Global warming, or climate change, is a subject that shows no sign of cooling down.

Here's the lowdown on why it's happening, what's causing it, and how it might change the planet.

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 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.
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.
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.

National Geographic

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.

The most respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it by burning fossil fuels (like coal, oil and natural gas) and cutting down forests.Scientists have given a clear warning about global warming, and we have more than enough facts about causes and fixes to implement solutions right now. Listen I have three wonderful kids a 10 year old girl a 5 year old boy and a 18 month old girl, this is how I look at it I would not ignore my kids let them outside to do whatever they wanted to do gosh I could think of endless things my kids would get into get hurt on, my point is if we know something is unhealthy or bad for our babies little ones and big ones alike we make it right we dont allow it were right on top of that so why are we letting this happen to our earth cause it may not be us around to suffer the concequences but our kids kids could maybe even our own children someday will be effected by our polluting of our beautiful earth god made us. So lets do something about it lets all get on bored and go green.

I joined a yahoo club it is a Global Warming group and there is lots of great info to be learned and someone sent me this email with all this info and I just have to share it with you. So here you go!

The Secret Campaign of Bush's Administration To Deny Global
Warming

This article is from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on news
stands until June 29th

"That's a big no. The president believes . . . that it should be
the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The
American way of life is a blessed one."

- Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary responding in May
2001 to whether Bush would ask Americans to curb their first-in-the-
world energy consumption

Earlier this year, the world's top climate scientists released a
definitive report on global warming. It is now "unequivocal, " they
concluded, that the planet is heating up. Humans are directly
responsible for the planetary heat wave, and only by taking immediate
action can the world avert a climate catastrophe. Megadroughts,
raging wildfires, decimated forests, dengue fever, legions of
Katrinas - unless humans act now to curb our climate-warming
pollution, warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "we
are in deep trouble."

You would think, in the wake of such stark and conclusive findings,
that the White House would at least offer some small gesture to
signal its concern about the impending crisis. It's not every day,
after all, that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together
and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell. But the Bush
administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of
science - especially when it comes from international experts. So
after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick
Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of
global warming.

"We're going to see a big debate on it going forward," Cheney told
ABC News, about "the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle
versus the extent to which it's caused by man." What we know today,
he added, is "not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap
together some policy that's going to 'solve' the problem."

Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president's
see-no-evil performance. "I don't see how he can say that with a
straight face anymore," Christine Todd Whitman, who clashed privately
with Cheney over climate policy during her tenure as the
administration' s first chief of the Environmental Protection Agency,
tells Rolling Stone. "The consequences of climate change are very
real and very negative, but Cheney is not convinced of that. He
believes - not quite as much as Senator James Inhofe, that this is
a 'hoax' - but that the Earth has been changing since it was formed
and to say that climate change is caused by humans is incorrect."

Cheney's statements were the latest move in the Bush administration'
s
ongoing strategy to block federal action on global warming. It is no
secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have
worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate
scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new
investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were
sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy
formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House
Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl
Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that
the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of
Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen
current and former administration scientists and climate-policy
officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-
formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the
American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate
polluters.
Page 2

"They've got a political clientele that does not want to be
regulated," says Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official who blew
the whistle on White House censorship of global-warming documents in
2005. "Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public
pressure for a stronger policy. They're not stupid."

Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he
took office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay,
the White House has blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced
them with token investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen
cars. "It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA
on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in
secret to craft the administration' s energy policy. "They have a
single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like
they are doing something."

It's now almost impossible to fathom that back in 2000, after then-
candidate Bush vowed to place caps on carbon pollution, top climate
scientists believed he was just the man to take action on global
warming. "It looked like we could finally get beyond the fray that
had consumed the Clinton administration, " recalls James McCarthy, a
Harvard climate scientist who co-chaired the previous report issued
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which gaveled down
the very day Bush was inaugurated in 2001.

Even at that point, the science was in. The U.N. panel linked "most
of the warming observed over the last fifty years" to "human
activities." That judgment aligned with the National Assessment on
climate change, a landmark federal report commissioned by Bush's
father in 1990 and completed just before Bush was elected in 2000.
The assessment projected dire impacts from global warming - from the
extinction of maple trees in New England to a catastrophic loss of
snowpack in California. "If we do nothing," McCarthy says, "the lack
of water in California will force a mass exodus."

But those who were expecting a Nixon-to-China moment from Bush on
climate weren't counting on the influence of the vice president and
his industrial patrons. In March 2001, Whitman traveled to Italy for
climate talks with European allies. She affirmed Bush's commitment to
regulating greenhouse gases - a position she had vetted with
Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andy Card. But what Whitman
didn't grasp was that when it came to climate, the president was
largely irrelevant.

Whitman should have had her doubts. Prior to joining the Cabinet, she
sought personal assurance from Bush that the EPA would be able to
call its own shots without deferring to the CEQ - the Council on
Environmental Quality, a policy arm of the White House. As Whitman
recalls it, Bush made no effort to mask his bureaucratic
ignorance. "What's CEQ?" he asked blankly.

Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing
the CEQ into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues
were really turned over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The
CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To
head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former
lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General
Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste
sites.

Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House.
In a fax sent to the CEQ on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush
took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a
housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming.
Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along
with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken, who had coordinated the
National Assessment.
Page 3

Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail
obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton' s first order of business -
even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White
House colleagues-to- be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He
echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office
of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the
scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was clear there was
a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy
industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.

A month after Exxon's fax, Whitman got her first sign that the EPA
was no longer in charge of climate policy. "When I made the statement
in Italy that something might happen on CO2," she says, "the utility
industry got really engaged, and all of that caused a rethink." In a
move Cheney is suspected of engineering, conservative senators Jesse
Helms, Chuck Hagel and Larry Craig wrote the White House on March 6th
seeking a "clarification" of the president's policy.

Two days later, the climate "rethink" was laid out in a memo by a
team of advisers loyal to Cheney - two of whom, Andrew Lundquist and
Karen Knutson, would go on to lead the vice president's energy task
force. The memo - provided to Rolling Stone by a former
administration official - concluded that Bush's campaign promise to
regulate CO2 "did not fully reflect the president's position" and
that "it would be premature at this time to propose any specific
policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming." The authors
dismissed both the IPCC and the National Assessment, writing
that "the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and
solutions to global warming is inconclusive and . . . must await
further scientific inquiry."

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