A new study published in the journal Nature yesterday, suggests that mankind’s involvement in global warming does not simply go back to the 20th century as many have stated, but rather it likely began in the 1830s in the infancy of the Industrial Revolution according to new research.
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New evidence from tropical oceans and the Arctic
The recently published study shows purports to show that global warming at the hands of humans goes back about 80 years earlier than once taken for granted.
“It was an extraordinary finding,” Nerilie Abram, the lead author and associate professor at The Australian National University, said in a statement that accompanied the publication of the study. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”
Using information provided by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change along with cave decorations, coral, tree rings and ice cores around the world as well a number of computer simulations various climate models, the researchers tracked global warming back to the 1830s.
From their work, the team believes that they have isolated the decade where man first starting warming the world with greenhouse gases.
“Our findings imply that instrumental records are too short to comprehensively assess anthropogenic climate change and that, in some regions, about 180 years of industrial-era warming has already caused surface temperatures to emerge above pre-industrial values, even when taking natural variability into account,” the researchers wrote in their study.
While the team has convinced Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Arizona climate scientist who was not part of the study who believes that the proxy data and simulations make their case others disagree.
Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann who is credited with the “hockey stick” that puts the beginning of global warming in the 20th century believes that the team is making unverified claims and says the team is wrong about the cooling of the early 1800s from two giant volcanic eruptions and John Fasullo, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research agrees with Mann.
Either way, human’s involvement in climate change is real regardless of when it began.
