Global warming is a real thing. Although some people out there have tried to disprove the existence of global warming, the findings of a new study that were just released in the Science journal indicates that global warming isn’t just real—it’s also caused a sudden spike in heat that is literally unprecedented. And, if what the study found is true, it proves just how much damage we have managed to do to the planet over the course of the last century or so.

According to the study that was done, the Earth was the coolest that it’s been in the last 11,300 years between the years of 1900 and 1910. It was actually cooler back then than it’s been in 95 percent of the other 11,000 years used in the study. But, at the turn of the 20th century, everything changed suddenly and, due to a number of man-made factors, the temperature on Earth began to rise quickly. So quickly that we just endured the biggest heat spike recorded in the last 11,000 years over the course of the last 100 years.

“In 100 years, we’ve gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum,” Shaun Marcott, one of the leading authors of the study, told Yahoo! recently. “We’ve never seen something this rapid. Even in the ice age, the global temperature never changed this quickly.”

So, what does it mean? Well, for one, it means that the Earth is warming up much too quickly because of the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It also means that scientists aren’t really sure what’s coming next. They suspect that the Earth may have been headed towards another ice age at some point. But, due to the rising temperatures, that’s probably out of the question now.

“We have, through human emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, indefinitely delayed the onset of the next ice age and are now heading into an unknown future where humans control the thermostat of the planet,” Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, told Yahoo!

And, that most certainly can’t be good, can it? It’s a scary world out there. And, studies like this one make it sound even scarier.