Climate change is the most prominent and imminent threat to our planet. Recent scientific findings indicate that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels explain the extent of climate change over the past 110 years. Moreover, these CO2 emissions are expected to increase even more over the next few decades. This poses a severe challenge for policymakers who need to develop effective mitigation strategies on a short-term and long-term basis.
Any attempt to tackle this challenge needs to adopt an evidence-based approach. To predict future climate, we need data about how environments have changed in the past. The first step towards this is establishing what climate variables we need to account for to produce reliable predictions of future climates. You might be wondering how we know what variables will affect future environments. What are some of the different ways we can predict climate change? Let us take a look at each one of these issues in detail below: