Washington – Mother Earth’s temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in today’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit per decade for the past 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
The team said that the overall temperature is now at its highest point 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.
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 Ocean and western Pacific Ocean.
Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Niño 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.
Hansen, who warned of the danger decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate-change factor.
