Global warming has propelled Earth's climate from one of its
coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest --
in just one century. A heat spike like this has never happened
before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said
climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global
temperatures going back that far. "If any period in time had a
sustained temperature change similar to what we have today, we
would have certainly seen that in our record," he said. It is a
good indicator of just how fast man-made climate change has
progressed. A century is a very short period of time for such a
spike. It's supposed to be cold The Earth was very cold at the
turn of the 20th century. The decade from 1900 to 1909 was
colder than 95 percent of the last 11,300 years, the study
found. Fast forward to the turn of the 21st century, and the
opposite occurs. Between 2000 and 2009, it was hotter than about
75 percent of the last 11,300 years. If not for man-made
influences, the Earth would be in a very