Dickens' 'soft black drizzle' chronicled early signs of global warming

Helen McGregor - the University of Wollongong 
researcher was the lead author of a paper illustrating
 a much earlier start date to climate change.

When Charles Dickens, the English novelist, was detailing the "soft black drizzle" of pollution over London, he might inadvertently have been chronicling the early signs of global warming.

New research led by Australian scientists has pegged back the timing of when humans had clearly begun to change the climate to the 1830s.

That's about half a century before the first comprehensive instrumental records began – and about the time Dickens began his novels depicting Victorian Britain's rush to industrialise.

The findings, published on Thursday in the journal Nature, were based on natural records of climate variation in the world's oceans and continents, including those found in corals, ice cores, tree rings and the changing chemistry of stalagmites in caves.

Helen McGregor, an ARC future fellow at the University of Wollongong and one of the paper's lead authors, said it was "quite a surprise" the international research teams of dozens of scientists had been able to detect a signal of climate change emerging in the tropical oceans and the Arctic from the 1830s.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Global warming signal can be traced back to the 1830s, climate scientists say.”