The Earth’s climate is an enormously complicated mess of moving parts that interact in unpredictable ways and can only be understood with advanced scientific knowledge — but that doesn’t mean the climate is impossible to understand.
The simple act of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will raise the Earth’s temperature by 2-4 degrees Celsius; adding more greenhouse gases will trap more heat, which will draw more moisture into the atmosphere, which will further trap heat, in a cycle.
While weather, which can be predicted up to two weeks out, is subject to chaotic, multiplying variations that make its course impossible to guess, the climate is a statistics of those variations — and it’s changing in frightening, measurable ways right now.
