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IS GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE REAL?

ESSAY TYPE: ARGUMENTATIVE, DIVISION/CLASSIFICATION

NUMBER OF PAGES: 3-10

TOPIC: ECOLOGY

MINIMUM NUMBER OF DOCUMENTS: 8 FROM 5 CATEGORIES

VIDEOS

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (GORE, 2006)

FUTURAMA EPISODES “NONE LIKE IT HOT” AND “AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH FROM FUTURAMA”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2taViFH_6_Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hib8zdoZ-YY&feature=related

GLOBAL WARMING: IT’S ALL ABOUT CARBON (5 EPISODES)

http://www.npr.org/news/specials/climate/video/ (about 2-3 minutes each)

NOVELS

STATE OF FEAR by MICHAEL CRICHTON

INTERACTIVES

HTTP://CLIMATE.NASA.GOV/KEYINDICATORS/

HTTP://ENVIRONMENT.NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/ENVIRONMENT/GLOBAL-WARMING/GW-OVERVIEW-INTERACTIVE.HTML

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GRAPHS/PICTURES

http://www.what-is-global-warming.com/

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POPULAR LITERATURE SOURCES

CLIMATE NAZIS AND THEIR LIES SOUTH ORANGE, NJ THURSDAY, MAY 17, 2012

By Alan Caruba Founder, The National Anxiety Center, South Orange, NJ; 973-763-6392

What is it with the "warmists", Al Gore and his clones who keep insisting the Earth is warming, that too much carbon dioxide (CO2) will be the death of us, and that we have to immediately stop burning "fossil fuels" if we are to save the planet? They are the most relentless liars on the face of the planet.

They want us to cover the surface of the U.S. with solar panels and the mountains with wind turbines to generate the energy needed for everything we do. These Green energy alternatives are so wonderful they are producing a mere three percent of our current needs, require government subsidies and loan guarantees to exist, and tend not to be all that great when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

So why are we still hearing from this discredited and disgraced bunch of charlatans and buffoons? In early May, The New York Times published "Game Over for the Climate" by a major offender of the truth, Dr. James Hansen, who for some reason is still the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), despite having pocketed big bucks beyond his humble government salary. In 2007 he split a million dollar Dan Davis Prize with someone else and in 2001, received a $250,000 Heinz Award. Former GISS employees want him fired.

As debased as The Times is, in 2006 the American Association for the Advancement of Science selected Hansen to receive their Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. I cite this as a warning that even a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper and formerly respected science organization have long since gone over to the dark side when it comes to global warming. Nothing they have to say on the subject should be regarded as more than pure propaganda.

Suffice to say that Dr. Hansen's opinion article cited every global warming lie we have been hearing since 1988 when he first gained famed testifying before a congressional committee that we were doomed. In his Times article, he predicted that the "semi-permanent drought" would turn the Midwest into "a dust bowl." Like every other global warming prediction (that hasn't come true) this will happen "over the next several decades." Time enough for Dr. Hansen to pick up a few more awards and fatten his bank account.

The face of the global warming hoax, Al Gore, will not shut up. He made news in August 2011 when he totally lost it while speaking at the Aspen Institute. Anyone, noted climatologists, meteorologists, and mere science writers like myself were the target of his rant for actually citing things such as the fact that the Earth has been in a natural COOLING cycle since 1998 and other inconvenient facts about the climate.

"And some of the exact same people" said Gore, frothing at the mouth, "I can go down a list of their names—are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message. 'This climate thing, it's nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn't trap heat. It may be volcanoes' Bullshit! 'It may be sun spots.' Bullshit! 'It's not getting warmer.' Bullshit!"

The climate is not cooperating. The Church of Global Warming is crumbling around them. People are making fun of them. Parents are objecting to their scaring children with their lies. People

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actually want to warm their homes in winter and cool them in the summer. Meanwhile, using the global warming lies, the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to shut down the entire U.S. coal mining industry and attacking "fracking" to access natural gas. The Department of the Interior has virtually shut down all oil drilling on federal land and offshore. How crazed is all this?

