Dr. Henry Fielder, lead climatologist for the project, and Dr. Wendy Carmichael, a zoologist, spoke to Official News Agency on Saturday over coffee.

"It was an amazing discovery.  I would love to tell you that this is what we were looking for but that would be a fib," said Fielder, 46.  "Our grant was for the study of radical temperature change on laboratory rodents.  We had hoped on a genetic level to find a way to increase their tolerance for freezing cold in order to help astronauts and future moon settlers cope with the rigors of space."

"What we were doing was dipping live mice into liquid nitrogen all day."  Dr. Carmichael spoke up.  "We weren't making much progress.  The numbers were pretty consistent. "The discovery came in April as Dr. Carmichael 28 a graduate of UCal Olivehurst picked up the group's six morning editions of the Appeal-Democrat the area's only local newspaper.

"We don't read it .  We line the cages with it." she said.  "Anywho, in the next two machines I noticed two headlines that mentioned temperature increases due to global warming and one that talked of the same increases due to climate change.  It made me wonder 'Is there a connection?'".

"We started comparing data the next day," her colleague continued, "and what we found was astonishing.    Temperature increases attributed to global warming coincided rather closely with increases caused by climate change."

'Global warming' is the theory based upon temperature observation and computer models which predicts an uptick in the Earth's average temperature due to a "greenhouse effect" created when gases such as CO2 trap the sun's heat inside the atmosphere. 

'Climate change' on the other hand refers to a variation in the Earth's climate over a period of time, most notably the last hundred years, and forecasts a rise in global temperature due to the thermal reflective qualities of some waste gases such as CO2 released into the environment.

"We started crunching the numbers in earnest after that."  Fielder smiled, "We found that as the temperature rises world-wide due to global warming it rises equally around the Earth due to climate change.  We were astounded."

"This changes the face of environmental research," Carmichael said.

"Our grant runs out at the end of this quarter," she went on, "but the Bush Administration has already promised us another 7 million dollars in funding based upon this new data.  This is a very exciting time for us."