Climate change may already be impacting 85% of humanity, study says

The effects of climate change could already be impacting 85% of the world's population, an analysis of tens of thousands of scientific studies said Monday. A team of researchers used machine learning to comb through vast troves of research published between 1951 and 2018, and found some 100,000 papers that potentially documented evidence of climate change's effects on the Earth's systems. "We have overwhelming evidence that climate change is affecting all continents -- all systems," study author Max Callaghan said in an interview. He added that there was a "huge amount of evidence" showing the ways in which these impacts are being felt. The researchers taught a computer to identify climate-relevant studies, generating a list of papers on topics from disrupted butterfly migration to heat-related human deaths and forestry cover changes.