Image Credit: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
From CNN with comments below by WUWT regular Just The Facts:
Global warming has propelled Earth’s climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest — in just one century.
A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global temperatures going back that far.
“If any period in time had a sustained temperature change similar to what we have today, we would have certainly seen that in our record,” he said. It is a good indicator of just how fast man-made climate change has progressed.
A century is a very short period of time for such a spike.
It’s supposed to be cold
The Earth was very cold at the turn of the 20th century. The decade from 1900 to 1909 was colder than 95% of the last 11,300 years, the study found.
Fast forward to the turn of the 21st century, and the opposite occurs. Between 2000 and 2009, it was hotter than about 75% of the last 11,300 years.
If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University. Marcott was the lead author of the report on its results. Read More
Here is the National Science Foundation article that the CNN article appears to be based upon and here is the paper, A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years, published in Science today. This is the abstract:
Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
While the warming of the second half of the 21st century, and its causes, are the subject of vigorous debate, the fundamentally erroneous element of the CNN article above is the attribution of warming from the first half of the 21st century to human influence. Per Overpeck et. al 1997:
“Together, they indicate that the Arctic has warmed up to 1.5°C since 1850 – the coolest interval of the Arctic “Little Ice Age.” Much of the recent Arctic warming took place between 1850 and 1920, most likely due to natural processes”
If you look at anthropogenic CO2 emissions;
it is apparent that the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945, thus attribution of the warming that occurred prior to 1945;
to “man-made influences”, is fundamentally erroneous. CNN should correct this error in their article.
For further information on Earth’s paleoclimate please visit WUWT’s under construction Paleoclimate Reference Page.
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“The Earth was very cold at the turn of the 20th century. The decade from 1900 to 1909 was colder than 95% of the last 11,300 years, the study found”
hmmm, uncovered data from DMI ( as covered by WUWT last year) shows Arctic ice from 1900-1920 to be about the same as today.
We’re barely 11,000 years out of the last ice age – we better damn well be warming a touch. Matter of fact, Canada just found camel bones up in the high Arctic on Ellesmere Island. Duh! Do we have camels roaming around there now? Jeez – there are days when stupid gets to me. This is one of those days.
The ammount of green bovine drizzle seems to be increasing exponentially as of late. There must be some significant legislation in the pipeline.
We should be very glad if human activity could in fact forestall the next ice age.
Close to 90% of the past one million years have seen planet earth in ice ages, yes?
2 kilometer thick ice over much of the land in the northern hemisphere would not be good for human appreciation of Gaia!!
“If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University.”
Why would we want it colder? Do these people give any thought to what they say? And how can they be so sure that it would be getting colder???
It boggles the mind!
Pop the cork on a bottle of champagne. It has now been proved that we live in an age of unprecedented warmth and bounty, unlike much of the Holocene when life was troubled by cold, famine and plague.
There are too many inconsistencies here. Where did the MWP go for one? We know the arctic ice caps have melted off in the past and there is good evidence Southern Greenland was forested with conifers like Southern Sweden. There are the remains of over 100 farms that were active in Greenland 1000 years ago. And these people are telling us it’s warmer now than it was then? There is still some explaining to do here.
If this heat spike were to drop back down just as quickly, would it have shown up in the record which these researchers were using?
So it’s possible that manmade global warming has slowed or even prevented the onset of the next ice age. That might be a good thing to know.
Got a question: What about the Siberian mammoth remains that we almost flash frozen?
I mean with stomach contents undigested under feet of ice and permafrost?
Don’t have time to look it up that happened ah, quickly…
When will some humans learn, within mere human lifespans, that a hefty-looking spike between the years 1880-2010 sits amidst spikes that are even more hefty-looking on longer time scales.
In this regard, that spike is just an upward jiggle on the downward side of an even bigger dip.
Myopia is a terrible thing.
Yahoo! is on a full out blitz today. Something up…
The caution about the 400 year resolution specifically contradicts CNN’s claim. If CNN had any brains, and had actually read the report, they’d know that it’s not possible to conclude that there hasn’t been a rise this fast in the past.
Astonishing.
The Earth is seeing a rate of warming exiting the Little Ice Age not seen across the entire Holocene. Is it intentional that they do not see the rate of cooling entering the Little Ice Age was not seen across the Holocene either?
“If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder’
DUH!
Well then all the more reason to fill the atmosphere with CO2 because if these chuckleheads think a couple of degrees of warming is bad for humanity, they must think an Ice Age is way beyond awful.
On the other hand, when New York is buried under two miles of ice, Hanson will no have to worry much about flooding in Manhattan.
Ho Hum, another hockey stick. You would think the warmists could come up with something original?
If I were of a mind to try to scrape some money off the climate-change scam myself, I might consider starting a carbon-offset service for those distraught greenies who find it necessary to set themselves afire on television (or possibly Youtube) in order to call attention to their cause.
Younger Dryas – the Real Inconvenient Truth
Has anyone liberated the full text? Have the authors agreed to provide all data and code to those who “want to find something wrong with it”?
REPLY: I have it all, and I’ve sent it to McIntyre also. Anthony
Desperation, Louder, faster more franticly.
I love it.
Good thing history does not contradict this wisdom, eh?
So the building, plants,ectera under existing glaciers must be from enos ago, who knew european civilization was so old?
“It is apparent that the anthropogenic contribution to CO2 concentrations was minimal prior to 1945, thus attribution of the warming that occurred prior to 1945; to “man-made influences”, is fundamentally erroneous. CNN should correct this error in their article.”
Is that annual emissions or atmospheric concentration ? – 2 different things.
By 1959, when the Mauna Loa sequence starts, concentration was 316ppm, which was already about 14% above pre-industrial levels.
We simply do not know the extent of warming (if any) due to early carbon emissions so to say that the original article is “fundamentally erroneous” is …. fundamentally erroneous.
The correlation of CO2 emissions and global temperatures is broken on their own graphs, is this another attempt at GCD?Glibbering Climb Down that is.
The blatant disconnect between the headline and the detail here is a clear sign that all and any spin is now acceptable in the effort to save the “cause”.
Go team CAGW, another beautiful own goal.
There’s little evidence that warmer weather causes famines, wars and other disasters. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that a cooler climate causes all kinds of catastrophes. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/10/got-war-blame-the-weather.html
Marcott seems to be bolstering the argument that we should be burning all the fossil fuels we can get our hands on. It’s the only way we can keep the planet from cooling and causing famines, epidemics and global war. “Oh, the humanity …” (apologies to Herbert Morrison)
So our poor great-grandparents shivered and laboured under cold conditions barely seen in the Holocene, while we’re sweltering near the top?
Sorry for the handwaving, but this just sounds like bollux. The records (from weather to newsreel) are hardly screaming ‘largest change in one century evuh’. Shakun, Marcott and the New Mannites have something seriously wrong somewhere. Again.
Some days I wish the end of the world would just get on with it, then we can all go back to what we were doing before.