The Gary Null Blog

A common argument againstglobal warming is that the climate has always varied. Temperatures rise sometimes and this is perfectly natural is the usual line.

However, Svante Bjorck, a climate researcher at Lund University in Sweden, has now shown that global warming, i.e. simultaneous warming events in the northern and southern hemispheres, have not occurred in the past 20 000 years, which is as far back as it is possible to analyse with sufficient precision to compare with modern developments. Svante Bjorck's study thus goes 14 000 years further back in time than previous studies have done. "What is happening today is unique from a historical geological perspective", he says.

Svante Bjorck has gone through the global climate archives, which are presented in a large number of research publications, and looked for evidence that any of the climate events that have occurred since the end of the last Ice Age 20 000 years ago could have generated similar effects on both the northern and southern hemispheres simultaneously.

It has not, however, been possible to verify this. Instead, he has found that when, for example, the temperature rises in one hemisphere, it falls or remains unchanged in the other.