AsianScientist (Sep. 2, 2016) – An international research project has found human activity to be responsible for global warming for almost two centuries, proving human-induced climate change is not just a 20th century phenomenon. The findings were published in Nature.
The research involved 25 scientists from across Australia, the US, Europe and Asia, working together as part of the international Past Global Changes 2000 year (PAGES 2K) Consortium. The team found that warming began during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and is first detectable in the Arctic and tropical oceans around the 1830s, much earlier than scientists had expected.
Lead researcher Associate Professor Nerilie Abram from the Australian National University (ANU) said anthropogenic climate change was generally talked about as a 20th century phenomenon because direct measurements of climate are rare before the 1900s.
To identify when the current sustained warming trend really began, the team studied detailed reconstructions of climate spanning the past 500 years. They examined natural records of climate variations across the world’s oceans and continents, including climate histories preserved in corals, cave decorations, tree rings and ice cores. They also analyzed thousands of years of climate model simulations, including experiments used for the latest report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The data and simulations pinpointed the early onset of warming to around the 1830s, linked to small increase in greenhouse gas levels.
“But the early onset of warming detected in this study indicates the Earth’s climate did respond in a rapid and measurable way to even the small increase in carbon emissions during the start of the Industrial Age,” said co-researcher Dr. Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
The article can be found at: Abram et al. (2016) Early Onset of Industrial-era Warming Across the Oceans and Continents.
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Source: Australia National University; Photo: Pexels.
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