From studying a coral reef’s health in the Caribbean to tracking glacial ice melt on Antarctica, climate research informs us about how the Earth is changing. These observations help us anticipate future impacts on resources such as freshwater, food production and human health, for example, as the ranges of insect-borne diseases and drought-prone areas expand.
Climate researchers are also investigating what drives these changes. To make sense of the complex data, scientists use computer models that simulate climate responses to changes in external factors such as greenhouse gases and solar radiation. The resulting patterns of observed change are then compared to the simulated patterns generated by the model. The statistical method of detection involves determining how much the simulated pattern differs from the actual observed value and identifying the difference as evidence of climate change.
Thousands of individual observational records, amounting to millions of data points, are used to construct global temperature datasets for climate research. These data are merged, subjected to quality control and homogenized before being gridded and made available to the research community (see e.g., Dee & other Internet Resources).
Some of the most fundamental findings of recent climate science involve the human impact on climate. Early discoveries such as that of Guy Stewart Callendar linking carbon dioxide emissions with warming temperatures and Charles Keeling’s measurement of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere helped to lay the groundwork for modern understanding of human-based contributions to climate change. Scientists have come to a broad agreement on how climate changes and on what causes those changes, though some are still working to understand the full implications of a warming world.