Report on climate change - definite trend in increasing average global sea surface temperatures of approximately .1° C per decade

Note: You'll have to site primary sources like peer reviewed journals as this is a requirement of the paper for ecology class.

Throughout the Earth’s history, the global climate has seen dramatic shifts in temperature, composition, stability, and many other environmental factors. Examining global trends both in recent and distant history is important in understanding how the climate can be expected to change and respond to these changes. The complexity of the global climate makes predicting and measuring its condition both difficult and uncertain. However, this does not imply that attempts at modeling global climate change are futile.

Our ability to measure and understand the global climate is constantly improving and its predictions are ever-approaching a reliable model.
There are many different measurements taken by many different scientists in an attempt to address the question of how global climate is changing. Observations from the 1994 World Ocean Atlas (WOA94) and the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS), measuring sea surface temperature, have been used in many different analyses to find the answer to this question. In a method that groups individual temperature anomalies into climatological temperature classes and compares them with trends estimated based on 5° latitude-longitude bins, WOA94 data yields trends of a .14° + .04° C increase per decade for the temperature class approach compared to the .13° + .04° C increase per decade for the 5° bin approach. Corresponding COADS data yields trends of .10° + .03° C increase per decade compared to .09° + .03° C increase per decade. These trend estimates are within a 95% confidence interval of each other and show a definite trend in increasing average global sea surface temperatures of approximately .1° C per decade.

(Casey and Cornillon 2001) In a statistical model analyzing sources of uncertainty of global surface temperatures taken by satellites and weather balloons from 1860 to 1989, the global surface temperature increase was estimated to be .5° + .2° C per century. Despite this high level of uncertainty, this change in global surface temperature is significantly different from zero.

(Bloomfield 1992) In a more recent study analyzing more diverse sources of error, the best linear fit to annual global surface temperature indicated an increase in the global surface temperature of .61° + .16° C between 1861 and 2000.

(Folland et al. 2001)
Though the data for global temperature in both land surface-air and sea surface temperatures indicates an increasingly warmer climate, there are skeptics who doubt that this change is significantly different than historical temperature changes. In a 2001 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) compared the difference in temperature in the Northern Hemisphere from 1000 to 1999 C.E. relative to the 1961 to 1990 average using temperature reconstruction (data from tree rings, corals, ice cores, and historical record) for data from 1000 to 1980 and instrumental data for 1902 to 1999.

The rate and duration of the warming of the 20th century is larger than other time during this time period, with the 1990s representing the warmest decade of the millennium and 1998 likely having been the warmest year. (Houghton et al. 2001) This indicates that the current measurements of global climate change are greater than those in the past millennium and are not typical of historic climate change.

These observed increases in sea surface and global surface temperature have significant effects on environments all around the globe. These increases in temperature affect rainfall, ocean currents, sea levels, glacial cover , and many other environmentally important global factors. It is important to continue to track these globally increasing temperature trends and the effects they have both on our own environments and those connected to ours.

References:
Casey, Kenneth S., Peter Cornillon, 2001: Global and Regional Sea Surface Temperature Trends. Journal of Climate, Vol. 14, Issue 18 3801–3818. September 2001

IPCC, 2001: Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Houghton, J.T., Y. Ding, D.J. Griggs, M. Noguer, P.J. van der Linden, X. Dai, K.
Maskell, and C.A. Johnson (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 881pp.

Folland, C.K., Rayner, N.A., Brown S.J., Smith T.M., Shen S.S.P., Parker D.E., Macadam I., Jones P.D., Jones R.N., Nicholls N., and Sexton D.M.H. Global temperature change and its uncertainties since 1861. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 23, No. 23, 2621-2624. July 2001.

Bloomfield, Peter. Trends in Global Temperature. Climatic Change 21: 1-16. 1992.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recenttc.html