Global Warming or Climate Change

Climate science: A delicate balance James F. Kasting Nature 483 , 537–538 (29 March 2012) doi:10.1038/483537a Published online 28 March 2012 Earth has warmed rapidly before. About 55 million years ago, the temperature of the planet rose by as much as 8 °C over 20,000 years and remained elevated for roughly 100,000 years. The cause is unknown, but it may have been a result of cage-like methane clathrate molecules in the sea floor destabilizing and releasing into the atmosphere huge amounts of greenhouse gas. This Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum is of great interest to climatologists: the estimated temperature increase is similar to the future warming predicted owing to human activities, although we are perturbing the climate system much faster. Such events show that if you want to understand the climate's future, you need to learn about its past. The Goldilocks Planet — named after the concept that Earth, unlike its planetary neighbours, is just right for life, neither too h...

CLIMATE CHANGE Global Warming Is Changing the World Richard A. Kerr An international climate assessment finds for the first time that humans are altering their world and the life in it by altering climate; looking ahead, global warming 's impacts will only worsen In early February, the United Nations— sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared in no uncertain terms that the world is warming and that humans are mostly to blame. Last week, another IPCC working group reported for the first time that humans—through the greenhouse gases we spew into the atmosphere and the resulting climate change—are behind many of the physical and biological changes that media accounts have already associated with global warming . Receding glaciers, early-blooming trees, bleached corals, acidifying oceans, killer heat waves, and butterflies retreating up mountainsides are likely all ultimately responses to the atmosphere's growing burden of greenhouse gases. “Climate c...