Global Warming has been a heated debate for many years now, with scientists recently releasing an official statement that it is, in fact, a true event.

“There are no doubts in the scientific community that global warming is in existence, it is not even a debate anymore,” science teacher John Pruess said. “In fact they just released some evidence or observations that the ice pack in the North Pole is smaller now than it has ever been. It is even smaller than our models predicted which scientists could call alarming.”

Previous years had seen the scientific community torn by the idea that Global Warming was just a natural cycle of the earth’s climate, similar to how ice ages have naturally occurred throughout history.

However, with the recent sporadic changes in the weather, many people are starting to consider global warming as a major factor of their lives. An example of how the weather changes is the Hurricane season, which now starts later in the year and has recently hosted more extreme storms.

The polar ice caps are also an indicator of the extreme weather.

“The average global temperature is higher than it has ever been since average temperatures for the planet have been recorded,” environmental club advisor Jennifer Holah said. “Since it’s an average, this means that some places may not have seen much of a difference in temperature, but others may have seen a large difference.”

A singular cause for global warming is still unknown, however many scientists believe that it is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which results in the buildup of Green House gases.

“We are not totally to blame, but we are making it worse with carbon being pumped into the atmosphere,” Pruess said. “I think we are going to look back into the past and say we were definitely part of the problem.”

While the official causes of global warming are still to be pinpointed, scientists are starting to find a few clues to the major contributing factors.

“Since we don’t have a spare “control” earth without human impacts to compare our earth to, it’s impossible to do the absolute perfect experiment on global warming,” Holah said. “This has, unfortunately, led to controversy over the cause.  However, all experiments and models that we can do, point the finger at us.”

The level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased about 41% since the Industrial Revolution. Scientists say that the increase of carbon dioxide in the air could lead to more intense weather conditions and higher sea levels.

“There are a lot of different ways to look at weather which includes the variability of precipitation and temperature,” USGS climate director Mary Ratnaswamy said. “The IPCC looks at the data that is developed every few years and changes the model if necessary. All models have shown an increase in temperature.”

No one knows how global warming is going to affect in the next decade or so but scientists are determined to figure it out. An easy thing that people can do every day to protect the environment is recycling and carpooling.