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Over the last 150 years, nearly the entire Earth has experienced warming, a consistency not seen in the past two millennia, researchers reported yesterday (July 24) in Nature. Prior climate change events, such as the Little Ice Age of the 16th to 19th centuries, were regional, rather than global as is now occurring.
“Traditionally, the understanding of climate over [the past 2,000 years] is that there were globally coherent periods of climate variability—that there was a cold period called the Little Ice Age, [or] that there was a warm period called the Medieval Climate Anomaly,” coauthor Nathan Steiger, a research scientist at Columbia University, told reporters at a press conference, according to The Atlantic. “What we show is that these periods weren’t globally coherent, as previously thought.
Steiger and his team used hundreds of datasets from proxies of climate, such as tree rings and ice cores, ...
