Process
Coral bleaching
When water is too warm, corals expel the algae living in their tissues and turn white. Record heat in 2015 and 2016 caused the third global bleaching event since the 1980s.
Climate change and living things
Warming is moving species ranges: a 2003 analysis found shifts toward the poles averaging 6.1 km per decade and spring events arriving 2.3 days earlier per decade.Source: Parmesan & Yohe, 2003Source: IPCC, 2022
Idea or model
How Climate change and living things connects
Climate change and living things can cause
Climate change and living things is related to
Idea or model
Biodiversity
The variety of life, from genes to ecosystems. A 2019 global assessment found that around 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction.
Process
Carbon cycle
The movement of carbon among the air, oceans, living things, soils and rocks.
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems (opens the original in a new tab)
Parmesan C, Yohe G (2003). Nature 421:37-42.
Peer-reviewedSystematic analysisSummary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Working Group II, Sixth Assessment Report) (opens the original in a new tab)
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022). IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Consensus reportIntergovernmental source