One of their number, Dr. Peter Gleick, formerly of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics—the irony is too delicious—perpetrated a fraud against The Heartland Institute earlier this year, pretending to be a member of its board in order to secure a list of its donors and allegedly authoring a memo about a scheme to invade the nation's schoolrooms with a program to dispute global warming. After confessing to the former, he resigned from the task force. An FBI probe is underway to determine if he broke any laws. Heartland has dubbed it "Fakegate."

The Institute, by the way, is sponsoring its 7th annual conference on climate change, May 21-23, in Chicago, immediately following the NATO conference that will be held in the windy city where it is headquartered. Its theme this year is "Real Science, Real Choices." Among the speakers will be Czech President Vaclav Klaus, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, vice chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and two former NASA astronauts.

The lesson we can draw from the last few decades is that the entire environmental movement, of which the global warming hoax is one part, is an extension of what Dr. Robert Zubin, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy, addressed in his new book, "Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalism, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism."

Antihumanism has been around a long time. As Dr. Zubin points out, it has taken the form of "Darwinism, eugenics, German militarism, Nazism, xenophobia, the population control movement, environmentalism, technophobia, and most recently, the incredibly demented climatophobic movement, which seeks to justify mass human sacrifice for the purpose of weather control."

Al Gore, James Hansen, and even President Obama's science advisor, John Holden, are card-carrying members of this cult. In 1971 Holden co-authored "Global Ecology" with Paul Ehrlich, famed for his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb." They wrote "when a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later, it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the 'carrying capacity' of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet."

So you need to understand that you are no better than a fruit fly and you need to die in order to avoid depleting the planet's supply of food and its energy resources.

God knows I would like to ignore or—better still—never have to hear from these climate Nazis, but that is not going to happen so long as The New York Times, the United Nations, and a host of others keep repeating their lethal lies.

ENVIRONMENTALIST SCIENTIST ADMITS HE WAS 'ALARMIST' ON GLOBAL WARMING

By Napp Nazworth , Christian Post Reporter April 26, 2012|9:13 pm

James Lovelock, the scientist who developed the "Gaia theory" of Earth, said in a MSNBC interview that he was too "alarmist" in an earlier book on global warming.

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The science supporting global warming, Lovelock said, does not understand as much about how the Earth's climate changes as scientists had previously claimed.

"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now."

Lovelock has written several books considered important works within the environmentalist movement, including, GAIA: A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH (1979), THE REVENGE OF GAIA (2006), and THE VANISHING FACE OF GAIA: A FINAL WARNING (2009).

His next book, due next year, will take a more measured tone about climate change, Lubbock said. Lubbock still believes that atmospheric carbon is causing the Earth to warm, but not as much and as quickly as he had previously expected.

The "Gaia theory" developed by Lovelock postulates that Earth is like a single organism, with its living and non-living parts interacting with one another. While the "Gaia theory" has made Lovelock a seminal figure within the environmentalist movement, he has butted heads with some environmentalists for his outspoken advocacy for nuclear power.

In the interview, he mentioned "An Inconvenient Truth," the 2006 Oscar winning documentary narrated by former Vice President Al Gore, as another example of alarmist global warming rhetoric.

Few challenge the notion that the planet is getting warmer. The debate over climate change is mostly about whether, or to what extent, Earth's warming is caused by humans, mostly in the form of burning fossil fuels, versus part of a natural warming and cooling cycle.

Christians are also split on the issue. Some advocate stronger policies aimed at reducing atmospheric carbon, others worry such policies would be unadvisable without sufficient scientific evidence to justify them.

President Barack Obama this week, in a Rolling Stone interview, blamed conservatives for raising doubts about human-caused climate change.

With Americans' concerns focused on the economy, Obama explained, "it's been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science."

The current presidential race will present an opportunity, Obama added, to voice "my belief that we're going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way."

