Slashdot Mirror
Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak
ananyo writes "Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years, a study published in Science suggests. Researchers have reconstructed global climate trends all the way back to when the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from the most recent ice age. They looked at 73 overlapping temperature records including sediment cores drilled from lake bottoms and sea floors around the world, and ice cores collected in Antarctica and Greenland. For some records, the researchers inferred past temperatures from the ratio of magnesium and calcium ions in the shells of microscopic creatures that had died and dropped to the ocean floor; for others, they measured the lengths of long-chain organic molecules called alkenones that were trapped in the sediments. From the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest, they report (abstract)."
If only we could figure out how the cave men managed to make the earth cool off for the last ten millenia...
These studies only show what they do because most of the world's scientists are funded by the anti-oil lobby, who have so much money that the oil industry find it difficult to compete. Imagine if you were on an environmental archaeologist's research salary - that's got to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a year, why on earth would you accept the measly hundreds of thousands of dollars that the oil industry can afford to pay their researchers?
(That's sarcasm, by the way.)
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Second reaction: We are so screwed
After spending a significant amount of time studying the data and politics surrounding this issue, I concluded that global warming is a baked cake at this point (no pun intended) The US contains a little over 4.5% of the worlds population says Google yet we are responsible for the majority of world emissions. Now consider that we are trying to cut back, meanwhile China is rapidly industrializing, increasing its footprint with every passing day. When you think of the footprint China will have when it is as industrialized as the USA, any hope of avoiding serious global damage is tiny at this point.
-1 Comment Contains Portal Reference
We're preventing the temperature decline that would lead us into the next glaciation. And like another poster mentioned, we're still in an "ice age" but we're toward the end of one of the interglacial periods. If we heat things up enough maybe we can get out of the ice age altogether. ;-)
As a Canadian I completely support the global warming movement and am always glad to see reports like this showing its' progress.
GO WARMING GO WARMING IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY, GO WARMING!!
I think you and I have been given two different definitions of "Ice Age" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
There are two different frequently encountered uses for "ice age" that conflict; the less-technical one of which is for what is more-technically known as a glacial period within what is, in the more technical use, known as an "ice age".
If someone says "most recent ice-age", they are reasonably unambiguously using the less-technical usage.
Articles like this can be scaremongering with misleading titles for headline purposes. "Warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 years" means that is has been cooler than about 2700 of the last 11,000 years. This of course can turn around and bit you when your trying to do something for political gain instead of scientific gain. After all it's all too easy to point to something like this as proof that things aren't as bad as they have been in the past pre-industrial era.
I'm not taking sides on this issue, what I'm arguing is that people need to let science do the talking and leave politics on the wayside. The result of failing to do so is that otherwise perfectly sound science research gets tainted by politics. More science and less politics please, that is all.
Title: Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak
Actual first line: Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years
Some peak - it's barely in the first quartile.
Which would be a relevant comparison if we weren't concerned with the effects of and on human civilization, which arose about 10,000 years ago.
Yeah when we discuss global warming I think it is a great idea to ignore the fact that the Earth was much warmer before the Ice Ages. Yeah we can all agree there was some event that helped put the earth into an Ice Age but why hasn't anyone ever asked if It was warmer here before the Ice Age wouldn't it be almost natural to expect the Earth to gradually return to what it was before the event before man was here to supposedly create a problem we refer to as "global warming". Almost like a spinning top a slight jolt can cause its motion to be erratic but it eventually rights itself? So again the model is Really Warm (dino era) >>>>Big Event makes it cold>>>> gradually the earth is returning to what it once was. IMO it would probably do this with or without us. We just want to pretend that since it is better for us the way it is now that this just has to be how it is supposed to remain forever
Convert all coal fire plants to LFTR Nuclear reactors. It will end up being as cheap as coal, even cheaper in the long run when you account for longevity of the converted plants which will increase the age from 25 years to 80 years. Stop worrying so much about feeling bad over whether its man mad or not, really who cares, the fact is as a species we should care about what makes our species have the most prosperous environment to live in. Forget for a moment about every other species on the planet. Let's be selfish, worry about us. Convert the plants to LFTR reactors get 1000 years of the most power dense, low waste solution while we have it available. Doesn't pollute large areas of land (one mountain pass has enough Thorium to last us 1000 years at 100% of US consumption for everything...every last Watt we use! Has less than .01 % waste that only lasts for 300 years and it consumes the long term waste at the same time. The power density of Thorium is a 1,000,000 ...thats 1 million times the power density of coal. It has none of the draw backs of other alternate energies and the nuclear reactors made with liquid salts can NOT melt down...That is no Fukushima, NO Chernobyl No Three Mile Island. IT is in no way possible with these reactors. It is a clean solution and doesn't pollute and like other alternative energies it works 24 hours a day. I have even worked out a method to pay for it, that only has a 1 year investment associated with it. COAL to LFTR
Well, that is wonderful news since about that long ago was the 'end' of the last ice age when temperatures were so low we were having massive die offs due to the cold climate.
Warming is good for life. You might not be acclimated to it but the reality is when we have periods of cooling we have die offs and when we have periods of warming there is an expansion of species, of biodiversity. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and that was good for life.
I welcome warmer temperatures. It has been too cold in the last thousands of years.
