Reflecting on our Changing Climate, from Fear to Facts

This book contains reflections about climate change – an intrinsic reality of our planet’s history over the past 4.6 billion years – including both natural and anthropogenic variations. More recently, the phrase “climate change” has become a euphemism for “carbon dioxide emissions”. While focusing on CO2 emissions is crucial for understanding climate change, solely using this term in scientific discussions may lead to overlooking other complex factors contributing, among other things, to extreme weather events, potentially affecting the quality of evidence analysis. The shift towards using “climate change” interchangeably with “carbon dioxide emissions” within scientific circles, while highlighting a key driver, necessitates ensuring comprehensive discussions that encompass the diverse evidence related to all climate sub-systems. Therefore, using the phrase like a changing climate opens a bigger umbrella that facilitates covering multiple and complex climate manifestations.

The book will be useful to students, researchers and policy makers working and studying in the vast and often contentious landscape of climate change debates.