Happy 35th birthday, global warming!
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman-Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Chemical, Biochemical, Biomolecular Engineering Environmental Engineering Geological Engineering Green Design and Sustainable Engineering |
| Special Topic(s): | |
| Learning Resource Type: |
Reference - Article/Document |
| Media Type: |
Unknown |
| Author(s): |
Organization:RealClimate |
| Description: | Blog by RealClimate by climate scientists. Excerpt: "Global warming is turning 35! Not only has the current spate of global warming been going on for about 35 years now, but also the term “global warming” will have its 35th anniversary next week. On 8 August 1975, Wally Broecker published his paper “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” in the journal Science. That appears to be the first use of the term “global warming” in the scientific literature (at least it’s the first of over 10,000 papers for this search term according to the ISI database of journal articles). In this paper, Broecker correctly predicted “that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide”, and that “by early in the next century [carbon dioxide] will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years”. He predicted an overall 20th Century global warming of 0.8ºC due to CO2 and worried about the consequences for agriculture and sea level." Image caption: Global temperature up to June 2010 according to the NASA GISS data. Grey line is the 12-month running average, red dots are annual-mean values. The thick red line is a non-linear trend line. Broecker of course did not have these data available, not even up to 1975, since this global compilation was only put together in the late 1970s (Hansen et al. 1981). He had to rely on more limited meteorological data. |
| Rating: |
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| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | global warming green house gases climate change Wally Broecker Broecker |
| References: |
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? |
| Usage Tip | |
| Related ABET Criteria: |
(b) Design and conduct experiments, analyze and interpret data |
| Use of Resource: |
Interesting historical perspective on our awareness of global warming. |
| Difficulty: |
Easy |
| Interactivity Level: |
Low |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | July 2010 |
| Platform/Format: |
WWW |
| Cost: |
Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/happy-35th- |
| Metadata: |
IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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