Demystifying Climate Change Lingo: From Scope 3 to SSP

Climate change is complicated, to say the least, so the terminology relating to climate change can also be hard to decipher. Here we’ve put together a simplified glossary of just a few terms that can be helpful to know as you navigate information about global warming. We’ll start with the very basics and move on to some of the more obscure jargon.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions

These emissions are a type of pollution that builds up in the atmosphere and causes the greenhouse effect—where solar heat gets trapped in the atmosphere and can’t get back out, in much the same way that the sun heats up a car in summer. The greenhouse effect is the mechanism behind global warming.