WALL STREET JOURNAL: IN 10 YEARS, NO SIGN OF GLOBAL WARMING

Tuesday, 27 Mar 2012 10:33 AM

By Martin Gould Wall Street Journal

World temperatures have remained virtually unchanged in the past 10 years despite predictions of global warming and America’s mildest winter in decades, Princeton physics professor William Happer contends. Weather patterns worldwide over the past few months were very similar to those in 1942 when the

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continental United States basked in a warm winter at the same time that Alaska and Asia were slammed with severe weather and “General Frost” stalled the German army’s advance into Russia, Happer wrote in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed. And any changes that have occurred should not be attributed to a rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Happer, a prominent opponent of climate change theory, wrote in an article headlined “Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again.” “CO2 is not a pollutant,” he wrote. “Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today. Increasing CO2 levels will be a net benefit because cultivated plants grow better and are more resistant to drought at higher CO2 levels, and because warming and other supposedly harmful effects of CO2 have been greatly exaggerated.” Global temperatures have increased by around four-fifths of one degree Celsius since the “Little Ice Age” of the early 1800s, he wrote. “Some of that warming has probably come from increased amounts of CO2, but the timing of the warming — much of it before CO2 levels had increased appreciably — suggests that a substantial fraction of the warming is from natural causes that have nothing to do with mankind.” Recent severe tornadoes in the United States also prove nothing, Happer wrote. “Like winter temperatures, the numbers, severity and geographical locations of tornadoes fluctuate from year-to-year in ways that are correlated with the complicated fluid flow patterns of the oceans and atmosphere, the location of the jet stream, El Niño or La Niña conditions of the tropical Pacific Oceans, etc. “As long as the laws of nature exist, we will have tornadoes,” he added. “But we can save many more lives by addressing the threat of tornadoes directly — for example, with improved and more widely dispersed weather radars, and with better means for warning the people of endangered areas — than by credulous support of schemes to reduce ‘carbon footprints,’ or by funding even more computer centers to predict global warming.” Happer has become one of the most outspoken skeptics of global warming. He told Congress in 2009 that the increase in carbon dioxide “will be good for mankind.” The same year, he likened those who believe carbon dioxide is causing climate change to Nazis. “This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” he said. “What used to be science has turned into a cult.”

LAST TIME CARBON DIOXIDE LEVELS WERE THIS HIGH: 15 MILLION YEARS AGO, SCIENTISTS REPORT

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today, a UCLA scientist and colleagues report Oct. 8 in the online edition of the journal Science

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"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

"Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said.

By analyzing the chemistry of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists have been able to determine the composition of Earth's atmosphere going back as far as 800,000 years, and they have developed a good understanding of how carbon dioxide levels have varied in the atmosphere since that time. But there has been little agreement before this study on how to reconstruct carbon dioxide levels prior to 800,000 years ago.

Tripati, before joining UCLA's faculty, was part of a research team at England’s University of Cambridge that developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past — by studying the ratio of the chemical element boron to calcium in the shells of ancient single-celled marine algae. Tripati has now used this method to determine the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere as far back as 20 million years ago.

"We are able, for the first time, to accurately reproduce the ice-core record for the last 800,000 years — the record of atmospheric C02 based on measurements of carbon dioxide in gas bubbles in ice," Tripati said. "This suggests that the technique we are using is valid.

"We then applied this technique to study the history of carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago to 20 million years ago," she said. "We report evidence for a very close coupling between carbon dioxide levels and climate. When there is evidence for the growth of a large ice sheet on Antarctica or on Greenland or the growth of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, we see evidence for a dramatic change in carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years.

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."

Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years — until recent decades, said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. It has been known that modern-day levels of carbon dioxide are unprecedented over the last 800,000 years, but the finding that modern levels have not been reached in the last 15 million years is new.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the carbon dioxide level was about 280 parts per million, Tripati said. That figure had changed very little over the previous 1,000 years. But since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide level has been rising and is likely to soar unless action is taken to reverse the trend, Tripati said.

"During the Middle Miocene (the time period approximately 14 to 20 million years ago), carbon dioxide levels were sustained at about 400 parts per million, which is about where we are today," Tripati said. "Globally, temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, a huge amount."

