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But basic science fails to shed light - at least directly - on daunting challenges confronting society such as how best to adapt and what stock to place in various solutions. Adapting will involve dealing with sea-level rise, upheaval in agriculture, stark changes in energy demand for heating and cooling, new water resource management regimes, and fundamental change in the world's transportation and energy infrastructure. It is a challenge of enormous scale, requiring that civilization overcome "technological, financial, cognitive and behavioral, and social and cultural constraints," as the chapter on adaptation in the IPCC's 2007 report put it. Adapting to global warming and stemming the greenhouse-gas tide will touch nearly every aspect of life, forcing climatologists, biologists and oceanographers to work with energy experts, social scientists and automotive engineers, even economists. Together, these strange bedfellows must produce recommendations useful to political leaders from presidents to planning commissioners. Those collaborations are not in place.

Data from the UK Met Office shows that temperatures in the first half of the year have been more than 0.1 Celsius cooler than any year since 2000. The principal reason is La Nina, part of the natural cycle that also includes El Nino, which cools the globe. Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease.

Challenging warming skeptics who note that parts of Antarctica have gotten colder, researchers on Wednesday reported that overall the continent has gotten warmer since the 1950s, and that even those colder spots would be warmer were it not for the ozone hole. "Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming," said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. "Now we can say: No, it's not true ... It is not bucking the trend."

Climate is the average pattern of weather over the long term. The earth's climate has warmed and cooled for millions of years, since long before we appeared on the scene. There's no doubt that the climate is growing warmer currently; indications of that change are all around us.

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Overarching and Enduring Understandings Addressed in Climate Change Unit: Natural Cycles of Planetary Change Change is Detection through Pattern recognition Interlocking relationship between the Earth's Systems Overarching Questions Addressed in Greenland Melting unit: What are the results of global warming? Can the triggers of the Little Ice Age happen again? What are the methods that scientists use to study Earth processes? What are the harbingers and fingerprints of global processes? What are the drivers of climate? How are glaciers and ocean currents related?

Proving that old misunderstandings are not easily resolved, Politico published an anachronistically bad article about climate science yesterday.

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Holdren said temperatures should be kept from rising more than 3.6 degrees. To get there, he said the U.S. and other industrial nations have to begin permanent dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide pollution by 2015, with developing countries following suit within a decade. Those efforts are racing against three tipping points he cited: Earth could be as close as six years away from the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, he said, and that has the potential of altering the climate in unforeseen ways. Other elements that could dramatically speed up climate change include the release of frozen methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia, and more and bigger wildfires worldwide.