With a scientifically proven warming trend on the rise, Christmas might become a backyard barbecue party in a few decades.

But wait, why is there snow in certain places on Earth where cold Weather was not a particular feature to begin with? No, global warming is not a hoax. Here is some info that might debunk some myths and clear things up for you.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been analyzing data running back 200.000 years using ice core information and weather data from the 19th and 20th century. As the greenhouse gas release for the most of our history was rather low, the Temperature has fluctuated, but essentially remained the same for the fist period considered. In what concerns the period from 1971 to 2020, their data suggests that it is getting warmer at an unprecedented rate.

2016  is the hottest year on record, beating the last year record which was held by 2015 and being the 40th year in a row with abnormally high global temperatures. Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

The six-month period from January to June was also the planet’s warmest half-year on Record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late nineteenth century. To place the findings in a historical context, scientists usually compare temperatures with “normal” temperatures averaged over a 30-year stretch, usually 1961 to 1990.

According to the US National Climatic Data Center, part of NOAA, if you are under 30 years old, you never lived through a year where the average surface temperature of our planet was below average. People who are 60 years old had a completely different Earth in terms of climate.

So we need to face it. The climate has already changed.

key factor in temperature rises is the severely increased CO2 level in the atmosphere. And we all know where that comes from – in a nutshell, pollution. There has been a 142 percent increase in CO2 levels compared to those at the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. The greenhouse gases form a layer in the atmosphere that acts like a thermal blanket, absorbing the heat reflected from the earth. Afterwards, it radiates back, further increasing the Earth’s surface even more. Warmer climate will probably lead to more evaporation and precipitation overall, but in individual regions it will vary, some becoming wetter and others dryer.

Of course there is also a CO2 cycle that has been going on for millions of years. The CO2 is taken out of the air by mixing with the water in the atmosphere and forming carbonic acid. That accounts for the rather acid pH of the rain, which doesn’t exactly have a neutral value of 7, but a rather 5.5 value. Further on, it reacts with rocks, breaking them down and helping soil formation. There have been high and low peaks in the level of CO2 with extremely large variations, but speaking on a large geological scale.

That means that there have been rises of 5 to 8 degrees Celsius in the past, but over the course of millions of years, meaning that the ecosystems had time to adapt, and managed to do so, as only few species have gone extinct in those periods. So even if the course of the geological cycle is kept, as in the increase of CO2 is cyclical, its speed has, for a long while now, reached pathological values and the issue needs to be seriously addressed.

The consequences are pretty clear: the water cycle gets damaged. And that happens in time. As the oceans absorb heat, the water molecules expand and thus the sea levels rise. On land, the heat waves generated droughts in South Africa, China and Brazil and some parts of the United States and increased rainfalls in parts of Russia, United States, Japan, Argentina and many others. India, alongside with New Zealand and Western Europe received fewer rainfalls.

Some notable mentions are also that the United States have gone through rather harsh winters and Antarctica gained ice, 560,000 square kilometers of it, to be precise, setting a new record, compared to the previous years. So there’s more sea ice now than the 1981 to 2010 average levels.

But still, Antarctica is losing ice at an unprecedented rate across most of the continent. Ice has increased in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica, but other parts of it are still melting.

A lot of them.

A study made by NASA explains that the melting glaciers have been depositing  freshwater, that once with the melting of the glacier got released. Summoning one’s basic knowledge of middle-school physics, one deduces that freshwater has a higher freezing point than the salt water of the Southern Ocean.

So the paper concludes that the top layer of water surrounding Antarctica has been diluted by the massive quantity of freshwater released, that freezes more easily today. That accounts for the ice accumulation that has been reported to increase each decade from around 1975.

Now let’s get some facts straight. According to the dictionary, the word ’weather’ refers to the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, whereas ’climate’ is weather over time and thus climate change is about long-term weather changes of the planet, such as evolution of the ice caps, sea levels, changes in rainfall pattern and so on.

A study conducted by the Yale University helps to better discern between the two terms, global warming and climate change.  Although they are often used synonymously, it appears that the term ’climate change’ is 20 years older than ’global warming’.

As it turns out, the two terms generate different interpretations among the general public, ’global warming’ having a bigger impact upon people, as it strongly increases one’s concerns, worries and emotions towards potential harmful effects. The study revealed that the term ’climate change’ was more closely linked with weather phenomena such as storms and felt less emotional and less of a treat. So by choosing to specifically use one of these terms, it can virtually change the outlook of the audience over this huge issue.

Next on the list are some geographical phenomena that normally occur and need to be acknowledged to further understand the warming trend. El Niño and La Niña are complex weather patterns resulting from variations in ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific. La Niña is the cold phase and El Niño the cold warm.

The oceans have a great capacity to store heat, providing inertia against temperature fluctuations. This basically means that it takes longer for great spans of water to warm or cool over time. And as it gets carried by the winds, a year with a stronger El Niño will impact the weather for a longer period of time than that needed for the phenomenon to actually take place.

The video below helps to better understand the big picture: