global warming (glbl wôrmng)
n.

A conjectural greenhouse effect on Earth that is attributed to deforestation and an increase in industrial air emissions.

It won't be long before science will discover that global warming is a global phenomenon and not a human mistake.  Global warming has been happening for the past 10,000 years, ever since the last ice age advance of the Pleistocene period.  In fact, it would be more accurate to call it Global Thawing.

Earth is not an ice planet.  It is not natural for glaciers to extend to the 45th parallels.  Evidence to support this statement lies in the fact that polar ice is covering huge plains of peat bogs, which means vegetation predominated just before the ice advanced.  If the Pleistocene ice cover  were as old as scientists say they are, the vegetation now being exposed would be over 1 million years old.  Further, there would have been no Woolly Mammoths in the polar regions 11,500, 23,000, 36,000, and 42,000 years ago.

It is pretty evident the ice melting today does not belong there.  Something drastic occurred and earth has been thawing out.

What caused the ice age to begin with?  We know dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years with no ice age.  The planet was about 4 degrees warmer and there were a greater variety of plant and animal life.

It appears soon after a major asteroid impacted the earth a vast portion of plant and animals species died off en mass.  The large volume of carbon and nitrogen carcasses and debris are quickly covered by dust and ash.  The sterile atmosphere keeps the dead matter preserved for millennia .  Continuing volcanic dust and erosion continues to bury dead matter for millions of years.  The pressure of accumulating dust and erosion eventually transforms the dead matter into petrocarbons.  What was once a significant part of the biosystem became sequestered carbon and remains buried in the crust until continental drift pushes the petrocarbons down to the upper mantle where they are burned and released as carbon dioxide in volcanic eruptions.

The last major asteroid to hit the earth was about 65 million years ago and was the primary cause for wiping out the dinosaurs.  If left to nature it would take about 100 to 150  million more years before the carbon sequestered as petrocarbons is once again released to the biosphere.

As fate would have it, the human species discovered petrocarbons and built a civilization around petrocarbon products.  Unwittingly, we are short circuiting the  200 million year damage done by the last major asteroid impact.  By bringing the petrocarbon back to the surface, we are returning the earth's environment back to its natural state.

As more carbon is released into the atmosphere, the atmosphere is returned to its natural temperature, which causes glacial ice to melt.  Because of humans, the Earth will sooner return to its global tropical climate.  It will become increasingly important for all species to focus on adapting as there will be no other alternative.  The increased global warming will lead to a more unstable Earth as the biosystem, plate tectonics, and climate all struggle to adapt.  Even human society will have to restructure in order to adapt.

Global temperatures will not rise linearly, however. They are subject to orbital variations of the solar barycenter about the Sun.

But there is a silver lining to this cloud of global warming.  As the planet warms, the upper atmosphere warms.  If the upper atmosphere warms to a significant temperature, it will be impossible for nitrogen to liquefy and thus the ice age cycle will be broken.  By burning petrocarbons the earth will once again return to its stable temperature and life will diversify once again and continue uninterrupted until the next major asteroid impact.