Global warming and other climate change phenomena became a worldwide exploited subject over recent decades. World science has made enormous progress in understanding past climate change and its causes, and continues to study current and potential impacts that will affect people in the future. All scientists agree that the Earth's climate is changing due to natural phenomena, and most of them argue that human activities are increasing the greenhouse effect, while some scientists attribute climate changes exclusively to the natural causes. Though there still is, and always will be, need for multiple lines of research on an extremely complex system like Earth's climate is, an immediate consensus is crucial for decision-makers to place climate change in the context of other large challenges facing the world today. This paper discusses the existing body of evidence on climate changes in the past, and uncertainties that prevent scientists to reach full consensus on how climate might change in the future. It extends the time scale of climate changes over the entire history of Earth to help better understanding of hypothetical changes and their consequences that could be expected both in the near and in a very distant future.

Climate change is a complex and multi-facetted phenomenon, interpreted by an extensive body of interdisciplinary science. Although a great deal is known about the climate system, an enormous amount of uncertainty remains. Since uncertainty is usually equated with ignorance, this fact feeds scepticism on man-induced impacts on the global climate and links climate change with natural causes only. A broader concept of climate change science is presented by focusing on both early and modern scientific foundations of climate models and specific types of uncertainty usually encountered when formulating quantitative assessments of risks due to climate change.Major controversial issues of such risks and their origin is addressed with paticular attention paid to the widespread criticism for inconsistency of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, based on the assumptions found not always justified by the real scientific methods. Major inconsistencies and misleading arguments on the climate change are also discussed.

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Power plants face today, and will continue so in the future, a variety of challenges, along with many uncertainties as well. Overshadowed by an inevitable and burdensome transition to a low carbon economy as the most exploited subject, there are also numerous issues, often overseen or even neglected, that may make position of power plants critical with respect to the security of supply, particularly when considering a massive move of mobility towards electric drives or a high penetration of intermittent renewables, for example. Exposed to a brutal and often unfair competition with subsidized players on the open market, some power plants are being economically and/or politically disqualified by ones based on another kind of primary energy sources. Addressed briefly are the above and some other issues, including water-energy nexus, energy storage, clean coal and CCS technologies, decentralized generation, role of virtual power plants, smart networking, cyber threats, as well as energy price volatility, global recession, geopolitical concerns, cross-border cooperation, climate deal, strong or smart solutions for security of energy supply, and some other dilemmas, challenges and/or uncertainties attributed to power plants in the times to come.

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