Hey Ho

Here's the good news from peer-reviewed research results just published in the journal Science on the last 11,300 years of the Earth's climate:

“We have, through human emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, indefinitely delayed the onset of the next ice age" said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University.

So no ice age to worry about.  And now back to reality. The study also found:

The decade of 1900 to 1910 was one of the coolest in the past 11,300 years — cooler than 95 percent of the other years, the marine fossil data suggest. Yet 100 years later, the decade of 2000 to 2010 was one of the warmest, said study lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University. Global thermometer records only go back to 1880, and those show the last decade was the hottest for this more recent time period.

“In 100 years, we’ve gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum,” Marcott said. “We’ve never seen something this rapid. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly.”

When he says "we" he means "we the species that calls itself human beings." This 11,000 years pretty much constitutes the known history of human civilization, beginning with organized agriculture.

The speed of the change tells the story:  "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."

  Or in more scientific language: "What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand," he said. "In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we've seen in the whole Holocene," referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.

In more other words, for those hoping that today's global heating is part of a natural long term trend that would be discernible with a longer timeline, sorry, no can do.

This actually should be good news.  Because if it were a natural trend, there might be little we could do. But if it's caused by greenhouse gas pollution, stopping it could eventually at least level off the upward trend in time to save that human civilization.

But maybe that is the scariest part.  It could be the rest of Katharine Heyhoe's quote: "...and we are now heading into an unknown future where humans control the thermostat of the planet."

Hey, ho.