Global Warming and Climate Change

The phrase ‘global warming’ has become familiar to many people as one of the important environmental issues of our day. Many opinions have been expressed concerning it, from the doom-laden to the dismissive. This book aims to state the current scientific position on global warming clearly, so that we can make informed decisions on the facts. Is the climate changing? In the year 2060 my grandchildren will be approaching seventy; what will their world be like? Indeed, what will it be like during the seventy years or so of their normal life span? Many new things have happened in the last seventy years which could not have been predicted in the 1920s. The pace of change is such that even more novelty can be expected in the next seventy. It is fairly certain that the world will be even more crowded and more connected. Will the increasing scale of human activities affect the environment? In particular, will the world be warmer? How is its climate likely to change? Before studying future climate changes, what can be said about climate changes in the past? In the more distant past there have been very large changes. The last million years have seen a succession of major ice ages interspersed with warmer periods. The last of these ice ages began to come to an end about 20,000 years ago and we are now in what is called an interglacial period.