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Tripati's new chemical technique has an average uncertainty rate of only 14 parts per million. "We can now have confidence in making statements about how carbon dioxide has varied throughout history," Tripati said.

In the last 20 million years, key features of the climate record include the sudden appearance of ice on Antarctica about 14 million years ago and a rise in sea level of approximately 75 to 120 feet. "We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in carbon dioxide levels of about 100 parts per million, a huge change," Tripati said. "This record is the first evidence that carbon dioxide may be linked with environmental changes, such as changes in the terrestrial ecosystem, distribution of ice, sea level and monsoon intensity."

Today, the Arctic Ocean is covered with frozen ice all year long, an ice cap that has been there for about 14 million years. "Prior to that, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic," Tripati said.

Some projections show carbon dioxide levels rising as high as 600 or even 900 parts per million in the next century if no action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide, Tripati said. Such levels may have been reached on Earth 50 million years ago or earlier, said Tripati, who is working to push her data back much farther than 20 million years and to study the last 20 million years in detail.

More than 50 million years ago, there were no ice sheets on Earth, and there were expanded deserts in the subtropics, Tripati noted. The planet was radically different.

Co-authors on the Science paper are Christopher Roberts, a Ph.D. student in the department of Earth sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Robert Eagle, a postdoctoral scholar in the division of geological and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology. The research was funded by UCLA's Division of Physical Sciences and the United Kingdom's National Environmental Research Council.

Tripati's research focuses on the development and application of chemical tools to study climate change throughout history. She studies the evolution of climate and seawater chemistry through time. "I'm interested in understanding how the carbon cycle and climate have been coupled, and why they have been coupled, over a range of time-scales, from hundreds of years to tens of millions of years," Tripati said. In addition to being published on the Science Express website, the paper will be published in the print edition of Science at a later date.

THE GREATEST HOAX? GLOBAL WARMING, SAYS SEN. JAMES INHOFE

Right Side News; The Right News for Americans

WEDNESDAY, 06 JUNE 2012 09:46

By ROGER ARONOFF

The issue of global warming continues to be a fault line in this country and across the world. There are, on the one hand, those who believe, like Al Gore, that the earth is warming to a catastrophic degree, that it is caused by man’s overuse of carbon-based energy, and if we don’t hurry and do something about it we will face the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, biblical flooding, and increased tornadoes and hurricanes. Their holy grail is the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which they cite as confirmation of their theories.

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In a recent interview with Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), we discussed his recent book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, in which he documents his personal journey of discovery on this issue—from his early days in politics, as the mayor of Tulsa, to his time as a congressman—from his years in the insurance and oil businesses, and seeing firsthand the heavy hand of the federal government.

In what way is global warming a hoax? Inhofe said, “...I’m talking about MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, the Al Gore Hollywood elites, and all that. These are people who really want to believe this, and they have unlimited funds that they pour into campaigns. They brag about having ‘defeated’ people, that they’re able to do, and that’s how they got so much political power. That is where the hoax comes in, because they’re perpetrating a hoax, and that hoax is that catastrophic global warming is taking place in the world now, and it’s due to manmade gases—CO2, carbon, methane, that type of thing—and what they want to do is just shut down this machine called America.”

Inhofe has led the battle in the Senate to block cap-and-trade legislation after it had passed the House. Cap-and-trade is supposed to be a market-based plan to reduce pollution, and in this case CO2, with the goal of halting or slowing global warming. He has had quiet support in the Senate, but he was the one willing to be hammered by the media and his Senate colleagues for not toeing the line and agreeing that this is settled science and necessary for the preservation of earth as we know it.

In a recent article in American Thinker by Randall Hoven, a retired Boeing Technical Fellow who, following a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy, worked at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory from 1979 to 1982, has laid out the most recent scientific findings on global warming. He uses data from NASA/GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) data going back to 1880, and the Hadley Center from Great Britain which goes back with the data to 1875.

