Show me the data
A quick guide to human impact on the environment
Carbon Emissions
The amount of Carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere is nearly perfectly collinear with the Industrial Revolution and subsequent industrial growth. This is easily estimated from ice samples.
Carbon is unquestionably a result of human activity
We can measure random and cyclical carbon in the atmosphere from ice core samples. Never in 800,000 years have we seen carbon levels like those since the Industrial Revolution.
Climate Warming & Emissions
A striking correlation between emissions and global average temperatures. Although temperatures fluctuate regularly, their fluctuations track upward following human-based carbon emissions.
Microplastics
These are only produced by human production. Note that there are several parts of the ocean where we find more than 10 pieces per cubic meter (dark purple circles and dark red stars). There are over 1.3 billion cubic meters of surface water in the ocean.
Polar Ice Degradation
We do not have accurate data from long ago, but since 1990 the arctic ice shelves have declined in size dramatically. This also leads to a rise in sea levels. Here a comparison of ice in summer and winter in 1990 compared to 2020.
Scientific Consensus as of 2019
A review of all published climate science studies in peer reviewed journal articles between 2005 and 2015 suggested a consensus of somewhere between 83 and 97% of climate scientists that humans were causing the major changes we observe in our environment in the last 100 years1.
A new study of all of the just over 11 thousand articles across all disciplines and journals published in 2019 revealed that this consensus was 100% (within a natural margin of error)2.
Bibliography
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nate Breznau (August 31, 2023). Human Induced Climate Change. Crowdid. Retrieved January 23, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ne8p
