Earth Hurtling Towards Temperatures Not Seen In 11,000 Years
By Andrea Germanos
09 March, 2013
CommonDreams.org
CommonDreams.org
"Under all plausible
greenhouse gas emission scenarios," the world is on track to surpass
temperatures not seen since the dawn of civilization, according to new
research.
Confirming "unprecedented" global warming, the new study published in Friday's issue of the journal Science shows that the earth's temperatures catapulted in just the last century at a rate that had previously taken 4,000 years.
"In 100 years, we've gone from the cold end of the
spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum," said climatologist Shaun
Marcott, lead author of the study. "We've never seen something this
rapid. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this
quickly."
Marcott said that current "global temperatures are
warmer than about 75 percent of anything we've seen over the last 11,000
years or so." By 2100, he said, global temperatures will be "well above
anything we've ever seen in the last 11,000 years."
"The climate changes to come are going to be larger
than anything that human civilization and agriculture has seen in its
entire existence," NPR
quotes Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute
for Space Studies, as saying. "And that is quite a sobering thought."
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