Scientists say Earth is hotter today than it has been for nearly all of the last 11,000 years

A new study published Thursday in the journal Science contains some eye-popping numbers regarding global temperature changes over the last few millennia. Per The Wall Street Journal:

Previous climate research presented a much more condensed snapshot, stretching back 1,500 years max. According to The New York Times, these past studies also concluded "that the rapid temperature spike of the past century, believed to be a consequence of human activity, exceeded any warming episode during those years."

But this new, expansive experiment — led by Oregon State's Shaun Marcott — gives us a much wider scope of how Earth's temperatures have changed, stretching back to a warm period following the last Ice Age known as the Holocene. Scientists claim that this period of increased sunlight, which caused the northern ice sheets to melt, "set the stage for the rise of human civilization" by "permitting a high level of food production" about 8,000 years ago, says The Times.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In their findings, Marcott's team discovered that it took 11 millennia from the Holocene's start for the global temperature to increase one degree. After that, it took just another 150 years — basically from the Industrial Revolution till now — for the temperature to rise another degree.

"What's different is the rate of change," says Marcott. "What we've seen over the past 150 years is much greater than anything we saw in the past 11,000 years." The team relied on proxy measurements from various sources to piece together a timeline of global temperature estimates — including readings from marine fossils, ice cores, and pollen levels.

So what does it all mean? According to the Journal: