Climate change

Key people

• Greta ThunbergSwedish climate protection activist (born 2003)
• Syukuro ManabeJapanese-American meteorologist and climatologist (1931–)
• Katharine HayhoeCanadian atmospheric scientist
• Michael E. MannAmerican physicist and climatologist

Timeline

• 1820In the 1820s, Joseph Fourier proposed the greenhouse effect to explain why Earth's temperature was higher than the Sun's energy alone could explain.
• 1850Warming since the Industrial Revolution Around 1850 thermometer records began to provide global coverage.
• 1880Since 1880, there has been no upward trend in the amount of the Sun's energy reaching the Earth, in contrast to the warming of the lower atmosphere (the troposphere).
• 1950Since the 1950s, droughts and heat waves have appeared simultaneously with increasing frequency.
• 1961From 1961 to 1990, a gradual reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface was observed.

Read

• Field notes from a catastropheElizabeth Kolbert · 2006Book
• The Great DerangementAmitav Ghosh · 2016Book
• Climate ChangeJonathan Cowie · 2007Book
• Climatic changesHuntington, Ellsworth · 1922Book

Watch

• Climate Change, Climate change reason, impact of Climate change on global world trade, aktu mbaYouTube
• Climate Change and Global Warming: Explained in Simple Words for BeginnersYouTube
• What is climate change | Effects of climate change | Causes of climate change | Climate changeYouTube
• Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye | National GeographicYouTube
• Climate change | Effect and Causes | Global Environmental Issue | Environmental Science | EcologyYouTube
• What is Climate Change?: Crash Course Biology #8YouTube
• Climate Change – MIND MAP ENVIRONMENT | Drishti IAS ENGLISHYouTube
• The Basics of Climate Science | Essentials of Environmental ScienceYouTube
• Climate Change and Global Warming, EXPLAINED | The Climate ExplainersYouTube
• Climate Change in One Shot 🌱 | Causes, Characteristics & Greenhouse Effect (EVS Guide)YouTube

Listen

• The Climate QuestionBBC World ServicePodcast
• Ask MIT ClimateMIT Climate ProjectPodcast
• Climate ChangeYale School of ForestryPodcast
• A Matter of DegreesDr. Leah Stokes, Dr. Katharine WilkinsonPodcast

Voices to follow

• Amy Austin@amytaustin · XArgentinan ecologist and academic
• Martin Barreiro@mbarreiro_tve · XSpanish meteorologist and presenter
• Lucas Berard-Chenu@LucasBerard_ · XFrench geographer
• Jean-Marc Jancovici@JMJancovici · XFrench engineer and energy climate specialist

Debates

• Should geoengineering be widely deployed to combat climate change?One view: Geoengineering offers potential rapid solutions to reduce global temperatures and buy time for emissions reductions. · Another: Geoengineering carries significant unknown risks and could have unintended global environmental consequences.Open question
• Is carbon pricing or direct regulation more effective for reducing emissions?One view: Carbon pricing uses market forces to incentivize emissions reductions efficiently across industries. · Another: Direct regulation ensures specific emissions targets are met and can address non-market failures directly.Open question

Glossary

• Greenhouse effectThe process where gases in Earth's atmosphere trap heat, warming the planet.
• Carbon footprintThe total amount of greenhouse gases released by an individual, event, or product.
• Renewable energyEnergy from sources that naturally replenish, like solar, wind, and hydro power.
• MitigationActions taken to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions.
• AdaptationAdjustments made to cope with the actual or expected impacts of climate change.
• Climate modelA computer simulation used to predict future climate based on scientific understanding.

Careers

Roles this can lead toward

Student research

Published policy papers by One Young India delegates — every delegate leaves published under their own name.

• Paying the Climate Debt: The Case for a Carbon Wealth TaxParthvi Kandoi
• The Philadelphia Experiment: Deconstruction of a Military Myth and PseudoscienceDwij Verma

Threads 16

Where this connects to other fields — and why it's worth knowing.

• Ethics and Moral Philosophy Philosophy

  How much we pollute today changes who is even born in the future, since different lives lead to different babies. So we can't say we 'harmed' a specific future person, because a cleaner path would have created totally different people. Our normal way of judging right and wrong quietly stops working.

