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For scientific and political disputes, see Global warming controversy, Scientific opinion on climate change and Public opinion on climate change.
For past climate change see Paleoclimatology and Geologic temperature record. For the Sonny Rollins album see Global Warming (album).
Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature change from 1880-2010, relative to the 1951-1980 mean. The black line is the annual mean and the red line is the 5-year running mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates. Source: NASA GISS
Comparison of surface based (blue) and satellite based (red: UAH; green: RSS) records of global mean temperature change from 1979-2009. Linear trends plotted since 1982.
The map shows the 10-year average (2000-2009) global mean temperature anomaly relative to the 1951-1980 mean. The largest temperature increases are in the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula. Source: NASA Earth Observatory [1]
Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global surface temperature increased by 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the 20th oceans and because the ocean loses more heat by evaporation.[30] The Northern Hemisphere warms faster than the Southern Hemisphere because it has more land and because it has extensive areas of seasonal snow and sea-ice cover subject to ice-albedo feedback. Although more greenhouse gases are emitted in the Northern than Southern Hemisphere this does not contribute to the difference in warming because the major greenhouse gases persist long enough to mix between century.[2][A] Most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century has been caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, which