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Earth is around four-and-a-half billion years old. And in all those years the temperature of our planet has always been going up and down. It was the sea and the sun, volcanoes and meteorites and continents drifting that made the Earth’s temperature change in the past.
The gases that surround our planet make up the atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere acts like a greenhouse with earth in the middle of it. It lets sunlight in and stops the warmth getting out. Without it the earth would be freezing and too cold for us to survive.
By looking at the climate in the past we can discover a lot about how the Earth’s temperature should be today. What is healthy for planet Earth? We can also make predictions about global warming of the future.
In order to find out, scientists use many different methods. One is to dig down through the snow and ice of Antarctica and examine the different layers that have formed over thousands of years. With these ancient blocks of ice we can discover a lot of information about what the temperatures were year after year.
Other methods include looking at ancient coral reefs, rings in tree trunks, stalagmites, old pollen, seeds and leaves. All this data helps paint a picture of what the atmosphere and climate were like throughout history.
Well 8,000 years ago the temperature was not too different from how it is today, in fact over all those years to present day the Earth’s temperature has changed by less than 1 Degree Centigrade every 100 years, sometimes up, sometimes down. This is a very small amount of change and has allowed plants and animals grow safely.
But, in the last 10 years we’ve had 5 of the hottest years ever recorded! Scientists think this is the beginning of manmade global warming, and their prediction for the future is that temperatures will begin to rise more quickly if humans don’t act soon. By the year 2100 temperatures could go up by anything from 1.4 degrees to 5.8 degrees – A much quicker rise in the heat of our planet than ever before!
The United Nations gathered scientists from all around the World to research the truth about climate change. These scientists collect an enormous amount of data, which they study and put into computers to come up with reports on the climate of past, present and future. The group of scientists is called The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)