• Fiscal Policy & Public Debt Economics

  Running up huge government debt and pumping out carbon do the same sneaky thing: we get the party now, and people not even born yet get the cleanup bill. How much you care about those future strangers is a single hidden number economists call the discount rate, and it quietly settles both debates at once.

• The Industrial Revolution History

  Drill deep into Antarctic ice and each layer traps ancient air, a frozen diary of the atmosphere. For ten thousand years the carbon dioxide line is flat, then suddenly it shoots up. That kink marks the exact moment humans fired up coal factories: the Industrial Revolution, written in ice.

• Architecture & Urban Design Arts

  Buildings, heating them, cooling them, making their concrete and steel, pump out roughly 40% of global emissions. That means the biggest climate lever isn't only power plants and cars; it's floor plans and blueprints. Fighting climate change is partly an architecture problem.

• Calculus & Rates of Change Mathematics

  Think of the CO2 in the sky as water filling a bathtub, where our emissions are the tap. Even if we stop opening the tap wider, the water keeps rising as long as any is still flowing in. Most people expect the level to fall the moment emissions stop growing, but it doesn't, and that mix-up is at the heart of climate confusion.

• Applied Ethics and Bioethics Philosophy

  The nastiest fight in climate economics is over one boring-looking number called the 'discount rate.' It decides how much we should care today about people suffering a hundred years from now. Hidden inside that dial is a giant moral question, dressed up as math: is a future kid's pain worth as much as ours?

• Motivation & Behaviour Change Psychology

  Your brain treats a reward far in the future as almost worthless, which is why studying tonight for an exam next month feels impossible. Now scale that up: a climate disaster decades away feels weightless to whole societies, so we put it off. Countries procrastinate on climate for the exact same brain-glitch reason you procrastinate on saving money.

• Mathematical Finance & Markets Mathematics

  In finance, when a choice can't be undone and the future is murky, waiting has real value; you keep your options open. But climate tipping points can smash the option itself, like a door that vanishes if you hesitate. That flips 'wait and see' from the cautious move into the reckless one.

• Nuclear Weapons Risk Global Risks

  The computer models that first warned a nuclear war could plunge Earth into a freezing 'nuclear winter' used the same physics that powers today's climate science, how tiny particles in the air trap or block heat. And both dangers ask us the same hard thing: act on a catastrophe you can't fully prove until it's too late.

• Scarcity & Trade-offs Economics

  The whole climate fight can shrink down to one number: how much a life 50 years from now is worth today. Pick a high value and acting now looks like cheap insurance; pick a low one and it looks like a waste. Two famous economists read the exact same science and landed on opposite plans, just by choosing that number differently.

• Corporate Governance Business

  The planet's temperature is now being decided in company boardrooms. Directors have legal duties to protect the business, and they know oil-heavy assets could become worthless as the world shifts. So a giant science-and-climate question turns into a question about how companies are run.

• Cognitive Biases Psychology

  Climate change is almost perfectly built to slip past the human brain. The danger feels far away in time, far in space, and only maybe, so our minds treat it as not real yet. We're wired to shrug at exactly this kind of slow, distant threat.

• Narrative & Storytelling Literature

  A good story needs a villain, a ticking clock, a hero, and a big final showdown. Climate change has none of that: no single bad guy, no clear deadline, no dramatic ending. The science is settled, but our brains are built to pay attention to stories, and this threat just doesn't fit the shape of one.

• Map Scale and Gerrymandering Geography

  Count the pollution where a phone is made, and China looks like the big polluter. But count it where the phone is bought and used, and the wealthy importing countries look guilty instead. Same exact tons of carbon, opposite villain, depending only on where you decide to draw the line.

• International & Human Rights Law Law

  When governments refuse to act on climate, courts are grabbing the controls. In the Urgenda case, judges ruled that weak climate action violates people's rights — and ordered a whole country to cut emissions its own politicians wouldn't.

• Game Theory & Strategy Mathematics

  Cutting emissions helps everyone, so every country is tempted to slack off and let others do the work. One economist's fix isn't a moral lecture but a "climate club": nations that cooperate slap tariffs on those that don't. Suddenly cheating costs more than helping.