Earth warmer today than in the past 11,300 years

US: Using data obtained from 73 ice and sediment core monitoring sites around the world, scientists have reconstructed Earth’s temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age.

The analysis by researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and Harvard University has revealed that the planet today is warmer than it’s been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years.

Previous research on past global temperature change has largely focused on the last 2,000 years, said lead paper author Shaun Marcott of OSU. Extending the reconstruction of global temperatures back to the end of the last Ice Age puts today’s climate into a larger context.

“We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years. Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years,” Marcott said.

The research was funded by the Paleoclimate Program in NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences. “The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age,” said Candace Major, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences.

“This research shows that we’ve experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the beginning of the industrial revolution,” added Major, “as over the previous 11,000 years of Earth history--but this change happened a lot more quickly.”

HINDUSTAN TIMES