In short, both temperature data sets (NASA and Hadley Center) show:

1. Minimal global warming over the last 130 to 160 years: about half a degree Celsius per century.

2. No statistically significant global warming in the last 14 to 17 years. 3. Global cooling in the last 9 to 13 years.

In addition, Hoven cites the same data to shatter another myth, the melting of the Arctic ice. “While Northern Hemisphere winter sea ice extent was shrinking over much of the time that satellite measurements have been available (since 1979), the trend over the last eight years has been growth. There has been no statistically significant shrinkage of winter sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere for 13 years (since 1999).”

Adds Hoven, “Southern Hemisphere winter sea ice extent has grown over all the 32 years that satellites have been measuring it. And that growth is statistically significant.”

But James Hansen, who heads up GISS, sees it quite differently. “[g]lobal warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.” Hansen, in a New York Times column in May, called the situation “apocalyptic” and faulted President Obama for failing to “provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course.”

However, in late March of this year, a group of 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts joined a growing list of scientists who now publicly reject the global warming theory that says, with a high degree of certainty, man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change. They all signed an open letter

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to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, criticizing the agency for its role in advocating this theory as proven science, while ignoring or neglecting empirical evidence contradicting the conventional view.

The group who signed the letter includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. They argue that NASA, and specifically GISS, rely too heavily on climate models that have not been borne out over time.

“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated,” they wrote, “especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”

Another figure lauded by Sen. Inhofe is Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. He spoke in May at The Heartland Institute conference in Chicago, where he stated that the global warming alarmists “have succeeded in establishing the religion of environmentalism as the official religion of Western society—a religion that demands a radical transformation of Western civilization. Skeptics must continue the ideological battles. As he has stated previously, the purpose of this entire issue is to control human behavior—human liberty.”

As with every issue, there will always be conflicting opinions, and in many cases, conflicting facts. So in the end, each person has to decide for him or herself whether or not they choose to believe that man-made global warming is real, and if so, what can and should be done about it.

To those who believe, or in some cases claim to know it is occurring, what is the optimum average global temperature we should be seeking? Could a planet that is another degree or two warmer mean less need for heating fuel, and a higher yield in food crops? Are we certain that carbon dioxide is the culprit, and is it realistic to think we can tweak that average global temperature by reducing its output; and at what cost in terms of dollars, and in terms of the surrendering of our sovereignty to a United Nations bureaucracy that is largely hostile to U.S. interests?

Now that thousands of scientists dissent from the alarmist point of view, and former hardcore believers have abandoned the theory, can the remaining scientists still claim there is a consensus that man-made global warming exists, and that we must take drastic measures to prevent the potential catastrophic impact of said warming? And should the media still label the skeptics as “deniers,” as in Holocaust deniers?

In The Greatest Hoax, Inhofe states, “I believe that many globalist elites have worked within the United Nations to expand its responsibility to an alarming degree. Now, instead of facilitating international cooperation, I believe the UN’s primary institutional goal—in practice, if not in word—is to actively build a global utopia. The UN believes that it can—with enough power and influence—determine what is best for the world by reaching agreements by majority agreement, or better yet—consensus—among all of the member states participating at the United Nations.”

Also in the book, Inhofe publishes verbatim more than 100 of the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University, resulting in what came to be known as “ClimateGate.”

If it wasn’t clear that the global warming theory was in trouble when the ClimateGate scandal erupted in 2009, showing the corruption in academia willing to “hide the decline” and suppress scientific studies and views that didn’t conform to those of the “warmists,” then it should have been

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when they largely dropped the term “global warming” and replaced it with “climate change.” Who, after all, could disagree with the notion that the climate is changing? It has been changing since the beginning of time. One would have to be positively anti-science to make such a suggestion, a term thrown around a lot by the Left to describe the Republicans who ran for president this year.

GLOBAL WARMING FAST FACTS

National Geographic News

Updated June 14, 2007

Is It Happening?

Yes. Earth is already showing many signs of worldwide climate change.

• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.

Are Humans Causing It?

• "Very likely," the IPCC said in a February 2007 report.

