The effects of climate change span the globe and have reached an overwhelming majority of people on Earth in the form of coastal flooding, wildfires, and other climate-related events, new findings suggest.
Using a special computer program to analyze the sizeable amount of data on climate change, researchers report that about 85% of people have felt its effects, according to results published Monday in Nature Climate Change .
To come to this conclusion, scientists fed published summaries of more than 100,000 studies on climate change into a computer trained to identify key information. The computer mapped that information onto a global grid of data on local temperature and precipitation changes that are linked to human activity.
The maps show where these precipitation and temperature shifts ― both of which are measures of climate change ― were likely connected to climate-related outcomes such as drought, floods, fires, and even human health.
The results suggest that 80% of the Earth’s land, not including Antarctica, is experiencing climate change because of human activity ― at least in part. Almost all the temperature shifts are toward warming, though precipitation changes are mixed, with increases in some areas and declines in others.
Compared with low-income countries, high-income countries had about double the amount of solid evidence for the human factor in climate change, the researchers found. That said, one possible explanation for why the roughly 20% of land mass where human-induced effects were seemingly weaker ― like in western Africa and some parts of Asia ― is that these areas have been less scrutinized by scientists, the study authors said.
Source
Nature Climate Change: “Machine-learning-based evidence and attribution mapping of 100,000 climate impact studies.”
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