Climate Change
How are global temperatures changing, and what are the impacts on sea level rise, sea ice, and ice sheets?
Current climate change is primarily caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. This warming can drive large changes in sea level, sea ice and glacier balances, rainfall patterns, and extreme temperatures. This has potentially devastating impacts on human health, farming systems, the stability of societies, and other species.
To limit and stop climate change, we need to greatly reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases. We cover these emissions in our work on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. This will require massive shifts in our energy and food systems, which we also cover in detail.
On this page, you will find global data and research on the impacts of climate change, including temperature anomalies, sea level rise, sea ice melt, glacier loss, and ocean acidification.
Research & Writing
More people care about climate change than you think
The majority of people in every country support action on climate, but the public consistently underestimates this share.
How much have temperatures risen in countries across the world?
Explore country-by-country data on monthly temperature anomalies.
How much CO2 can the world emit while keeping warming below 1.5°C and 2°C?
The budget to keep temperatures below 1.5°C is less than a decade of current emissions. For 2°C, it’s less than three decades.
Related work on climate change and its impacts
Cite this work
Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:
Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Veronika Samborska (2024) - “Climate Change” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-climate-change,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado and Veronika Samborska},
title = {Climate Change},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2024},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change}
}
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