Climate justice
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Climate justice is an approach to climate action that focuses on the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized or otherwise vulnerable populations. Climate justice wants to achieve an equitable distribution of both the burdens of climate change and the efforts to mitigate climate change. Climate justice is a type of environmental justice.
Fridays for Future demonstration in Berlin in September 2021 with the slogan "fight for climate justice".
A visualisation by country of the impact of climate change (country size) and its contribution (country colour)
In 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands confirmed that the government must cut carbon dioxide emissions further, as climate change threatens citizens' human rights.
Rally for climate justice: Mass mobilization at the Chevron Oil Refinery in Richmond, California (2009)
Climate change
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In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global average temperature is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices add to greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide and methane. Greenhouse gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight. Larger amounts of these gases trap more heat in Earth's lower atmosphere, causing global warming.
Sea ice reflects 50% to 70% of incoming sunlight, while the ocean, being darker, reflects only 6%. As an area of sea ice melts and exposes more ocean, more heat is absorbed by the ocean, raising temperatures that melt still more ice. This is a positive feedback process.
Different levels of global warming may cause different parts of Earth's climate system to reach tipping points that cause transitions to different states.
Ecological collapse. Coral bleaching from thermal stress has damaged the Great Barrier Reef and threatens coral reefs worldwide.
Extreme weather. Drought and high temperatures worsened the 2020 bushfires in Australia.