The report, based on the work of some 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries, concluded that humans have caused all or most of the current planetary warming. Human-caused global warming is often called anthropogenic climate change.

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• Industrialization, deforestation, and pollution have greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases that help trap heat near Earth's surface. (See an interactive feature on how global warming works.)

• Humans are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than plants and oceans can absorb it.

• These gases persist in the atmosphere for years, meaning that even if such emissions were eliminated today, it would not immediately stop global warming.

• Some experts point out that natural cycles in Earth's orbit can alter the planet's exposure to sunlight, which may explain the current trend. Earth has indeed experienced warming and cooling cycles roughly every hundred thousand years due to these orbital shifts, but such changes have occurred over the span of several centuries. Today's changes have taken place over the past hundred years or less.

• Other recent research has suggested that the effects of variations in the sun's output are "negligible" as a factor in warming, but other, more complicated solar mechanisms could possibly play a role.

What's Going to Happen?

A follow-up report by the IPCC released in April 2007 warned that global warming could lead to large-scale food and water shortages and have catastrophic effects on wildlife.

• Sea level could rise between 7 and 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) by century's end, the IPCC's February 2007 report projects. Rises of just 4 inches (10 centimeters) could flood many South Seas islands and swamp large parts of Southeast Asia.

• Some hundred million people live within 3 feet (1 meter) of mean sea level, and much of the world's population is concentrated in vulnerable coastal cities. In the U.S., Louisiana and Florida are especially at risk.

• Glaciers around the world could melt, causing sea levels to rise while creating water shortages in regions dependent on runoff for fresh water.

• Strong hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and other natural disasters may become commonplace in many parts of the world. The growth of deserts may also cause food shortages in many places.

• More than a million species face extinction from disappearing habitat, changing ecosystems, and acidifying oceans.

• The ocean's circulation system, known as the ocean conveyor belt, could be permanently altered, causing a mini-ice age in Western Europe and other rapid changes.

• At some point in the future, warming could become uncontrollable by creating a so-called positive feedback effect. Rising temperatures could release additional greenhouse gases by unlocking methane in permafrost and undersea deposits, freeing carbon trapped in sea ice, and causing increased evaporation of water.

What is Climategate?

In late November 2009, hackers unearthed hundreds of emails at the U.K.'s University of East Anglia that exposed private conversations among top-level British and U.S. climate scientists discussing whether certain data should be released to the public.

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The email exchanges also refer to statistical tricks used to illustrate climate change? trends, and call climate skeptics idiots, according to the New York Times.

One such trick was used to create the well-known hockey-stick graph, which shows a sharp uptick in temperature increases during the 20th century. Former U.S vice president Al Gore relied heavily on the graph as evidence of human-caused climate change in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

The data used for this graph come from two sources: thermostat readings and tree-ring samples.

While thermostat readings have consistently shown a temperature rise over the past hundred years, tree-ring samples show temperature increases stalling around 1960.

On the hockey-stick graph, thermostat-only data is grafted onto data that incorporates both thermostat and tree-ring readings, essentially presenting a seamless picture of two different data sets, the hacked emails revealed.

But scientists argue that dropping the tree-ring data was no secret and has been written about in the scientific literature for years.

Climate change skeptics have heralded the emails as an attempt to fool the public, according to the Times.

Yet climate scientists maintain that these controversial points are small blips that are inevitable in scientific research, and that the evidence for human-induced climate change is much broader and still widely accepted.

GLOBAL WARMING HAS DEVASTATING EFFECT ON CORAL REEFS, STUDY SHOWS

Sean Markey for National Geographic News May 16, 2006

Eight years after warming seas caused the worst coral die-off on record, coral reefs in the Indian Ocean are still unable to recover, biologists say. Many reefs have been reduced to rubble, a collapse that has deprived fish of food and shelter.

