global warming

noun

Etymology: First attested in the 1950s. Came into common use in the mid-1970s with Wallace Smith Broecker's paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” and Mikhail Budyko's statement in 1976 that “a global warming up has started”.

1. A sustained increase in the average temperature of the Earth, sufficient to cause climate change.

   “As a movie, The Day After Tomorrow is your classic computer-generated cinematic confection, only the bad guy isn't an alien or a giant lizard, it's global warming.”

   “In the popular imagination, global warming is mostly seen as a threat to cold-loving species, and there are good reasons for this. […] But global warming is going to have just as great an impact—indeed, according to Silman, an even greater impact—in the tropics.”