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Study: Earth Is At Its Warmest In 120,000 Years (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: As part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, Carolyn Snyder, now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. Snyder's temperature reconstruction, published Monday in the journal Nature, doesn't estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years. Snyder based her reconstruction on 61 different sea surface temperature proxies from across the globe, such as ratios between magnesium and calcium, species makeup and acidity. But the further the study goes back in time, especially after half a million years, the fewer of those proxies are available, making the estimates less certain, she said. These are rough estimates with large margins of errors, she said. But she also found that the temperature changes correlated well to carbon dioxide levels. Temperatures averaged out over the most recent 5,000 years -- which includes the last 125 years or so of industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases -- are generally warmer than they have been since about 120,000 years ago or so, Snyder found. And two interglacial time periods, the one 120,000 years ago and another just about 2 million years ago, were the warmest Snyder tracked. They were about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the current 5,000-year average. Snyder said if climate factors are the same as in the past -- and that's a big if -- Earth is already committed to another 7 degrees or so (about 4 degrees Celsius) of warming over the next few thousand years. "This is based on what happened in the past, Snyder noted. "In the past it wasn't humans messing with the atmosphere."
120,000 years ago women weren't allowed to make studies like this. Progress!
Recently posted perspective here.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
According to Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies: "The paper claims that ESS is ~9C and that this implies that the long term committed warming from today’s CO2 levels is a further 3-7C. This is simply wrong." He goes on to show why: http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
Here is another perspective based on non smoothed data.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
James Hanson, the previous director of NASA GISS and Gavin's former boss, weighs in with his own perspective. In a comment to the post he says in part: There are various technical issues with both Schmittner and Snyder approaches that lead them toward their low and high values. Suffice it to say that I expect the true answer lie between the two, but closer to Snyder’s. The evidence favors a temperature change in the range ~4-5C for LGM-Holocene, and thus a fast-feedback climate sensitivity close to 3C or a bit larger. This then leads to an ESS sensitivity ~6C or somewhat higher as discussed in our 2013 paper. http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
I think the XKCD comic is rather more clever as he uses peer reviewed science. Your other perspective presumes that temperatures in Greenland represent temperatures around the world. That's not going to work. It looks like he snipped only certain parts though as using the whole core wouldn't fool "even the dimmest denier at WUWT" as Sue explains here: http://blog.hotwhopper.com/201...
The data it's based on is also not global. It's from a single ice core in Greenland - the very definition of cherry-picked data, and hardly comparable to global temperature reconstructions.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I'm finding a correlation between warm weather in California and these articles. That's better statistics than is in this journal.
There have been several glacial/interglacial periods over the last 120,000 years. The peak of the current interglacial occurred about 8000 years ago. Since then temperatures have been slowly falling... up until about 150 years ago when something happened and temperatures dramatically reversed course.. Here's just the last 20,000 years by XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1732/
I have another XKCD for you: https://xkcd.com/605/
Yup, this is such good news. I was very concerned that we were heading into another ice age. Now, thanks largely to the efforts of Dick Cheney and his co-conspirators, we may avoid this tragedy and enjoy a more tropical climate.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I think you have that backwards. Snyder is saying that the historical record shows that the sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide is much HIGHER than the GISS estimates.
Gavin Schmidt's comment is, basically, that her data shows correlation, not causation.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
it would only take one Krakatoa to push us back into an ice age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa
Krakatoa's eruption did not, in fact, push us into a glaciation, so your assertion is experimentally falsified.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I love how graphs made by deniers even have a hockey stick.
But they drew a little lip at the end, from which they can project centuries of flat temperature, or perhaps even a decrease!
They should make up their minds. If the warming trend is natural and not at all bad for us, why not draw the graph realistically? What compels them to sugar-coat their own sad "me too" rebuttal?
Is this the same idiot?
Ezekiel 23:20
denier? anti-science?
Do you realize those are weasel words? Science is not a religion, except when it is. Also, Science is not a verb. That's just a pet peve.
Science is not a religion, except when it is.
Yeah it's a religion when it doesn't come out with the result you want. I've seen this one on slashdot. Climate deniers are literally no better than 9/11 truthers or creationists. They're just more numerous than the former and less numerous than the latter.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I love XKCD, but surprisingly Randal got it rather wrong when he did the comic - in the sense that the XKCD graph is based on old and debunked views that have been replaced by better data. For the actual data in a format similar to XKCD please see:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...
For those that want to 'shoot the messenger', why don't you like the modern observational data that replaces the old and incorrect meme ? some folks are just so conservative they love eco 'doom n gloom' and don't want to accept better research that shows today's conditions are not exceptional compared to even the geologically recent past. We are still unable to farm in Greenland as the Vikings did (it is so much colder today than then that the graves of the Viking farmers there are now under 'permafrost' - because it was warm enough 1000 years ago that Greenland was green and fertile and not white like today).
Both sides already "know" they're right, and no argument whatsoever could change that. Why bother continuing?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The site's tagline is: "The national daily championing freedom, smaller government and human dignity."
Now while I'm sure there are genuine good people who just happen to believe government should be small - unfortunately their voices are drowned out by the insane bastards who want government to be powerless so there isn't anybody to stop them from throwing poison in your drinking water and making your air unbreathable. Climate change denial is a forte of theirs and claiming models aren't accurate (mostly by either lying about what models predicted or lying about what the actual temperature is right now) is a key part of how they deny things. The whole "we don't know and we can't know" schpiel from people claiming to be champions of science (which is the thing we use to know things with) is ridiculous. But that tagline says it all. That's not an article about maths, statistics, science or probability though it claims to be all of the above. It's an article about politics - which is being disguised because they don't want you to know it's about politics. It's an attempt to achieve a political goal - regardless of scientific fact.
