Some authorities have claimed that global warming is one of the most—if not the most—important public health threat of this century. They do not, however, support this assertion by comparative analysis of the relative magnitude and severity of various health threats. Such an analysis, presented here, shows that other global health threats outrank global warming at present, and are likely to con...

The role of General Circulation Models (GCMs) has become predominantly important as the practical interest in regional impacts from anthropogenic greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) grows. This first report documents the quality of GCMs as a tool for describing and predicting ‘global warming’ and the related geographical pattern of climate change from the CO2 added to Earth’s atmosphere.

The semidiurnal atmospheric thermal tide would have been resonant with free oscillations of the atmosphere when the day was approximately 21 h long, c. 600 Ma ago. Very large atmospheric tides would have resulted, with associated surface pressure oscillations in excess of 10 mbar in the tropics. Near resonance the Sun's gravitational torque on the atmospheric tide--accelerating Earth's rotati...

Through thermal expansion of oceans and melting of land-based ice, global warming is very likely contributing to the sea level rise observed during the 20th century. The amount by which further increases in global average temperature could affect sea level is only known with large uncertainties due to the limited capacity of physics-based models to predict sea levels from global surface tempera...

Introduction Conclusions References

The comparison of observed global mean surface air temperature (GMT) change to the mean change simulated by climate models has received much public and scientific attention. For a given global warming signal produced by a climate model ensemble, there exists an envelope of GMT values representing the range of possible unforced states of the climate system (the Envelope of Unforced Noise; EUN). ...

This paper employs public opinion data from a nationally representative probability sample to examine how information encounters and exposure to different media sources relate to individuals' beliefs about global warming. The analyses indicate that media source exposure (i.e., exposure to news and information about science presented through different media outlets), intentional information expo...

Assessing how environmental changes affect the distribution and dynamics of vegetation and animal populations is becoming increasingly important for terrestrial ecologists to enable better predictions of the effects of global warming, biodiversity reduction or habitat degradation. The ability to predict ecological responses has often been hampered by our rather limited understanding of trophic ...