10/14/16, 4:16 PMHumans Have Caused Global Warming for Longer Than We Thought | TIME Page 1 of 3http://time.com/4461719/global-warming-climate-change-humans/?iid=sr-link1 S C I E N C E C L I M AT E C H A N G E Humans Have Caused Global Warming for Longer Than We Thought Justin Worland @justinworland Aug. 24, 2016 Global warming isn't just a 20th and 21st century phenomenon People have been contributing to global warming since the mid-nineteenth century, decades before scientists previously estimated, according to new research published in the journal Nature. The study questions the perception of climate change as primarily a 20th century phenomenon and provides new evidence of how quickly the Earth’s atmosphere responds to increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Even relatively low levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the first decades of the Industrial Revolution contributed to a temperature increase, according to the research. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us,” says study author Nerilie Abram of the Australian National University. “But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.” Dirk Meister—Getty Images Arial view of German industrial area. ADVERTISING inRead invented by Teads http://time.com/science/ http://time.com/tag/climate-change/ http://time.com/author/justin-worland/ https://twitter.com/justinworland http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature19082 http://inread-experience.teads.tv/ 10/14/16, 4:16 PMHumans Have Caused Global Warming for Longer Than We Thought | TIME Page 2 of 3http://time.com/4461719/global-warming-climate-change-humans/?iid=sr-link1 RECOMMENDED FOR YOU Read More: July Was the Single Warmest Month Ever Recorded Previous research has relied largely on land temperature records from the Northern Hemisphere to evaluate warming trends. But that’s not where early man-made global warming struck first, according to the new study. Researchers looked at historic data derived from natural sources like coral, tree rings and ice to determine that the first “sustained” and “significant” temperature rise actually occurred in tropical oceans and the Arctic during the 1830s. That’s several decades before most modern temperature data sets began. Researchers attribute the difference in temperature rise between different geographic locations across the globe to a variety of climate factors including ocean circulation. That, at least in part, explains why temperatures in the Arctic have been rising much faster than anywhere else on the globe—about 16°C (29°F) this winter—while temperature rise in Antartica has been relatively slow. The work should encourage others studying global warming to incorporate earlier data into their models and research to gain a better understanding of how the world warms, the scientists behind the study say. Read More: These Photos Show How Hard Climate Change Has Hit Greenland Of course, th ...

1. 10/14/16, 4:16 PMHumans Have Caused Global Warming for
Longer Than We Thought | TIME
Page 1 of 3http://time.com/4461719/global-warming-climate-
change-humans/?iid=sr-link1
S C I E N C E C L I M AT E C H A N G E
Humans Have Caused Global
Warming for Longer Than We
Thought
Justin Worland @justinworland Aug. 24, 2016
Global warming isn't just a 20th and 21st
century phenomenon
People have been contributing to global
warming since the mid-nineteenth
century, decades before scientists
previously estimated, according to new
research published in the journal Nature.
The study questions the perception of
climate change as primarily a 20th
century phenomenon and provides new
evidence of how quickly the Earth’s
atmosphere responds to increased
levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
Even relatively low levels of
greenhouse gas emissions in the first
decades of the Industrial Revolution

2. contributed to a temperature
increase, according to the research.
“It was one of those moments where
science really surprised us,” says
study author Nerilie Abram of the
Australian National University. “But
the results were clear. The climate
warming we are witnessing today
started about 180 years ago.”
Dirk Meister—Getty Images
Arial view of German industrial area.
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10/14/16, 4:16 PMHumans Have Caused Global Warming for
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Read More: July Was the Single

3. Warmest Month Ever Recorded
Previous research has relied largely
on land temperature records from
the Northern Hemisphere to
evaluate warming trends. But that’s
not where early man-made global
warming struck first, according to
the new study. Researchers looked at
historic data derived from natural
sources like coral, tree rings and ice
to determine that the first
“sustained” and “significant”
temperature rise actually occurred in
tropical oceans and the Arctic during
the 1830s. That’s several decades
before most modern temperature
data sets began.
Researchers attribute the difference
in temperature rise between different
geographic locations across the globe
to a variety of climate factors
including ocean circulation. That, at
least in part, explains why
temperatures in the Arctic have been
rising much faster than anywhere
else on the globe—about 16°C (29°F)
this winter—while temperature rise
in Antartica has been relatively slow.
The work should encourage others
studying global warming to
incorporate earlier data into their
models and research to gain a better
understanding of how the world

4. warms, the scientists behind the
study say.
Read More: These Photos Show How Hard Climate Change Has
Hit Greenland
Of course, the contribution of humans to global warming in the
19th century pales
compared to people’s role today. Temperature rise remained
within the area of natural
variability until the 1930s, yet in February of this year, the most
unusually hot month
ever recorded, temperatures rose 1.2°C (2.2°F) higher than the
global average during the
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20th century. That’s close to the 2°C (3.6°F) threshold held up
by scientists as the level
where humans will begin to experience the worst effects of
temperature rise.
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10/14/16, 4:17 PMThe Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—
and We’re to Blame | TIME
Page 1 of 3http://time.com/3035872/sixth-great-
extinction/?iid=sr-link2
S C I E N C E E N V I R O N M E N T
The Sixth Great Extinction Is
Underway—and We’re to Blame
Jeffrey Kluger @jeffreykluger July 25, 2014
RECOMMENDED FOR YOU
The Earth has been stripped of up to 90%
of its species five times before in the past

