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Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, cloud forests are drying, and wildlife is scrambling to keep pace. It's becoming clear that humans have caused most of the past century's warming by releasing heat-trapping gases as we power our modern lives. Called greenhouse gases, their levels are higher now than in the last 650,000 years.We call the result global warming, but it is causing a set of changes to the Earth's climate, or long-term weather patterns, that varies from place to place.

The "greenhouse effect" is the warming that happens when certain gases in Earth's atmosphere trap heat. These gases let in light but keep heat from escaping, like the glass walls of a greenhouse.

First, sunlight shines onto the Earth's surface, where it is absorbed and then radiates back into the atmosphere as heat. In the atmosphere, “greenhouse” gases trap some of this heat, and the rest escapes into space. The more greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped.

Aren't temperature changes natural?The average global temperature and concentrations of carbon dioxide (one of the major greenhouse gases) have fluctuated on a cycle of hundreds of thousands of years as the Earth's position relative to the sun has varied. As a result, ice ages have come and gone.

Occasionally, other factors briefly influence global temperatures.  Volcanic eruptions, for example, emit particles that temporarily cool the Earth's surface.  But these have no lasting effect beyond a few years. Other cycles, such as El Niño, also work on fairly short and predictable cycles.Now, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than a third since the industrial revolution

Why is this a concern?The rapid rise in greenhouse gases is a problem because it is changing the climate faster than some living things may be able to adapt. Also, a new and more unpredictable climate poses unique challenges to all life.

As the mercury rises, the climate can change in unexpected ways. In addition to sea levels rising, weather can become more extreme. This means more intense major storms, more rain followed by longer and drier droughts (a challenge for growing crops), changes in the ranges in which plants and animals can live, and loss of water supplies that have historically come from glaciers.

Although we can't look at thermometers going back thousands of years, we do have some records that help us figure out what temperatures and concentrations were like in the distant past. For example, trees store information about the climate in the place where they live. Each year, trees grow thicker and form new rings. In warmer and wetter years, the rings are thicker. Old trees and wood can tell us about conditions hundreds or even several thousands of years ago.

For a direct look at the atmosphere of the past, scientists drill cores through the Earth's polar ice sheets. Tiny bubbles trapped in the gas are actually pieces of the Earth's past atmosphere, frozen in time. That's how we know that the concentrations of greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution are higher than they've been for hundreds of thousands of years.