Well, yeah, I guess so. Consider your career WITH Science OVER ! Go back to school.
World is warmer than it has been for 1200 years
By Mike Toner in Atlanta, Georgia
February 11, 2006
GLOBAL warming in the past century has been greater than any other shift in the world's climate over the past 1200 years, researchers have reported.
The analysis of data from tree rings, shell fossils, ice cores and temperature measurements from 14 locations on three continents shows that the current warming trend is the most extensive change - warm or cold - since the time of the Vikings.
Reporting their findings in the journal Science, Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa, climatologists at the University of East Anglia, home to the leading British climate research centre, stop short of blaming the 20th-century warming on industrial emissions or other human factors.
But they say the geographic extent of the warming is more widespread and more pronounced than the one that turned Greenland green 1000 years ago.
Their analyses of tree ring and other climate "proxies" from Europe, Asia and North America show two other pronounced climate shifts during the same period: the Medieval Warm Period from 890 to 1170, and the Little Ice Age, which gripped the northern hemisphere from 1580 to 1850.
The medieval warming, which encouraged the Vikings to settle in previously inhospitable regions of Greenland and Iceland, is sometimes cited by critics of modern global warming theories as evidence that the Earth can experience widespread warming independent of human activity.
"It's good that they [Osborn and Briffa] acknowledge that the last thousand years contained two warm periods with a cold one in between," said Fred Singer, president of the US-based Science Policy Project, which frequently disputes claims of global warming. "But it still doesn't prove that the 20th century was unique."
While the study's temperature measurements go back only to the 1800s, the researchers were able to reconstruct the northern hemisphere's climate back as far as the ninth century.
Researchers correlated records with 14 long-term climate proxies, ranging from shell fossils in Chesapeake Bay in the US to tree rings in Mongolia.
"Both individually and taken as a whole, these reconstructions support the conclusion that it is likely that the late 20th century was the warmest period in the past millennium or longer," Dr Osborn says.
Averaged across the globe, the increase in temperatures is numerically small - about one degree above normal, and about two degrees warmer than during the late 1800s.
The increase, however, has been especially sharp in recent years, with all 10 of the warmest years on record occurring since the mid-1990s.
The warming has been linked to accelerated melting of mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets throughout the world, warmer sea surface temperatures, the earlier arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere and other changes.
Many scientists predict the warming will increase if man-made releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not curbed.