All this fussing about warming is ignoring the real problem. Global Warming is just a distraction from the real issue of toxic pollution.
ok, this stinks of troll, but I'll take it:
"So calm the fuck down about religion, deniers, AGW, man made causes, SUVs, smug ass Californians, and Al Gore. Just realize accordingly, spend less money on ski equipment and more money on boats."
I dig your cool complacency, and actually I kind of agree. Global climate change probably won't make much of difference to your life during your lifetime, and maybe not even to your kids. Because you're rich. You can afford to pay 50% more for food (as agriculture is disrupted): the worst that will happen is you might move house, accept a slightly lower standard of living and bitch about the price of things. Oh, and 'buy more boats'.
It's the poor who will pay. I don't mean the middle class, I mean the 1 billion+ people who live on less than $1 a day. They will starve in greater numbers and die in greater numbers - they can't move, or "buy less ski equipment". I get that you don't care about that, but I hope that as a society we can bring ourselves to give a shit.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
How is New Jersey eliminated a con?
The "less technical" meaning is meaningless. Basically when the media or average person says "ice age" they mean glacial maximum, or more personally, ice sheets extending from the pole to... wherever they happen to live.
We will be out of the current ice age when Greenland and even Antarctica are ice-sheet free... Which is the normal (average) state of the planet. Cool glacial periods, like the one we're in now, are the exceptional periods vs. the rule Average global temperature, geologically speaking, is about 10C higher than present. The cool periods when ice sheets are possible tend to only last a few million years at most, separated by warmer (than now) periods lasting a hundred million years or longer.
The next glacial maximum may be 50,000 years off. If we cut CO2 concentrations to 2/3 current levels, the next glacial maximum may only be 15,000 years off.
As with all "global warming" topics, I can divide the opinions based on their mod points:
[-1,1] = "global warming is a farce"
[2,5] = "global warming is supported by a majority of scientists, debate over, hand over the keys to your SUV"
sudo make me a sandwich
The cited statistic is enough to mock this report. It's warmer now than it has been 74% of the time in the past 11,300 years. Seriously? WOuldn't that mean for 25% of the past 11,300 years the average temperature was HIGHER?! WHat makes the current temp so noteworthy? Because it is above the average, but below the highest temperature in the past 11,300 years?
Ken
Here's why you should care:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives-intermediate.htm
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Er, you know that Perihelions happen every year, right? That the kinetic energy of the earth doesn't vary year-to-year? This is physics 101 stuff.
Thank you Mr. Kennedy, I'd love a ride home after the party...
Sincerely,
Mary Jo Kopechne
Ken
Shhh! You're harshing my paranoia!
Ken
Yeah, what they probably are referring to is the timing of perihelion with respect to the seasons, or other parameters. Those do cause variations in the amount of solar energy arriving at the surface, and how it is distributed on the Earth. Look up Milankovitch cycles.
Your ignorance of this subject is simply staggering. I beg you, as one sentient human being to another - research the various effects on the global climate (of which this cycle is just one), and see the correlation (or lack thereof) to global temperature. It's not as clear-cut as you seem to think it is. Hint: If you think you can debunk a well-established branch of science in a one-paragraph post to Slashdot, you're most likely wrong.
Wrong, we are still IN the last 'Ice Age'. We are in a period known as an 'interglacial'. For much of Earth's history there was little or no ice on the planet at all.
1) Why would an 11,300 year data set imply cherry picking? Because it is not a round enough number for you? Perhaps this temperature record is based on foraminifera. Perhaps those are obtained through gravity or piston coring. Perhaps in regions where you need a high enough sedimentation rate to resolve temperatures at 200-400 year intervals, you can only recover 11,300 years. I have only briefly read the article, but it is likely that before 11,300 years, they did not have the time resolution to accurately resolve the temperature prior to this point. This is a data resolution issue, not an "i'm hiding the truths from you" issue.
2) It is the rate of those changes that the authors are highlighting. Absolute temperatures aren't that telling (it has been both much colder and much warmer on earth at various times in history). If the current rate of temperature change had previously occurred in the past 11,300 years (i.e. was driven by natural sources) then they would have seen some indication of it. It would not have been as pronounced as the current trend, due to lower temporal resolution (which acts as a low pass filter), but it still would have appeared.
I don't think anyone is arguing that there are not climate cycles (see Milankovish, also, straw man). But you are comparing events that are happening on much different time scales. Prior to 100 years ago, the temperature had been falling for ~5000 years. In the past 100 years, the temperature has risen to what it was 5000 years ago. Clearly whatever cycle was occurring on a 10000 year period is not the same cycle that we are dealing with now.
Opinions were like kittens, I was giving them away.
Well, the article didn't note the alarming part of that so well. The issue isn't the temperature at the moment so much as the really alarming rate of change. Here's a chart that documents the history and recent changes. Notice anything odd about the recent record relative to the entire temperature record going back to the dawn of agriculture?
I don't think you understand how agriculture works. If you cut hydrocarbon input, production collapses, and poor people everywhere starve. Compared to the possibility of a few degree temperature increase, that is far better for everyone involved.
Also, sadly, the reactor you are referring to in your article is neither LFTR or even a thorium reactor at all - the reactor nearing completion at Kalpakkam has a wikipedia page.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor
It's worth writing about on it's own merits instead of pretending it has anything at all to do with LFTR.