Another Global Cooling Is Not Expected in the Soon

 

The last century and a half is the warmest in several thousand years.
Photo Credit: Ilya Safarov

Because of the large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there will not be another ice age, which, according to scientists' calculations, should come in the not-so-distant future. Interglacial periods typically last 12,000 to 15,000 years, succeeded by glacial periods. The interglacial period, to which the present one belongs, lasts almost 12 thousand years, and should have ended soon and given way to an ice age. However, as climate modelers have shown, not only will temperatures not decrease in the coming decades, but they will increase. Rashit Khantemirov, a Head Specialist of the Laboratory of Natural Science Methods in Humanities at Ural Federal University, talked about it on the broadcast of Komsomolskaya Pravda radio.

"One of our most recent results of our work is an ultra-long tree-ring chronology. Based on data from the annual rings of semi-fossil trees in Yamal, we studied information on summer temperatures for 7,638 years. We found out that the current warming is the strongest. Since the middle of the 19th century temperature has been rising very rapidly and reached its highest level in the last decades. That is, there has been a warming of 1.5 degrees in global temperature over the last 150 years. This is not very critical for us now, but the consequences will be tangible: not we, but our children and grandchildren will suffer," Rashid Khantemirov explains.

There is no cooling trend in the coming decades. In the last century, there have been no extremely cold summers, but there have been 27 extremely warm years. Over the past 40 years, every other year has been extremely warm. Therefore, it will not be easy to reverse the situation to a cold snap. Scientists are sure: the data show that anthropogenic factors have not only added to the list of the main forces influencing climate change, but have also become more determinant than natural causes.

The year rings of trees are one of the best sources of data on air temperature in the past according to many criteria. Dendrochronology determines the year of formation of each ring with absolute precision. This allows scientists to identify where trees were growing at a particular point in time, how many there were, how the forest boundary changed, whether there were volcanic eruptions, solar flares and much more. Not only are the annual rings studied, but also each cell in the ring - so you can track changes in temperature, for example, over the course of a single summer.

The most temperature-sensitive trees grow in the circumpolar regions and highlands. In some polar regions, there are remnants of trees that grew thousands of years ago. One such place is the Yamal Peninsula.

Source/Credit: Ural Federal University

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