With data from 73 ice and sediment core monitoring sites around
the world, scientists have reconstructed Earth’s temperature
history back to the end of the last Ice Age. The analysis
reveals that the planet today is warmer than it’s been during 70
to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years. Results of the study, by
researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and Harvard
University, are published this week in a paper in the journal
Science. Lead paper author Shaun Marcott of OSU says that
previous research on past global temperature change has largely
focused on the last 2,000 years. Extending the reconstruction of
global temperatures back to the end of the last Ice Age puts
today’s climate into a larger context. “We already knew that on
a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of
the past 2,000 years,” Marcott says. “Now we know that it is
warmer than most of the past 11,300 years.” “The last century
stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature
since the end of the last ice a