Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of SI unit prefixes
- List of chemical symbols
- Preface to the First Edition
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Preface to the Third Edition
- 1 Global warming and climate change
- 2 The greenhouse effect
- 3 The greenhouse gases
- 4 Climates of the past
- 5 Modelling the climate
- 6 Climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond
- 7 The impacts of climate change
- 8 Why should we be concerned?
- 9 Weighing the uncertainty
- 10 A strategy for action to slow and stabilise climate change
- 11 Energy and transport for the future
- 12 The global village
- Glossary
- Index
4 - Climates of the past
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of SI unit prefixes
- List of chemical symbols
- Preface to the First Edition
- Preface to the Second Edition
- Preface to the Third Edition
- 1 Global warming and climate change
- 2 The greenhouse effect
- 3 The greenhouse gases
- 4 Climates of the past
- 5 Modelling the climate
- 6 Climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond
- 7 The impacts of climate change
- 8 Why should we be concerned?
- 9 Weighing the uncertainty
- 10 A strategy for action to slow and stabilise climate change
- 11 Energy and transport for the future
- 12 The global village
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
To obtain some perspective against which to view future Climate change, it is helpful to look at some of the Climate changes that have occurred in the past. This chapter will briefly consider climatic records and Climate changes in three periods: the last hundred years, then the last thousand years and finally the last million years. At the end of the chapter some interesting recent evidence for the existence of relatively rapid Climate change at various times during the past one or two hundred thousand years will be presented.
The last hundred years
The 1980s and early 1990s have brought unusually warm years for the globe as a whole (see Chapter 1) as is illustrated in Figure 4.1, which shows the global average temperature since 1860, the period for which the instrumental record is available with good accuracy and coverage. An increase over this period has taken place of about 0.6 ˚C (ninety-five per cent confidence limits of 0.4 to 0.8 ˚C). The year 1998 is very likely to have been the warmest year during this period. An even more striking statistic is that each of the first eight months of 1998 was very likely the warmest of those months in the record. Although there is a distinct trend in the record, the increase is by no means a uniform one.
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- Information
- Global WarmingThe Complete Briefing, pp. 56 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004