6. 450 million years. Now it's happening
again—and this time there's no rogue
asteroid responsible
Here’s hoping the human species likes its
own company, because at the rate Earth is
going, we might be the only ones we’ve
got left.
Nobody can say with certainty how many
species there are on Earth, but the
number runs well into the millions. Many
of them, of course, are on the order of
bacteria and spores. The other ones,
the ones we can see and count and
interact with—to say nothing of the
ones we like—are far fewer. And,
according to a new and alarming
series of papers in Science, their
numbers are falling fast, thanks
mostly to us.
One of the first great rules of
terrestrial biology is that no species
is forever. The Earth has gone
through five major extinction events
before—from the Ordovician-
Silurian, about 350 million years
ago, to the Cretaceous-Paleogene, 65
million years back. The likely causes
included volcanism, gamma ray
bursts, and, in the case of the
Cretaceous-Paleogene wipeout, an
asteroid strike—the one that killed
the dinosaurs. But the result of all of
the extinctions was the same: death,

7. a lot of it, for 70% to 90% of all
species, depending on the event.
As increasingly accepted theories
have argued—and as the Science
papers show—we are now in the
midst of the sixth great extinction,
the unsettlingly-named
Anthropocene, or the age of the
Getty Images
Goodbye to all that: millions of Earth's
species, like the white rhino, are no match
for the one species that considers itself the
smartest
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10/14/16, 4:17 PMThe Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—
and We’re to Blame | TIME

8. Page 2 of 3http://time.com/3035872/sixth-great-
extinction/?iid=sr-link2
humans.
The numbers are sobering: Over all,
there has been a human-driven
decline in the populations of all
species by 25% over the past 500
years, but not all groups have
suffered equally. Up to a third of all
species of vertebrates are now
considered threatened, as are 45% of
most species of invertebrates. Among
the vertebrates, amphibians are
getting clobbered, with 41% of
species in trouble, compared to just
17% of birds—at least so far. The
various orders of insects suffer
differently too: 35% of Lepidopteran
species are in decline (goodbye
butterflies), which sounds bad
enough, but it’s nothing compared to
the similar struggles of nearly 100%
of Orthoptera species (crickets,
grasshoppers and katydids, look your
last).
As the authors of all this loss, we are
doing our nasty work in a lot of ways. Overexploitation—which
is to say killing animals
for food, clothing or the sheer perverse pleasure of it—plays a
big role, especially among
the so-called charismatic megafauna. So we get elephants
slaughtered for their tusks,

9. rhinos poached for their horns and tigers shot and skinned for
their pelts, until oops—no
more elephants, rhinos or tigers.
Habitat destruction is another big driver, particularly in
rainforests, where 25,000 miles
(75,000 km) of tree cover are lost annually—the equivalent of
denuding one Panama per
year, year after year. And you don’t even have to chop or burn
an ecosystem completely
away to threaten its species; sometimes all it takes is cutting a
few roads across it or
building a few farms or homes in the wrong spots.
Environmental fragmentation like this
can be more than sufficient to cut species off from food or
water, to say nothing of mates,
and start them in a downward spiral that becomes irreversible.
Then too there is global warming, which makes once-hospitable
habitats too hot or dry
or stormy for species adapted to different conditions. Finally, as
TIME’s Bryan Walsh
wrote in last week’s cover story, there are invasive species—
pests like the giant African
snail, the lionfish or the emerald ash borer—which hitch a ride
into a new ecosystem on
ships or packing material, or are brought in as pets, and then
reproduce wildly, crowding
out native species.
The result of all this species loss—what the Science researchers
dub defaunation—goes
far beyond simply leaving us with a less rich, less diverse
world. After all, the Earth
bounced back from far worse extinctions and did just fine. But
it bounced back a

10. different way each time, and the most recent version, the one in
which we emerged, is the
one we like—and it’s easy to destroy.
Loss of species, the authors point out, means loss of
pollinators—which is a real problem
since 75% of food crops rely on insects if they’re going to
thrive. Nutrient cycles—the
decomposition of organic matter that feeds the soil—collapse if
mobile species can’t get
from place to place and do their living and dying in a fairly
even distribution. The same is
true for water quality, which relies on all manner of animals to
prevent lakes and rivers
and streams from becoming too algae-dense or oxygen poor.
Pest control suffers as well
— when animals like bats are no longer around the eat the
insect pests that attack crops,
it’s bad news for autumn harvests. North America alone is
projected to suffer $22 billion
in agricultural losses as desirable bat populations continue to
decline.
It oughtn’t take appealing to our self-interest to get us to quit
making such a mess of
what we’re increasingly coming to learn is an exceedingly
destructible world. But it’s that
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very self-interest that led us to make that mess in the first place.
We can either start to
change our ways, or we can keep going the way we are—at least
until the Anthropocene
extinction claims one final species: our own.
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