Global Climate Change

Abstract

Global climate change, despite increased scientific understanding of its causes and consequences, continues to be one of the most challenging issues currently facing the earth. Global climate change and increasing climate variability affects every aspect of the earth's biophysical environment, and by extension humanity. Placing the current rate of global and regional climate change in a broader temporal context establishes that the rate of change in global mean temperature in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries is unique in earth's recent geologic history. The impacts associated with global climate change are many and include increased drought, sea level rise and coastal flooding, decreased agricultural productivity, altered biogeochemical cycles, and an increasing incidence of extreme weather events.