Emissions → Climate → Weather
The atlas shows who emits what, and where. This page explains what those emissions do to the climate, and clears up the common confusion that “climate” is the same as “weather”.
The causal chain
Greenhouse gases such as CO₂ and methane build up in the atmosphere and trap more heat. That shifts the climate, the statistical distribution of temperature, precipitation and extremes over decades. A single day's weather stays variable; but the distribution it is drawn from shifts.
Climate ≠ weather
A cold day doesn't refute warming; a single storm doesn't prove it. Weather is what's happening outside right now; climate is the long-term pattern behind it. Warming is decided by the decades-long trend, not yesterday's headline.
Loaded dice
Emissions don't cause a specific weather event. They change the odds. Like loading dice: any single roll stays random, but rare extremes such as heatwaves, downpours and droughts become more frequent and more severe. So one can never say “this source = that storm”, only that more emissions load the dice further.
What the atlas contributes
The emitter atlas makes the cumulative contribution visible: individual facilities, their annual amount, their trend. None of these sources is responsible for a specific weather event, but taken together and over time they shift the climate, and with it the odds.
Where this can be followed up
This page explains the chain. The pages below show it against real data, each at a different link of it.
- Climate. The shifted distribution, measured: temperature and threshold days since 1881. Here you can see that it is not the weather that changed, but what it is drawn from.
- Extreme weather and wildfire. The loaded dice in their outcome. The page separates strictly between what ignites a single fire and the conditions under which a spark becomes one.
- Low water. The same case on the water side, and the clearest answer to the question of which figure carries a climate statement at all: of four levels, only two do.
- Air quality. The same sources, a different harm. It acts immediately and locally, not over decades, and therefore needs no probability argument.
- Species diversity. Where this chain ends. The decline in Germany is largely not a climate problem but one of land use. Anyone who has followed the chain will see here where it stops.
- Solutions. What follows from it, on three levels: individual, collective, systemic.