Since the last climate deal in 1997, the Earth has grown into a wilder, hotter and waterier place, and climate change is now regarded as a more urgent problem.
The last time that the nations of the world struck a binding agreement to fight global warming was 1997, in Kyoto, Japan. As leaders gather for a conference in Paris to try to do more, it's clear things have changed dramatically over the past 18 years.
Some differences can be measured:degrees on a thermometer, trillions of tons of melting ice, a rise in sea level of a couple of inches. Epic weather disasters, including punishing droughts, killer heat waves and monster storms, have plagued Earth.
As a result, climate change is seen as a more urgent and concrete problem than it was last time.
Global temperatures to rise 4°C by 2100 :
"At the time of Kyoto, if someone talked about climate change, they were talking about something that was abstract in the future," said Marcia McNutt, the former U.S. Geological Survey director who was picked to run the National Academies of Sciences. "Now, we're talking about changing climate, something that's happening now.
Accelerating change
"You can point to event after event that is happening in the here and now that is a direct result of changing climate." Other, nonphysical changes since 1997 make many experts more optimistic than in previous climate negotiations.
For one, improved technology is pointing to the possibility of a world weaned from fossil fuels, which emit heat-trapping gases. Businesses and countries are more serious about doing something, in the face of evidence that some of science's worst-case scenarios are coming to pass.
"I am quite stunned by how much the Earth has changed since 1997," Princeton University's Bill Anderegg said in an email. "In many cases (e.g. Arctic sea ice loss, forest die-off due to drought), the speed of climate change is proceeding even faster than we thought it would two decades ago."
Some of the cold numbers on global warming since 1997:
- The West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have lost 5.5 trillion tons of ice, or 5 trillion metric tons, according to Andrew Shepherd at the University of Leeds, who used NASA and European satellite data.
2013 was the fourth hottest year since 1880 :
- The five deadliest heat waves of the past century in Europe in 2003, Russia in 2010, India and Pakistan this year, Western Europe in 2006 and southern Asia in 1998 have come in the past 18 years, according to the International Disaster Database run by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium.
- The number of weather and climate disasters worldwide has increased 42 percent, though deaths are down 58 percent. From 1993 to 1997, the world averaged 221 weather disasters that killed 3,248 people a year.
From 2010 to 2014, the yearly average of weather disasters was up to 313, while deaths dropped to 1,364, according to the disaster database.
Eighteen years ago, the discussion was far more about average temperatures, not the freakish extremes. Now, scientists and others realise it is in the more frequent extremes that people are truly experiencing climate change.
Witness the "large downpours, floods, mudslides, the deeper and longer droughts, rising sea levels from the melting ice, forest fires", former Vice President Al Gore, who helped negotiate the 1997 agreement, told The Associated Press. "There's a long list of events that people can see and feel viscerally right now.
"Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation."
Studies have shown that man-made climate change contributed in a number of recent weather disasters. Among those that climate scientists highlight as most significant: the 2003 European heat wave that killed 70,000 people in the deadliest such disaster in a century; Hurricane Sandy, worsened by sea level rise, which caused claimed 159 lives; the 2010 Russian heat wave that left more than 55,000 dead; the drought still gripping California; and Typhoon Haiyan, which killed more than 6,000 in the Philippines in 2013.
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