Climate change - Is Earth warming or cooling?

Despite the recently popular belief that Earth is actually cooling rather than warming this belief hasn't been supported by the most recent scientific studies. In fact, the recent NASA study has actually confirmed that global warming hasn't stopped in the last couple of years, and that the temperatures over the last decade have grown rapidly which is the clear evidence that climate change really exists.

Not only that, NASA scientists believe that if current El Niño conditions hold throughout the year, then 2010 will go down in history books as the hottest year on record, even despite an unusually snowy and hard winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

This new study combined sea-surface temperature records with meteorological station measurements and tests alternative choices for ocean records, urban warming and tropical and Arctic oscillations.

Many Americans are likely to disagree with the results of this study, especially given the East Coast's hard winter but as scientists have concluded "in the United States only one of the past 10 winters and two of the past 10 summers were cooler than the 1951-1980 climatology, a frequency consistent with the expected 'loading of the climate dice".

This latest report is likely to cause even more "global warming-global cooling" debate. The majority of scientists still supports global warming theory while global cooling theory is becoming more and popular among public, especially after this year's hard and long winter that seemed to some people as clear evidence that there's no global warming.

What public fails to see is that one or two hard winters do not represent the rule but only an exception because climate change is long-term phenomenon and in order to make some valid scientific conclusions we need to measure data from more than just last couple of years. It is true that science isn't able to give us an exact answer of what exactly will increased climate change impact do to our planet but it can certainly give us more than enough evidence that climate change is really happening.