TECHNOLOGY × ANTHROPOCENE × CLIMATE

The Industrial Revolution

1750 to 1950 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

The Industrial Revolution, from 1750, returned to the atmosphere within decades carbon buried over hundreds of millions of years, and corals and tree rings recorded the industrial warming year by year.

The Industrial Revolution is the period, begun in the eighteenth century with the industrial use of coal, that returned to the atmosphere within a few decades carbon buried over several hundred million years. High-resolution natural archives, here corals and tree rings, grow in annual layers, each of which can be dated and records the temperature of its year. Abram and colleagues (2016) used these archives to place the onset of industrial warming in the 1830s, a century before an instrumental network, a network of thermometers, could have detected it. The energy imbalance of the planet is the difference between the solar energy received and the energy returned to space. It had not been altered this rapidly in twenty thousand years.

Why it matters

With the Industrial Revolution, one species begins to modify the composition of the atmosphere faster than geological processes can respond. Every other carbon release on this timeline came from a source that eventually ran out, or was compensated by a sink, a reservoir that eventually absorbed the carbon. The industrial release is fed deliberately, from reserves that took the whole Carboniferous, a geological period, to lay down.

Dating & uncertainty

The industrial use of coal begins in the eighteenth century. Sustained warming becomes detectable in oceanic and continental archives, such as corals and tree rings, only in the 1830s. That is well before an instrumental network could have measured it.

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.99475.3 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day