This year's fires, for instance, threatened the Chimalpas biological reserves in Mexico, home to hundreds of endangered plant species. And that's just the ones we know of. In the vast Amazon, dozens of animals and plants unknown to science are still discovered every year, including a tiny new monkey announced just last week. This shifts global rainfall patterns, bringing killer floods to places such as Peru and harsh droughts to Asia and parts of Latin America. While scientists are increasingly confident that humans are warming the planet, they are more cautious about ascribing specific weather variations to climate change.
Most heat coming from the sun is trapped in the oceans, and most of that is in the tropics.
The Pacific as the largest ocean is the biggest heat-catcher, and the western equatorial Pacific is usually the world's warmest patch of ocean. The ocean surface overall has grown one degree Fahrenheit hotter over the last century, and ocean warming has been particularly pronounced over recent decades. We have shown that the latter is highly unlikely. And the main thing we can point to is global warming. Other scientists find Trenberth's conclusions less persuasive because they are based on a statistical record that runs back only around 120 years.