A new study published in the journal "Science", 3 days ago, has revealed that the Earth is on track to becoming the hottest it has been over the past 11,000 years.

Scientists collected fossil samples and other data from 73 sites across the world and reconstructed the history of the planet's temperature from the end of the last Ice Age to the present. This period of 11000 years is known as the Holocene and includes all of recorded human civilization.

The process of estimating Earth's ancient climate is known as paleoclimatology. Measurements were taken from marine fossils, pollen records from lakes and ice cores from Greenland.

Global mean temperature varied within a range of one degree Celsius during the Holocene. It was mainly caused by a slow shift in Earth's orbit, which changed the amount of sunlight falling on different parts of the globe. The first half of the Holocene period was warm. Then there was a cooling trend that lasted approximately 5,000 years. About 200 years ago, temperatures began to rise steadily.

Hold your breath, they have said that the past 10 years have been hotter than 80 per cent of the past 11,300 years. The research shows that a one-degree temperature variation that took 11,300 years to occur since the end of the last major ice age has been repeated in the last 150 years from the start of the Industrial Revolution. If the scientists' forecasts are correct, the planet will be warmer in 2100 than it has been for 11,300 years.

"What's different is the rate of change," said Shaun Marcott, a paleoclimatologist at Oregon State and lead author of the paper. "What we've seen over the past 150 years is much greater than anything we saw in the past 11,000 years."

The study says all the climate models evaluated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict that irrespective of the greenhouse gas emission scenario, the Earth will be hotter in the coming decades than at any time since the end of the Ice Age.