Global Warming vs. Climate Change, Arguments, Projected Impacts and Implications for Emergency Management

Discussion: Global Warming, Climate Change and Emergency Management

• Is there a difference between global warming and climate change? Explain.
• What are some arguments for and against global warming/climate change?
• What are the projected impacts of global warming/climate change?
• How will global warming/climate change affect emergency management, including prevention, preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery?
• Cite at least three scholarly sources. Respond to classmates with posts that enhance their thinking, and cite your sources.

Original example for study purposes (about 520 words). Add your course text and any required readings.

Global Warming Versus Climate Change

The terms are related but not identical. Global warming refers specifically to the long-term rise in Earth’s average surface temperature, driven mainly by greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. Climate change is the broader term for long-term shifts in temperature, precipitation, wind patterns and other aspects of the climate system, including sea level rise, shrinking ice and changes in extreme events (NASA, 2023). In other words, global warming is one cause and component of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2023) concluded that human activities have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature about 1.1°C higher in 2011–2020 than in 1850–1900.

Arguments For and Against

Arguments supporting human-caused climate change include multiple independent temperature records showing warming, the physics of greenhouse gases, rising carbon dioxide concentrations from fossil fuel use, retreating glaciers and sea ice, rising sea levels and climate models that reproduce observed warming only when human emissions are included (IPCC, 2023). Arguments raised by skeptics include that the climate has always changed naturally, that solar variability or ocean cycles explain the warming, that models are uncertain, that some regions have experienced cold extremes and that the economic costs of reducing emissions are too high. Scientific assessments address most of these: natural factors such as the sun cannot explain recent warming, and while uncertainty exists about the size of future impacts, it does not change the overall direction. The strongest remaining debates concern policy, such as how quickly and at what cost to reduce emissions and adapt.

Projected Impacts

The IPCC (2023) projects that continued emissions will increase the frequency and intensity of heat extremes, heavy precipitation, agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions and intense tropical cyclones, and that sea levels will keep rising for centuries. These changes are expected to threaten food and water security, damage infrastructure, increase heat-related illness and death and worsen inequities, because low-income communities, older adults and people with chronic illness are most exposed and least able to adapt.

Implications for Emergency Management

Schneider (2019) argued that climate change is a critical variable that emergency managers must factor into their work, even when national policy language avoids the term. Its effects touch every phase:

• Prevention and mitigation: hazard mitigation plans must use forward-looking climate projections rather than historical records alone, updating floodplain maps, building codes, stormwater systems and land-use rules, and investing in green infrastructure and buyouts in repeatedly flooded areas.
• Preparedness: agencies must prepare for more frequent and overlapping disasters, such as a heat wave during a wildfire season, by expanding cooling centers, early warning systems, evacuation planning for vulnerable populations and mutual aid agreements.
• Response: more frequent events will strain personnel, budgets and shelters, and responders themselves face heat stress and longer deployments.
• Recovery: recovery must “build back better,” rebuilding to higher standards and sometimes relocating rather than restoring the same vulnerable conditions. Recovery funding and plans should be linked to long-term climate adaptation so that each disaster reduces future risk.

Overall, climate change turns emergency management from a reactive to a forward-looking profession that must plan for conditions that have never occurred locally before.

References

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2023). Climate change 2023: Synthesis report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Core Writing Team, H. Lee, & J. Romero, Eds.). IPCC. https://doi.org/10.59327/IPCC/AR6-9789291691647

NASA. (2023, August 2). Is climate change the same as global warming? We asked a NASA scientist [Video]. https://www.nasa.gov

Schneider, R. O. (2019). Emergency management in a changing climate. Journal of Emergency Management, 17(6), 487–495. https://doi.org/10.5055/jem.2019.0441

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