Climate Heat Now Exceeds Most of Past 11,300 Years
[link to ens-newswire.com]

[snip]

CORVALLIS, Oregon, March 8, 2013 (ENS) – The planet today is warmer than it has been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years, finds a new study of ice and sediment cores from sites around the world.
Results of the study, by researchers at Oregon State University and Harvard University, are published this week in the journal “Science.”

With data from 73 ice and sediment core monitoring sites, the scientists have reconstructed Earth’s temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age. Cores show past air temperatures as well as past sea surface temperatures.
Lead author Shaun Marcott of OSU says that previous research on past global temperature change has focused on the last 2,000 years.

“We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years,” Marcott says. “Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years.”