land-based ice sheets to build up again on Antarctica and in the Arctic.
In order to work out the timing of these processes in more detail, one must consider where CO 2 goes after it leaves our smokestacks and exhaust pipes. Some of it will be taken up by soils and organisms but most of it will dissolve into the oceans, with between two thirds and half of our emissions perhaps going into solution during the next millennium or so Inman , Eby et al.
In many computer simulations, maximum ocean acidification lasts years or more, depending on the amount of CO 2 we emit in the near future. Marine species living in the polar regions and deep sea basins and trenches will be the most rapidly and severely impacted because the solubility of such gases is greatest in cold waters. But after the seas have absorbed as much CO 2 as they can, roughly a fifth of our fossil carbon emissions will still be left adrift in the air Tyrell et al.
The next stage of the cleanup will proceed more slowly. As atmospheric CO 2 dissolves into raindrops, the carbonic acid that it produces will react with calcite and other carbonate minerals in rocks and sediments. Over thousands of years, those geochemical weathering processes will transfer many of the formerly airborne carbon atoms into groundwater and runoff, finally delivering them to the oceans in the form of dissolved bicarbonate and carbonate ions.
Meanwhile, carbonate-rich deposits on the sea floor will experience similar reactions with overlying seawater as the oceans become more acidified. This slow addition of acid-buffering substances to marine ecosystems will act much like an antacid pill that allows the seas to consume more CO 2 from the overlying atmosphere.
These processes are generally expected to dominate the long-term recovery for 5, years or so. But even this second, lengthier phase won't remove the very last fraction of our carbon pollution. Only tens of thousands of years later, or possibly even hundreds of thousands if we burn most of our enormous coal reserves, the last remnants of our CO 2 will finally be scrubbed away by even slower reactions with resistant silicate minerals, such as the feldspars found in granite and basalt.
This is what University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer calls "the long tail of the carbon curve" Archer , and it will be dominated by gradual global cooling , albeit at higher temperatures than those of today. The intensity and duration of the warming peak and recovery will depend upon choices we make during this century. Figure 2: Airborne carbon dioxide concentrations in a moderate emissions scenario. Note the steep initial rise, rapid climate whiplash turnaround, and slow long-term recovery over the next , years.
All rights reserved. Much of Greenland and western Antarctica's ice will melt into the oceans over millennia, lifting sea levels several meters higher than today before slowly receding. On the other hand, if we burn through all remaining coal reserves before switching to alternative energy sources, then a far more extreme scenario will result.
In one computer simulation of what could follow a gigaton emission Figure 3; Schmittner et al. Atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and temperatures then fall relatively steeply for several thousand years after the peak and whiplash phase, but they don't return to today's levels for at least , years.
All land-based ice eventually melts, raising sea levels by as much as 70 meters until the world cools enough for large polar ice sheets to form again, roughly half a million years from now. Figure 3 Detail of the first years of an extreme emissions scenario, showing lagged responses of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, temperatures, and sea level. What might life on Earth be like under such conditions?
Although no examples from the past perfectly illustrate the warmest phases of these two scenarios, several of them are nonetheless informative. The surface area of the Greenland ice sheet shrank by at least a third, the Arctic Ocean lost some summer ice-cover but retained enough for ringed seals and polar bears to survive, elephants and water buffalo migrated northward into Britain and Europe, and trees that are now more typical of the southeastern United States, such as black gums and hickories, thrived in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York Stager Although it was caused by cyclic changes in the orientation of the Earth relative to the sun rather than greenhouse gases, the Eemian example nonetheless shows that even a relatively moderate warming can melt enough land-based ice to raise sea levels by 6—9 meters if it persists long enough, which in this case was 13, years Figure 4.
Figure 4: Fossil oysters resting several meters above the surf zone near Durban, South Africa. Their elevation shows how high sea level once stood during the warm Eemian Interglacial, ,—, years ago.
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