Global temperature highest in millennia
September 26th, 2006 by Jim JustA research team led by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York reports that the planet’s temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years. The overall temperature is the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago. The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water. Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather. Hansen said if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today. Rising temperatures are already affecting the distribution of plants and animals.