Climate affects agriculture, energy use, transportation and population shifts, and rapid changes would make adjustment in these things more difficult. Sudden Rise in Methane White said the Antarctica ice cores also showed that there was a sudden rise in methane, a major greenhouse gas. Methane, carbon dioxide and some other gases can accumulate in the atmosphere and trap heat from the sun, causing a general warming. Many scientists now believe that the Earth's climate may be warming because the burning of fossil fuels and other human processes have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. White said that global warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases may be very similar to warming that may occur naturally.
Humans add methane to the atmosphere.
So does nature. We are simply doing it faster. For this reason, said White, studying natural climate change of the past may give a fundamental understanding of how human actions could change the climate in the future. Thomas F. Stocker of the Physics Institute at the University of Bern, Switzerland, said the research reported by White and his colleagues is surprising. White said that the warming trend detected in his ice core taken from a seaside drill site was not found in ice cores taken from Antarctica drill sites that were farther inland.