The Earth-facing surface of the Sun is pictured in this NASA handout photo taken February 28, 2013 by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
WASHINGTON: The Earth is on track to becoming the hottest it has been at any time in the past 11.3 millennia, a period spanning the history of human civilization, a study published on Thursday has found.
Based on fossil samples and other data collected from 73 sites around the world, scientists have been able to reconstruct the history of the planet's temperature from the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 years ago to the present. They have determined that the past 10 years have been hotter than 80 percent of the last 11,300 years.
But virtually all the climate models evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that the Earth's atmosphere will be hotter in the coming decades than at any time since the end of the Ice Age, no matter what greenhouse gas emission scenario is used, the study found.
"We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years," said Shaun Marcott, the lead author of the study, which was published in Science.
"Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years. This is of particular interest because the Holocene spans the entire period of human civilization," said Marcott, who is a post-graduate researcher at Oregon State University.
