Global
Temperature
Highest In Millennia
By Associated Press
27 September, 2006
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The planet's temperature has climbed to
levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect
plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming
at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years,
according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies in New York.
That brings the overall temperature
to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about
12,000 years ago.
The researchers noted that
a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect
species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade
in the last half of the 20th century.
The warming has been stronger
in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and
rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and
more over land than water.
Water changes temperature
more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but
the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian
and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate
and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather.
"This evidence implies
that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution,"
Hansen said in a statement.
Few scientists doubt that
the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.
Hansen, who first warned
of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse
gases have become the dominant climate change factor.
The study said the recent
warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree
Celsius _ 1.8 degree Fahrenheit _ of the maximum temperature of the
past million years.
"If further global warming
reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make
Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was
that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when
sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher
than today," Hansen said.
© 2006 Associated Press
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