Climate Change is Speeding Up Over Time

Climate change may just be occurring faster today than it has at any other period. Scientists have analyzed changes in the climate that occur over several decades and have found that the changes are happening faster than at historical levels and are also starting to speed up.

"We focused on changes over 40-year periods, which is similar to the lifetimes of houses and human-built infrastructure such as buildings and roads," said Steve Smith, one of the researchers, in a news release. "In the near term, we're going to have to adapt to these changes."

The Earth is largely becoming warmer due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap heat. However, this rise isn't smooth; temperatures rise and fall due to climate fluctuations. Although natural changes in temperature have long been studied, less understood is how quickly temperatures changed in the past and will change in the future over shorter timescales, such as a person's lifetime.

In order to examine this rate of change, the scientists turned to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which combines simulations from over two-dozen climate models from around the world. The researchers used the CMIP to calculate how fast temperatures changed between 1850 and 1930. They then compared these rates to temperatures reconstructed from natural sources of climate information.

So what did they find? Rates of change over 40-year periods in North America and Europe rose and fell as much as .2 degrees Celsius per decade.  The scientists then performed a similar analysis between the years of 1971 and 2010. They found that the rates of change were about .3 degrees Celsius per decade, which is higher than can be accounted for by natural variability.

That's not all the researchers found, though. They looked at future predictions and found that climate change would pick up speed in the next 40 years in all modeled cases.

"In these climate model simulations, the world is just now starting to enter into a new place, where rates of temperature change are consistently larger than historical values over 40-year time spans," said Smith. "We need to better understand what the effects of this will be and how to prepare for them."

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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