Global temperatures hit 4000-year high, rate of increase fastest in 11,000 years
Posted on March 9, 2013 by END TIME HEADLINES
Greenhouse gases and thus temperatures are skyrocketing and will most
likely reach epic proportions by the year 2100, scientists at Oregon
State University and Harvard University have found. Funded by the
National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program, and published in the
March 8 issue of the journal Science, the study covers 11,300 years and
finds temperatures higher than they have been over 70 to 80 percent of
that time, OSU said in a statement on March 7. A team headed by Shaun
Marcott, a postdoctoral researcher in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean and
Atmospheric Studies, reached further back than most other studies, which
he said usually don’t go beyond 2,000 years ago, to give the current
climate change issues some context. They studied data from 73 sites
around the world, to tell Earth’s temperature history back to the end of
the last Ice Age. The current age, called the Holocene, began when the
great ice sheets of northern Turtle Island and Europe receded. What they
found may well heat up the climate change debate. First, Earth cooled
about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the past 5,000 years, but
warmed back up by the same amount over just the past 100 years, the
researchers said. And the bigger the land masses and the larger the
populations, the warmer it got—as in the Northern Hemisphere.
Predictions from climate change models expect the temperatures to
increase another 2.0 to 11.5 degrees by the end of the century, the OSU
statement said, “significantly greater than at any time during the past
11,300 years,” said Peter Clark, an OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author
on the Science article, in the statement. “We already knew that on a
global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past
2,000 years,” Marcott said in an OSU statement. “Now we know that it is
warmer than most of the past 11,300 years. This is of particular
interest because the Holocene spans the entire period of human
civilization.” Moreover it’s an anomaly because of the speed with which
it is happening, said Candace Major, the program program in the National
Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the
research along with NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences.
Breaching the Holocene’s temperatures would be a first, the scientists
said. Although 2000–2009 was one of the warmest since the U.S. started
keeping records, the temperatures have been lower than the age’s
overall. But no more. “The last century stands out as the anomaly in
this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age,”
said Majo in OSU’s statement. “This research shows that we’ve
experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the
beginning of the industrial revolution as over the previous 11,000 years
of Earth history—but this change happened a lot more quickly.” EP
Thanks to: http://endtimeheadlines.wordpress.com
Posted on March 9, 2013 by END TIME HEADLINES
Greenhouse gases and thus temperatures are skyrocketing and will most
likely reach epic proportions by the year 2100, scientists at Oregon
State University and Harvard University have found. Funded by the
National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program, and published in the
March 8 issue of the journal Science, the study covers 11,300 years and
finds temperatures higher than they have been over 70 to 80 percent of
that time, OSU said in a statement on March 7. A team headed by Shaun
Marcott, a postdoctoral researcher in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean and
Atmospheric Studies, reached further back than most other studies, which
he said usually don’t go beyond 2,000 years ago, to give the current
climate change issues some context. They studied data from 73 sites
around the world, to tell Earth’s temperature history back to the end of
the last Ice Age. The current age, called the Holocene, began when the
great ice sheets of northern Turtle Island and Europe receded. What they
found may well heat up the climate change debate. First, Earth cooled
about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the past 5,000 years, but
warmed back up by the same amount over just the past 100 years, the
researchers said. And the bigger the land masses and the larger the
populations, the warmer it got—as in the Northern Hemisphere.
Predictions from climate change models expect the temperatures to
increase another 2.0 to 11.5 degrees by the end of the century, the OSU
statement said, “significantly greater than at any time during the past
11,300 years,” said Peter Clark, an OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author
on the Science article, in the statement. “We already knew that on a
global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past
2,000 years,” Marcott said in an OSU statement. “Now we know that it is
warmer than most of the past 11,300 years. This is of particular
interest because the Holocene spans the entire period of human
civilization.” Moreover it’s an anomaly because of the speed with which
it is happening, said Candace Major, the program program in the National
Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the
research along with NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences.
Breaching the Holocene’s temperatures would be a first, the scientists
said. Although 2000–2009 was one of the warmest since the U.S. started
keeping records, the temperatures have been lower than the age’s
overall. But no more. “The last century stands out as the anomaly in
this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age,”
said Majo in OSU’s statement. “This research shows that we’ve
experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the
beginning of the industrial revolution as over the previous 11,000 years
of Earth history—but this change happened a lot more quickly.” EP
Thanks to: http://endtimeheadlines.wordpress.com