global warming

Definition

A sustained increase in the average temperature of the Earth, sufficient to cause climate change.

Etymology

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”.

Example Sentences

• "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."
• "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."
• "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."