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Global warming is real. Every year five feet melt away from an Antarctica glacier - more than 40 times its original melt rate before 1992. It's because the surface of the earth's temperature is increasing, and there's a universal agreement that this increase is caused by humans. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that over the next 95 years, the temperature of the earth's surface will rise a minimum of 1.1 degrees, maybe even increasing by as much as to 6.4 degrees.

One myth says that "greenhouse gases" trapping heat in our atmosphere are just the result of natural phenomenon like volcanoes. While it's true that volcanoes do create these gases, they only cause a tiny portion of the total effect, which is still indisputably man-made.

Skeptics also point out NASA corrected some temperature data in August of 2007 - but in fact, their new data still doesn't disprove global warming. Here's why...

- The change in the data was less than one degree - just .8 degrees Centigrade

- 1998 dropped from being the hottest year ever to being the second-hottest year ever, but it's still the hottest year in 74 years. And 2006 was also one of the four hottest years ever recorded.

- The data changed was only for the United States

- Most of the rankings haven't changed. Skeptics will often report that "five of the hottest years are now shown to occur before World War II" - but NASA's original data already showed this to be true for four years.

- Four of the hottest ten years have occured since 1990. Doubters often try to downplay this by saying that hot years should only be counted "since 1995" - so they can leave out 1990. They'll also conflate NASA's data with Al Gore's data, to claim that NASA's data has dropped from "9 out of 10" to "3 out of 10." NASA's data, both before and after, has always showed that 4 out of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 1990.

- Displaying the data on a graph shows a clear trend. NASA minimizes the effects of a single anomalous year by calculating the mean temperature over a five-year period of time. This shows a huge and unmistakeable upswing in the last ten years - and proves that seven of the hottest 10 five-year periods have still occurred in the last ten years.

Global warming is real. And denying that won't make it go away...

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
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