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The world is now warmer than at almost any time since the end of the last ice age and, on present trends, will continue to reach a record high for the entire period since the dawn of civilisation, a study has found.
The study published in the journal Science, aims to give a global overview of Earth's temperatures over the past 11,300 years - a relatively balmy period known as the Holocene that began after the last major ice age ended and encompasses all of recorded human civilization.
Their data (compiled by studying such things as ice cores, fossils and ocean sentiment) looked back over a much longer era than previous research, which went back 1,500 years.
Scientists say it is further evidence that modern-day global warming isn't natural, but the result of rising carbon dioxide emissions that have rapidly grown since the Industrial Revolution began roughly 250 years ago. Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that.
Shaun Marcott, a geologist at Oregon State University, says "global temperatures are warmer than about 75 percent of anything we've seen over the last 11,000 years or so." The other way to look at that is, 25 percent of the time since the last ice age, it's been warmer than now.
It's taken just 100 years for the average temperature to change by 1.3 degrees, when it took 5,000 years to do that before. By the end of the century, climate warming models predict an additional increase of 2 to 11.5 degrees, due largely to carbon emissions, the study noted.
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