Recently published findings in the European journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, have proven quite controversial in the scientific community. While the generally accepted timeline for global warming is over centuries and millennium, James Hansen warns that the timeline could be leaning more towards decades and centuries, reports the New York Times. Hansen warns of increasingly strong storms, such as the ones occurring towards the end of the last warm period the earth experienced, approximately 120,000 years ago. The authors cite the rates at which we burn fossil fuels as a major reason for this, as well as mentioning the fact that the warm fresh water melting into the oceans from the ice caps will lead to a feedback loop that will only increase the rate at which the ice caps melt. A Penn State climate scientist, Michael Mann, notes that the claims are rather contradictory to mainstream climate predictions and that because of this, the standard of proof for these claims must be significantly higher than the standard of proof for claims that are more in line with mainstream climatology.

While most of the paper is refuted or questioned by mainstream scientists, the one part that almost everyone in the scientific community agrees upon is that the rate of global warming is still entirely too quick. If the rate of global warming is not decreased, the next generation will be handed a situation they will not be able to handle.