From Guest Blogger Brooke Haughton: Broken Cycle: The Earth Should've Been Cooler By Now

If man-made carbon dioxide emissions were not as big of a problem as it is now, then the Earth would be a lot cooler than what we’re experiencing today. The recent rise in temperature has lead two US-based researchers to conduct a study about reconstructing the climate history of the Earth.

Their study, which was published in the journal Science, stated that the planet today is warmer than it has been during 70% – 80% of the time throughout the Holocene year period which is 11,300 years. The study also projected that by 2100, global temperatures would have broken the record of the warmest temperatures ever recorded during the Holocene – this includes all plausible greenhouse gas emission circumstances.

Data Gathering

Shaun Marcott, a post-doctoral researcher in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the lead author of the article said that the previous studies conducted about global temperature change mainly focused on the last 2,000 years and that going further into the past can put 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,” Marcott said. “Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years. This is of particular interest because the Holocene spans the entire period of human civilization.”

The researchers gathered data from 73 locations around the world for a much broader prospective. The team tried to reconstruct the past climates by examining isotopes from marine sediment cores, terrestrial sediments, and fossil data. From that, they assessed the trends of climate change from the beginning of the Holecene.

OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author of the Science article, Peter Clark said, “When you just look at one part of the world, the temperature history can be affected by regional climate processes like El Niño or monsoon variations,” noted Clark. “But when you combine the data from sites all around the world, you can average out those regional anomalies and get a clear sense of the Earth’s global temperature history.”

Results

As it turns out, the climate of the world is relative to its position relative to the sun.

“During the warmest period of the Holocene, the Earth was positioned such that Northern Hemisphere summers warmed more,” Marcott explained. “As the Earth’s orientation changed, Northern Hemisphere summers became cooler, and we should now be near the bottom of this long-term cooling trend – but obviously, we are not.”

Although the Earth has generally been warmer due to many man-made reasons, the study and almost every climate model predicts that by 2100, the average global temperature will be higher than at any point in time since the end of the Ice Age.

Brooke Haughton is the Green Energy consultant of Solar Panels Info. She provides information about the latest trends in the Solar Energy industry.