Rates of Change in Natural and Anthropogenic Radiative Forcing over the Past 20,000 Years

The rate of change of climate codetermines the global warming impacts on natural and socioeconomic systems and their capabilities to adapt. Establishing past rates of climate change from temperature proxy data remains difficult given their limited spatiotemporal resolution. In contrast, past greenhouse gas radiative forcing, causing climate to change, is well known from ice cores. We compare rates of change of anthropogenic forcing with rates of natural greenhouse gas forcing since the Last Glacial Maximum and of solar and volcanic forcing of the last millennium. The smoothing of atmospheric variations by the enclosure process of air into ice is computed with a firn diffusion and enclosure model. The 20th century increase in CO₂ and its radiative forcing occurred more than an order of magnitude faster than any sustained change during the past 22,000 years. The average rate of increase in the radiative forcing not just from CO₂ but from the combination of CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O is larger during the Industrial Era than during any comparable period of at least the past 16,000 years. In addition, the decadal-to-century scale rate of change in anthropogenic forcing is unusually high in the context of the natural forcing variations (solar and volcanoes) of the past millennium. Our analysis implies that global climate change, which is anthropogenic in origin, is progressing at a speed that is unprecedented at least during the last 22,000 years.