Three days of heavy rains devastated Louisiana in mid-August 2016. NOAA models find that warming due to greenhouse gases has made an event like that at least 40% more likely and 10% more intense.
If we built a rollercoaster that matched the shape of a graph of Earth's temperature history since the end of the last ice age, the track up the latest hill would be nearly vertical.
Scientists estimated global average carbon dioxide concentration at 397.2 parts per million (ppm) in 2014, as the global growth rate of carbon dioxide continues to accelerate.
From soybeans and sunflowers in North Dakota to cotton and winter wheat in Texas, large stretches of croplands in the U.S. Great Plains rely exclusively on rain. Those croplands are likely to face longer dry spells by mid-century.
Some of the chemicals that replaced ozone-harming CFCs are long-lived greenhouse gases. At NOAA's lab in Boulder, Colorado, chemist Steve Montzka leads the effort to monitor the concentration of CFC-substitutes and their potential impact on global warming.
For 800,000 years before the twentieth century, carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere never exceeded 300 parts per million. In March 2015, the monthly average went above 400 ppm for the first time.
Charles Keeling's measurements of carbon dioxide from the summit of Mauna Loa have become a landmark for mankind’s impact on the Earth. In this video, NOAA scientists talk about the history of the observations that allow us to connect Earth's warming climate to the greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.
In the Northeast, the amount of rain that came down in very heavy events increased by more than 70 percent between 1958 and 2010. A new law in New York requires state agencies to start thinking ahead about increases in extreme rain and other climate change risks.