Climate change has always been the topic of heated debate with scientists and experts, even skeptics, persuading the other side of facts and data of what the future will be. But arguably, more often than not, climate change believes win the debate that the threat is here and can affect the future of the world. However, some scientists who believe in climate change found that the threat might not that be great.

According to Andreas Schmittner, an Oregon State University researcher and lead author of the study, global warming from the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide may be less than the most dire estimates of some studies, citing the research done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007.

Schmittner noted that many previous climate sensitivity studies have looked at the past only from 1850 to present. But when reconstructing sea and land surface temperatures from the peak of the last Ice Age, 21,000 years ago, and compare it with climate model simulations of that period, there is a difference in result.

With this in mind and using it in their models, researchers said that the results implied less probability of extreme climatic change than previously thought.

What Scmittner and his colleagues did was compile land and ocean surface temperature reconstruction from the last Ice Age and created a global map of those temperatures.

During this period, atmospheric CO2 was around a third less than before the Industrial Revolution, where the levels of methane and nitrous oxide - harmful greenhouse gases - were much lower. Also taking into account the northern latitudes that was then covered in ice and snow, sea levels were lower, and the climate was drier.

Having those factors considered, their assessment showed that current researches got it wrong.

But even with current research getting it wrong, their assessment shows that even with the smallest of changes in the ocean's surface temperatures can have drastic impacts. What their Schmittner study points out though, is that there is time to prevent the warming of the sea's surface.

What the IPCC 2007 report, the report that Schmittner noted had too severe a projection, states is that the Earth's climate is warming now as evidenced from the observations in the increase in the average temperatures of the air and the ocean. The IPCC report also said that the concentrations of CO2 and methane since the industrial era are very likely to have been unprecedented in more than 10,000 years.

All of these things contribute to climate change that can affect the planet with increasingly severe weather, melting and thawing of glaciers, and the rising of sea levels.