Ice caps melting, severe climate change, the sky is falling. Global warming is an interesting topic that many talk about, yet the concern people have over global warming revolves around greenhouse gasses causing catastrophic temperature increases which will melt the glaciers and raise sea levels. Basic physics illustrates that global warming is more hype and less understanding. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is otherwise known as (IPCC) has just changed its predictions and the sky is not going to fall just yet. UN IPCC Third Assessment Reports that "[T]here is currently insufficient information to assess recent trends, and climate models currently lack the spatial detail required to make confident projections." According to the current paradigm, everyone should run around like Henny Penny, preaching doom, death, and destruction for humanity. To those who feel for the planet, the following may come as a shock: global warming is neither significantly impacting nor massively harming this earth we've grown so attached to.
             Over the past 100 years, the Earth has warmed 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit, and if warming patterns hold, another 2 to 3 degrees of warming is likely in the next 100 years. Sea levels rose 8 inches in the last century, and in this century a comparable 6 to 8-inch rise is likely. Global warming affects primarily cold air masses because they have the least amount of moisture in them. Therefore, 70 percent of the 1 degree of warming has occurred in the polar air masses in the winter months. It would be very difficult to try and convince a young Siberian lad that it is "a bad thing" that his average winter anticyclone temperature has increased from -40 to -37 degrees Fahrenheit. Earth's warming has actually saved lives in this capacity as more people die from extreme cold than from high heat. The effect carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses have on the atmosphere is to reduce the inter-annual variability of t...