Global Climate Change - Statistics & Facts

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Wang reports that in 2017, the earth’s surface temperature was around 0.84 Celsius degrees warmer than the 20th century average. In the last few years, global temperatures have been consistently among the hottest on record. The global anomaly in surface temperature might be the cause of an increase in sea level, a decrease in arctic ice and the growing number of weather-related catastrophes, including storms, floods and droughts. The economic loss due to the 2012 drought in the United States reached around 20 billion U.S. dollars, making it the country’s most costly drought in history.

Between November 30 and December 11, 2015, Paris hosted the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations' Framework Conference on Climate Change. The objective of the annual conference was to tackle climate change, stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and to reach a post-Kyoto Protocol agreement. The Kyoto Protocol was initially adopted in 1997 as an extension to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In the 2018 UNFCCC Conference in Katowice, Poland, rules were established in order to implement the Paris Agreement which acts as a guide on how governments will measure and report their climate efforts.

Global energy-related CO2 emissions stood at around 36.15 billion metric tons in 2017, a significant increase from the pre-Industrial era. In 2017, China was the largest producer of CO2 emissions. In order to reduce the production of carbon dioxide, several countries have started issuing tradable green certificates. Carbon pricing is considered one of the most effective methods to encourage corporations to lower emissions and to encourage more sustainable production. The increase in energy generation from renewable energy sources is seen as another way to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions.

[Note on the above comments: 
1) China is rapidly building nuclear power plants for the sole purpose of eliminating coal as their currently primary source of power to generate electricity, For more on China, see: http://i2mportal.com/resource_detail.php?resource_id=6307 

2) The primary way to reduce emissions in China and the U.S., etc is to replace coal-powered plants with nuclear-powered plants. For more, see: http://i2mportal.com/search_resource.php?search_value=U.S.+nuclear+power+plants#page=1 ].