global warming
nounEtymology First attested in the 1950s. Came into common use in the mid-1970s with Wallace Smith Broecker's paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” and Mikhail Budyko's statement in 1976 that “a global warming up has started”.
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A sustained increase in the average temperature of the Earth, sufficient to cause climate change.
- As a movie, The Day After Tomorrow is your classic computer-generated cinematic confection, only the bad guy isn't an alien or a giant lizard, it's global warming.2004 May 17, Lev Grossman, “Hollywood's Global Warming”, in Time, archived from the original on 28 Jun 2011:
- In the popular imagination, global warming is mostly seen as a threat to cold-loving species, and there are good reasons for this. […] But global warming is going to have just as great an impact—indeed, according to Silman, an even greater impact—in the tropics.2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, →ISBN, page 150:
3 more examples
- The study is one of the first to implicate global warming from human activities as one of the factors that played into the Syrian conflict which is estimated to have claimed more than 190,000 lives.2015 March 2, Ian Sample, “Global warming contributed to Syria's 2011 uprising, scientists claim”, in The Guardian:
- The pope’s acceptance that global warming is almost certainly man-made has irked the vocal minority with more skeptical views.2015 June 28, Paul Vallely, “The Pope's Ecological Vow”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- The Tibetan Plateau will experience significant water loss this century due to global warming, according to research published Monday that warns of severe supply stress in a climate change "hotspot".2022 August 16, “Tibetan Plateau water stores under threat: study”, in France 24, archived from the original on 16 Aug 2022:
- Related terms
- climate change, greenhouse effect, greenhouse gas