Clear signs of global warming in the tropics could be seen by the 1960s but in parts of Australia, South East Asia and Africa it was visible as early as the 1940s, according to a new study.

Because those regions experienced a narrower range of temperatures, smaller temperature shifts could be seen easily.

In 2012 the IPCC asserted that a relationship between global warming and wildfires, rainfall, storms, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events has not been demonstrated.

The real tragedy in all this is that, because of the overconfidence of activists like Al Gore and David Suzuki that we can control climate as if we had a global thermostat, most climate funding is devoted to supposedly preventing climate change that may happen in the future, not what is actually happening today due to natural climate variability.

Closer to the poles the emergence of climate change in the temperature record appeared later but by the period 1980-2000 the temperature record in most regions of the world were showing clear global warming signals.

Dr. Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading and an author of the study said that the simulations showed the earliest changes of temperatures in Africa and Southeastern Asia.

In the study, it was also observed that the continental USA showed fewer of these signs, especially the East Coast and the Midwest or central states.

These regions have yet to manifest obvious warming signals according to the models but it is expected they will appear in the next decade.

A team of researchers has revealed about the first time global warming became clearly evident in the temperature record. The IPCC stated that for the global average, warming in the last century has occurred in two phases, from the 1910s to the 1940s, at 0.35 degrees Celsius, and more strongly from the 1970s to the present, at 0.55 degrees Celsius. “This is likely to bring pronounced precipitation events on top of the already existing trend towards increasingly wet winters in these regions”.

As a faith-based organization that responds to disasters and works to lift people out of extreme poverty, we at Lutheran World Relief see first-hand that climate change is not a theoretical concept confined to science labs and political debates, but is affecting millions of people.