This is effect has various names, often it too is called the greenhouse effect, other times it is called global warming. Neither of these terms is accurate because they fail to discriminate between non-controversial science (greenhouse effect), and an observational temperature measurement. I will refer to this as Human Driven Climate Change (HDCC) to differentiate it from terms that I will need to use to describe it. The theory behind this effect is that human emissions of certain gases, namely CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, Methane from agriculture, nitrous oxide (NO2) from agriculture and fossil fuel burning, and Fluorocarbons from refrigeration and industrial applications, are acting to cause the world climate to become warmer by causing a positive feedback cycle. By raising the relative atmospheric concentrations of these gases, a greater amount of energy is being absorbed by the gases. The gases then radiate energy back, which causes the temperature to rise, this slight raising of the temperature, then causes greater evaporation. Since water vapor is the principal greenhouse gas, this causes the temperature to rise even more, thus more evaporation.
This positive feedback would melt glaciers and ice caps, causing oceans to rise, reclaiming lowland areas. It could cause global weather extremes. Further effects include droughts, flooding and eventual loss of ecosystems and farmland. As arid zones grow and the temperate zones move further north and south.
In response to this there has been a boom of recent research into this area, so much so that in order to make sense of it most governments internationally have put their resources into sorting and evaluating the data. Probably the most eminent of all of these was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is where most of the above data comes from.(2001) This panel included most of the foremost experts in their fields and reviewed over two thousand research papers to come to their conclusions.
