This interview provides much better insight than other coverage in print media today – Scientists have created the longest continuous reconstruction of the Earth’s surface climate stretching back two million years…analysis predicts current greenhouse gas levels could commit the planet to extreme rises of temperature over the long term…research, published overnight in journal Nature, suggests warming 3 to 7 degC already ‘locked in’ over coming millennia. The paper is called Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years and was conducted by Stanford University researchers in the US.

Will Steffen from the Australian National University says short term transient temperature is increasing 170 times faster than background levels. Professor Steffen says rising carbon emissions are likely to lock in hundreds of thousands of years of climate change ‘nothing like humans have known in the past’.

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