Sea sponges keep climate records and the accounting is grim, new study suggests
If temperature-tracking sea sponges are to be trusted, climate change has progressed much further than scientists have estimated.
If temperature-tracking sea sponges are to be trusted, climate change has progressed much further than scientists have estimated.
A new study that uses ocean organisms called sclerosponges to measure average global temperature suggests the world has already warmed by about 1.7 degrees C over the past 300 years — at least a half degree Celsius more than the scientific consensus as laid out in United Nations reports.
The finding, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, is startling, but some scientists say the study authors' conclusions extrapolated too much about global temperature than can be confidently gleaned from sea sponges.
But the study hits on an important question: How much did the world warm when fossil-fuel-powered machinery was chugging but humans were not very organized in measuring temperatures across the world? Scientists say it’s a critical question and something they need to better understand.
The authors of the study say that industrialization before 1900 had a larger impact than scientists previously realized, that its effect has been captured in the skeletons of centuries-old sponges, and that the baseline we’ve been using to talk about climate change politics has been wrong.
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