TWO recent climate reports raised questions about the role carbon and the solar cycle play in global climate patterns. For carbon, a team of scientists led by Richard Zeebe, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii-Manoa's School of Ocean & EarthScience & Technology, examined data from sediment cores from around the world to study an ancient global warming episode known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. This warming event occurred about 55 million years ago and provides important clues about what the future may hold. Some scientists believe the Earth is warming because of carbon dioxide emissions from human activities. However, exactly how much the Earth will warm over an arbitrary time period is still uncertain.
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