What is Global Warming

Global Warming is when carbon dioxide and air pollutants cause a "blanket" in the earth's atmosphere. The heat from the earth and the sun is getting trapped under this thick blanket. This is making the planet to warm up. The Earth is actually getting warmer, over the past 50 years the average global temperature has increased the fastest ever.

The Following is from: www.helpsavetheclimate.com/climatechange1.html

Update: the warming trend for the last 50 years is 0.13^oC per decade, nearly twice that for the previous 100 years. The total global average temperature increase from 1850-2005 is now 0.76^oC.

Figure 1. Global average surface temperature anomalies from 1856 to 2005, plotted relative to the 1961 to 1990 average temperature (the zero line). The red line represents five year averages (adapted from Instrumental Temperature Record)

Anomalies are often used, rather than absolute measures, as the nature of the data frequently shows changes in quantities better than absolute. The anomaly is plotted against some reference figure, in this case the 1961 to 1990 average temperature. As shown, global average surface temperatures have been higher than this average for at least 20 years. Also, since 1979, land temperatures have increased about twice as fast as ocean temperatures, 0.25^oC per decade against 0.13^oC per decade respectively (Smith, 2005). Update: 11 of the last 12 years (1995-2006) were among the warmest on the surface temperature record.