Humans have been causing global warming for almost two centuries: Study

A new study suggests that man-made global warming has been around for nearly two centuries.The study was published on 24 August 2016 in the journal Nature. The results of the study suggest that global warming began during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. The warming was first detectable in the Arctic and tropical oceans around the 1830s.

Key highlights of the study

• The researchers studied reconstructions of climate for the past 500 years to determine exactly when the current trend of sustained warming of the planet began.

• The researchers evaluated climate histories preserved in corals, cave decorations, tree rings and ice cores across the world.

• They also evaluated thousands of years of climate model simulations, including data used for the latest report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

• They also used climate models to separate the human-induced warming from natural factors such as volcanoes.

• They found that even the major volcanic eruptions in the early 1800s were only a minor factor in the early onset of climate change.

• According to the research, even relatively low levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the first decades of the Industrial Revolution contributed to a temperature increase.

• Climate warming appears to have been delayed in the Antarctic, possibly due to the way ocean circulation is pushing warming waters to the North and away from the frozen continent.