Climate Change and its Impacts – Current understanding, future directions

Abstract

Global climate change is well documented through warming of the atmosphere and oceans, sea-level rise and changes in the cryosphere (the portions of the Earth’s surface where water is in solid form) over the past few decades. Climate change is also occurring across the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB), as is evidenced by increasing temperatures. There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the past half-century. Global warming is, in turn, causing changes to the whole climate system—the highly complex interaction between the atmosphere, oceans, water cycle, ice, snow and frozen ground, land surface and living organisms. There will be environmental, economic and social ‘impacts’ resulting from all these changes.