Earth hottest in 12,000 years

MOTHER EARTH is beginning to resemble a Peggy Lee song — fever in the morning, fever all through the night. The planet’s temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.2 degree Celsius per decade for the last 30 years, according to James Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current inter-glacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.

The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved pole ward at an average rate of about 1.60 kilometres per decade in the last half of the 20th century.

The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water. Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat.

“This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution,” Hansen said. Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.

Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor. The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius of the maximum temperature of the past million years.

“If further global warming reaches two or three degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 metres higher than today,” Hansen said. Global warming Earth warming at a rate of 0.2 degree Celsius per decade Planet’s temperature has climbed levels not seen in current inter-glacial period, which began 12,000 years ago If this trend continues, we will see changes that will make Earth a different planet than the one we know now

*Source: http://epaper.hindustantimes.com, dated - Thursday, September 28, 2006.*