Introduction
This environmental factor influences everything from species distributions to the dynamics of vector-borne disease transmission.
What is temperature?
Collecting more data points, using calibrated instruments, and following consistent procedures are all ways to............
How to reduce noise or error?
These two frameworks, one focused on CO2 emissions and the other incorporating multiple socioeconomic factors, are the most commonly used models for projecting climate change.
What are the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) models?
Rising global temperatures have led to these wide-ranging impacts, including altered weather patterns, melting ice caps, sea level rise, more extreme weather events, and increased wildfires.
What are the effects/impacts of global warming / climate change?
These three types of organisms are major vectors of diseases like dengue, Lyme disease, and chagas disease, and their geographic range, phenology, and biology are being altered by global warming.
What are mosquitoes, ticks, and kissing bugs?
It is reduced when temperature is either too high or too low, and is maximized when temperature is just right.
What is performance?
These are four common sources of evidence scientists use to study past climates.
What are fossils, sediment cores, ice cores, and tree rings?
These repeating wind patterns, including the Hadley, cells, move air around the Earth and help distribute heat from the equator toward the poles.
What are atmospheric circulation cells?
These factors, including volcanic activity (aerosols), changes in solar output, and Earth’s orbital changes, influence the climate system.
What are the natural climate drivers or forcings?
This theory explains how climate change can disrupt the timing between species—such as when a predator's reproductive cycle no longer aligns with the peak availability of its prey.
What is the mismatch hypothesis (or phenological mismatch theory)?
These are the three most common measures of dispersion in statistics.
What are the range, the variance, and the standard deviation?
This term refers to long-term changes in temperature, precipitation, humidity, and other atmospheric conditions.
What is climate?
These computer models simulate Earth's climate systems by analyzing factors like temperature, wind, and precipitation patterns across different layers of the atmosphere and oceans.
What are Global Circulation Models?
This international body assesses scientific, technical, and socio-economic information to help understand climate change, its impacts, and strategies for adaptation and mitigation.
What is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC?
These include consequences such as food insecurity, mass migration, conflict over water, rising health risks, increased spread of vector-borne diseases, higher insurance costs, loss of property value, and displacement of communities.
What are the indirect impacts of global warming on humans?
This graph, often hump-shaped, shows how an organism’s performance changes with temperature, peaking at an optimal point and bounded by thermal limits.
What is a thermal performance curve?
This term describes the difference between an observed value of a parameter, like temperature or precipitation, and its value relative to a baseline period such as the pre-industrial era.
What are climate anomalies?
This process occurs when melting ice decreases Earth's reflectivity, causing more solar radiation to be absorbed, which accelerates warming.
What is a positive feedback loop?
These three are the major international accords aimed at addressing global climate change: one adopted in 1992, one in 1997, and one in 2015.
What are the UNFCCC or Rio protocol, Kyoto protocol, and Paris Agreement?
Population decline or go extinct, individuals acclimate, species adapt, species shift ranges, species evolve.
Organisms responses to climate change (global warming).
This 2015 agreement aims to keep global warming well below 2°C and involves countries submitting Nationally Determined Contributions.
What is the Paris Agreement?
Temperature, wind speed, air pressure, and cloud cover are most commonly measured in this atmospheric layer closest to Earth's surface.
What is the troposphere?
This process occurs when warming causes water to expand, leading to a rise in sea levels as oceans absorb more heat.
What is thermal expansion?
This term refers to the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted directly and indirectly by human activities, often measured in units of carbon dioxide equivalent.
What is a carbon footprint?
This phenomenon occurs when species are forced to move to higher altitudes or latitudes in response to warming temperatures, potentially leading to habitat fragmentation or extinction.
What is species range shift?