As a result, fish diversity has tumbled by half in some areas, say authors of the first long-term study of the effects of warming-caused bleaching on coral reefs and fish. The study focused on reefs near Africa's Seychelles islands, north of Madagascar, which sustained heavy losses from bleaching in 1998. "The outlook for recovery is quite bleak for the Seychelles," said lead study author Nicholas Graham, a tropical marine biologist at England's University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. The study, in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, predicts that isolated reef ecosystems like that around the Seychelles will suffer the most from global warming-caused bleaching events.

Warming Oceans

Small but prolonged rises in sea temperature force coral colonies to expel their symbiotic, food-producing algae, a process known as bleaching. While the dying reefs, which turn ghostly white, can recover from such events, many do not. In 1998 an El Niño weather pattern sparked the worst coral-bleaching event ever observed. "Over 16 percent of the world's reefs … were lost in that one year," said Graham, part of a team that recently received an unrelated research grant from the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration. (National Geographic

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News is a part of the National Geographic Society.) In the western Indian Ocean, regional currents compounded the heat effect, bleaching 90 percent of the coral reefs there.

With data from a 1994 survey in hand, researchers returned to the Seychelles in 2005 to study the bleaching event's long-term impact on coral reefs and fish communities. Surveying 60,000 square yards (50,000 square meters) of coral reef across 21 sites, researchers found that fish diversity declined the most on reefs that had sustained physical and biological erosion. The finding by U.K., Australian, and Seychelles researchers confirms what many scientists had long suspected. The census also revealed that four fish species—butterfly fish, damselfish, and two wrasses—may now be locally extinct. Six other fish species have declined to critically low numbers. Describing reefs in the inner Seychelles as in "various states of collapse," Graham says it appears unlikely they can recover. He says the reefs are too isolated to recruit young coral from other reef systems. "Coral cover at the moment is at about seven and a half percent [of previous levels] in the [inner] Seychelles," Graham said. "However less than one percent of that is fast-growing [branching] and plating corals, which in other places in the world are often the ones that come back and start a recovery process."

Reefs Vanishing Worldwide

Experts say word of vanishing coral reefs has become all too familiar. "By and large, reefs have collapsed catastrophically just in the three decades that I've been studying them," said Nancy Knowlton, a marine biology professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Knowlton, who is also a member of National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration, notes that corals live precariously close to their thermal limits.

As a result, even the most isolated reefs are vulnerable to the effects of global warming. "These increasingly warm temperatures that we've been seeing in the last couple of decades have been tipping reefs over in terms of these fast bleaching events," she said. Graham, the study author, says that while local and regional resource managers can mitigate some damage to coral reefs, broader action is required. "Bleaching is a global issue, and it's driven by global warming," Graham said. "So the onus is on all of us, really." "We need to reduce greenhouse gases and take these issues seriously."

CLIMATE CHANGE: HOW DO WE KNOW?

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.1

Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. Studying these climate data collected over many years reveal the signals of a changing climate.

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This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO 2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Source: NOAA)

Certain facts about Earth's climate are not in dispute:

The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.2 Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many JPL-designed instruments, such as AIRS. Increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth’s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.3

The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:

Republic of Maldives: Vulnerable to sea level rise

Sea level rise

Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.4

Global temperature rise

All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. 5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. 6 Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase. 7

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

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Warming oceans

The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.8

Flowing meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet

Shrinking ice sheets

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

Declining Arctic sea ice

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. 9

Glacial retreat

Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.10

Extreme events

The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.11

Ocean acidification

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent.12,13 This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.14,15

References 1 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5

B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46

Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306

V. Ramaswamy et.al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141

B.D. Santer et.al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.

2 In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

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3 National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

4 Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded from the CSIRO website.

5http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ anomalies/index.html

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

6 T.C. Peterson et.al., "State of the Climate in 2008," Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.

7 I. Allison et.al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, UNSW Climate Change Research Center, Sydney, Australia, 2009, p. 11

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/ 01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm

8 Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).

9 L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7

R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009

http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html

10 National Snow and Ice Data Center

World Glacier Monitoring Service

11 http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html

12 http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F (Note: The pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units. Since the pH scale is logarithmic, this change represents approximately a 30 percent increase in acidity.)

13 http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification

14 C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371

15 Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36.