December 12th marked 5 years since the adoption of the Paris climate agreement.
Let's see if anything has changed.
Data also shows that the rate of ice loss has accelerated. Up to 2012, the polar caps lost an average of 76 billion tonnes of ice per year. In the six years since then, they have lost 219 billion tonnes a year.
Another consequence of the rise in water temperature is thermal expansion: when water heats up, it expands and causes a rise in sea-level. Over the past five years, the sea level has risen by 5 millimetres per year, compared to 4 millimetres in the ten-year period from 2007-2016.
Arguably though, the effect of climate change that we notice the most is the increase in natural disasters. Be it hurricanes, tropical cyclones, droughts or fires, we are seeing more and more extreme weather events, and their effects are increasingly devastating.
Comments