Climate Change is Speeding Up
The effects of climate change may be much more severe and arrive much sooner than originally predicted. By Michael Coppola & Nancy Lazar According to a recently published research paper in “Nature Climate Change” our existing climate models underestimate how rapidly the Arctic is currently warming. They discovered that today’s rate of temperature increase – about one degree Celsius per decade – is similar to the rate that occurred prior to periods of abrupt warming during the last 100,000 year long Ice Age. This is a model that can shed light on our current global warming. The geologic record shows that during the recent Ice Age temperatures tended to rise a few degrees globally over 50 or so years, and then the temperature rose very fast over just two decades. These periods of warming occurred at least 20 times and rose as much as 15 degrees. The new model will need to reflect the rapid warming that occurs when this condition of steady warming exists. It will also have to increas