14 DAY TRIAL // A team of 80 international researchers writing in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience explain how, according to their investigations, the planet has warmed more over the past few years than it has in well over a millennium.
More precisely, these scientists maintain that, as far as global average temperatures are concerned, the years from 1971 to 2000 were the warmest on record in roughly 1,400 years.
The researchers reached this conclusion following their looking at temperature changes that took place throughout a period of more than two millenniums.
As Mongabay informs us, the temperatures reported prior to the late 19th century suggest that the Earth's land masses had a tendency to cool rather than get warmer.
However, once anthropogenic climate change came into play, this trend reversed and global average temperatures began to up.
“The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century,” reads the abstract for this paper.
Furthermore, “Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.”
Despite the fact that global trends suggest that the planet is in fact getting warmer, the researchers wished to point out the fact that, at a continental level, several idiosyncrasies can be pinned down.
Thus, after reconstructing continental temperatures for all major regions except Africa, in whose case accurate information is still lacking, the researchers came to understand that various parts of the world do not cool as fast and as much as others within the same time frame.
“At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them,” the researchers write in their paper.
It is the researchers' belief that this increase in global average temperatures is the result of human society's burning fossil fuels and destroying forests.