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
March 25, 2024
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.
March 18, 2024
How much have temperatures risen in countries across the world?
Explore country-by-country data on monthly temperature anomalies.
September 29, 2023
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.
More articles on climate change
March 3, 2025
“Cool” years are now hotter than the “warm” years of the past: tracking global temperatures through El Niño and La Niña
October 28, 2024
Climate change will affect food production, but here are the things we can do to adapt
October 14, 2024
How will climate change affect crop yields in the future?
September 30, 2024
Crop yields have increased dramatically in recent decades, but crops like maize would have improved more without climate change
July 29, 2024
Air conditioning causes around 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. How will this change in the future?
July 22, 2024
How can the world reduce deaths from extreme heat?
July 1, 2024
How many people die from extreme temperatures, and how this could change in the future: Part one
July 1, 2024
How many people die from extreme temperatures, and how this could change in the future: Part two
September 29, 2020
We teamed up with Kurzgesagt to make a video about climate change: 'Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's Complicated'
June 22, 2020
We teamed up with Kurzgesagt to make a video about climate change: 'Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? – Who Needs To Fix It?'
Related work on climate change and its impacts
Key Charts on Climate Change
See all charts on this topic
Featured Data on Climate Change
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}
}
Reuse this work freely
All visualizations, data, and articles produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.
All of our charts can be embedded in any site.