Earth has been steadily warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began emitting greenhouse gases at scale. And while the rate of warming has been largely constant for the past half-century, a recent study finds it has accelerated over the last decade — an alarming trend for Earth systems, biodiversity and human health. Since the 1970s, the average global temperature has increased by roughly 0.2° Celsius (0.36° Fahrenheit) per decade. “That was pretty constant, but in recent years there have been some really record-breaking hot years globally,” study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the ocean at Potsdam University in Germany, told Mongabay in a video call. The last three years are the three warmest on record – as are all ten of the years since 2015. That sudden spike prompted a debate among climate scientists, Rahmstorf said. They questioned if the sudden warming was indeed an acceleration, or natural variation that could be explained by three other factors — El Niño, volcanic eruptions, or solar flares — which can all affect global temperatures. To find out, Rahmstorf and study co-author Grant Foster, a statistician, applied statistical analysis to global temperature data to weed out the influence of those three factors. “We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” Foster said in a press release. What remained was predominantly the human-caused warming signal. The results were dramatic: since 2015,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.