"This reconstruction suggests that current temperatures are unprecedented in 24,000 years, and also suggests that the speed of human-caused global warming is faster than anything we've seen in that same time"
As part of this process, the team employed data assimilation techniques that used global proxies to create maps of global temperature changes for every 200-year interval going back 24,000 years.
Key points:
• The main drivers of climate change since the last ice age are rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the retreat of the ice sheets
• It suggests a general warming trend over the last 10,000 years, settling a decade-long debate about whether this period trended warmer or cooler in the paleoclimatology community
• The magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the last 24,000 years
