Scientists Find 130-Year-Old Sign That Climate Change Has Been Happening All Along

Like shrewd detectives, a team of Earth scientists ventured on a thought experiment to detect the earliest human fingerprint on climate change. They geared up with scientific theories, modern observations, satellite images, and assorted computer models. They went back in time, hundreds of years ago, beginning with the troposphere, the heat-trapping atmospheric layer that traps and accumulates the greenhouse gases emitted.

The next step was to study the stratosphere, the upper layer where this heat cools down. A fingerprint materialized from the data that indicated that humans have been the primary culprit behind climate change for the past 130 years. Only if earlier scientists had advanced technology to know this, perhaps the crisis wouldn’t have been so dramatic as it is now, according to a study published in the journal PNAS.

“You could have seen it coming,” this is probably what a timekeeper would say after observing the influence of humans on climate change over the past centuries. Typically, scientists, like those from NASA, drill ice cores from polar regions and mountain glaciers, or track greenhouse gas levels, or investigate features like tree rings, ocean sediments, volcanic eruptions, and layers of sedimentary rocks, to monitor the scope and seriousness of climate change. But this study of atmospheric layers indicated that the signal of human influence has always been the main culprit behind the formation of this maddening crisis.

They noted the observation in the paper saying that “the human fingerprint on global warming was discernible” and evident in Earth’s atmosphere much earlier than previously thought, even before the invention of modern cars. They deployed the pattern-based fingerprint method to disentangle and separate human and natural effects on climate. If scientists in 1885 had access to these technologically advanced models, the human-induced larceny wouldn’t have remained hidden for too long. For lead author Ben Santer, this observation popped out as a surprise, he shared with CNN.

Sander, who is from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said to the outlet, “It was surprising, really surprising to me the answer that we could have identified with high confidence a human-caused stratospheric cooling signal within 25 years of the start of monitoring, if we had back then in 1860 the measuring capability that we have today.” He revealed that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by about 140 parts per million since the initially detectable point. “This confirms that temperature change signals of the atmosphere are effective not only for detection, but also as early indicators of the success of climate mitigation efforts,” Andrea Steiner, a climate scientist not involved in the study, said.

A previous study published in Current Biology hinted that apart from natural and human causes, some dinosaurs could have been the main suspects in triggering the climate crisis. These plant-eating dinosaurs had digestive systems that rumbled with copious amounts of greenhouse gases like methane. To look at it another way, dinosaurs were the ancient heat-trapping machines that trapped the heat and helped the planet cool down. While they farted or released these gases through biological processes, the planet became a little warmer than before, and over time, this warming multiplied to a zillion mathematical powers, giving birth to climate change.