Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 144, anthropogenic climate change.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So, this will be the final episode in our series looking at climate change.

And today, as indicated, we're going to be talking about anthropogenic or human-caused climate change,

with the focus particularly being on how we know specifically that the warming of the climate

over the past century or so is due predominantly to human causes.

And we'll also then talk about, you know, given that we know the primary causes of the changes in the climate, what can we project about how those changes will continue over the coming century, so future projections and effects on extreme weather, the oceans, ecosystems and so forth. So the projections and impacts of continued warming brought about by continued

greenhouse gas emissions. So that's the second part of the episode. And we'll also talk a little

bit at the end about mitigation and the costs and benefits thereof, though the focus won't be

on like the pros and cons of different technological solutions, but rather just on an overall

estimates of how effectively we can mitigate impacts of climate change and what the relative

cost of benefits of that would be. So the recommended pre-listening is the previous episode

143 on climate modeling. It's all part of a series, so that will be helpful

to understand the context. Now, with that introduction another way, let's get into it and start

talking about what is sometimes called the fingerprints of human-produced warming. So throughout

the series, we've talked about the history of the Earth's climate, mechanisms of climate change,

the greenhouse effect, and then how we model and measure climate change

and the alterations on Earth climate. And we've said a lot about the fact that greenhouse gas

emissions have been increasing. We have a very clear model from the greenhouse effect about how

greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere affect temperatures. We have used climate models of a range of different types and sophistications to establish that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions very well explains the increase in temperatures over the last hundred years or so, whereas other potential causes, such as solar forcing, orbital changes and so forth, don't explain

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