When you get to the point where you will deny science and reality for the sake of your poiltical beliefs - no matter how nobel those beliefs may otherwise be - they've become evil. At the point where you want government to be too small to keep the water drinkable, the air breathable and the CO2 levels survivable - small government libertarians are no longer just people with whom I have a difference of opinion - they become an actual and legitimate threat to my personal security and the national security of all nations. Killing them becomes justified on the basis of self defence. *
You generally want to stop following the line of any ideology before the point where it becomes justifiable for other people to kill you in self defence over what you do in the name of that ideology.
*Note that I am speaking of what would be justified - not what I would actually do. I'm a pacifist and consider force the very last resort. I don't think we are *quite* at the last resort level in general yet. In a few specific cases yes, but not in general. If you live in a town where somebody is dumping poison in your drinking water though - and you kill the CEO of the company who did it and every idiot who tried to stop the government from preventing it, you are not a murderer though, that's self defence and even the most devoted pacifist will not begrudge you that.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I took away from her study that, as far as she could extrapolate from the available data on climate/temperature cycles going back 2 million years, that we were pretty much smack at the point of the two curves one would expect during this point in time
Not quite. We reached the peak of the current interglacial about 8000 years ago. That peak is the result of Milankovitch cycles and the carbon, albedo, and other feedbacks - just as the peaks that came before. Temperatures have been falling slowly since then until the last 150 years when we increased atmospheric CO2 by about 70% by burning fossil fuels. Temperatures have risen along with the recent CO2 increase, just as you'd expect. The question she's trying to answer is, if we stopped releasing CO2 today, how much more warming would we observe just due to the CO2 we've already released. She uses the CO2 and temperature correlation over the previous glacial/interglacial periods to estimate the impact of CO2 on temperatures.
Gavin Schmidt shows why this is flawed and, given our current circumstances, likely to overestimate the impact. Here is a snippet: "In the previous post, I outlined how the combination of carbon cycle feedbacks to the Milankovitch forcing and the climate system response to CO2 gives rise to this correlation and that – by itself – it can’t be used to define the latter term. Furthermore, because the regression is being defined over ice age cycles where the biggest changes are related to the (now disappeared) North American and Fenno-Scandanavian ice sheets, the regression might well be much less for situations where only Greenland and West Antarctica are 'in play'."
Hey, all you "man made" global warming people...you think it is mans fault? Do the world a favor and exit the planet and leave the rest of us the hell alone!
The quick fix for the "global warming people" isn't to leave the planet. It's to kill the people who are destroying the ecosphere upon which we depend for survival. If you want to see an eco-war, keep running your suck instead of changing your habits.
The ice core from greenland is a perfectly good meter stick. If localized activity affects the weather there will be signs in the ice. For example, if there's a volcano reducing insolation, then there's going to be volcanic particulates in the ice. Thus, you'll be able to separate the localized influences.
Are you claiming that Greenland isn't affected by global climate? That's going to be a hard sell.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you have that backwards. Snyder is saying that the historical record shows that the sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide is much HIGHER than the GISS estimates. Gavin Schmidt's comment is, basically, that her data shows correlation, not causation.
I took away from her study that, as far as she could extrapolate from the available data on climate/temperature cycles going back 2 million years, that we were pretty much smack at the point of the two curves one would expect during this point in time, so to speak, on both CO2 and temperature and from that lack of deviation from expected norms then suggesting that humans have had little if any significant effect on global temperature averages
In that case, you are misled by a misinterpretation of her results.
She looked at temperature and carbon dioxide with five thousand year averaging. Five thousand year averaging says absolutely nothing about the effects of industrialization-- we don't even show up in her data. With averaging on five-thousand year bins, you only see effects on time scales that are long compared to five thousand years.
, and that the warming that is occurring and will continue for a long time at pretty much the same average rate is pretty well inevitable given past history with or without human industrialization.
A more accurate statement of that : "The activities of humans over the last 100 years have not had an effect that is yet visible on a graph plotted over million-year time scales."
To which one could accurately add: "yet".
Seeing as how industrialization in it's entirety has failed to have been shown to appreciably affect global temperature changes
..enough to be evident over million-year time scales.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...then massive, costly, and punitive CO2 mitigation schemes become pointless and wasteful.
It is a political talking point that doing anything to address the production of CO2 will be "massive, costly, and punitive". Since the response of the fossil fuel industry has been "do everything possible to cast doubt on the fact that a problem even exists, and divert all attention away from realistic thinking about possible ways to address the problem", though, this has never been thought through.
The problem being that a non-existent 'climate crisis' allows governments, politicians, and their bureaucracies unprecedented powers and control that they will never willingly give up.
It is a right wing talking point that if climate change is real, then the only possible way to address it is to give "governments, politicians, and their bureaucracies unprecedented powers and control."
I find it amusing that the right wing's only approach to the problem is to say that if the problem is real we need to give governments more power. It's as if their political philosophies don't have any tools to solve problems other than "give the government more power."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There were vineyards in Scotland and diaries of vikings in Iceland tell of a land as warm as Europe. Orange trees were grown in parts of temperate China and northern Italy.
When it came to an end it started the little ice age which called all of the above to this day never recovered.
http://saveie6.com/
There have been several glacial/interglacial periods over the last 120,000 years.
No. Since the last interglacial 120000 years ago (the Eemian, warmer than the current) and the one we're living in (the Holocene) there has only been a glacial period (cold ... ).
It seems the paper thus says that our current interglacial is the warmest interglacial since the last interglacial. That seems very uncontroversial.
Regarding the XKCD graph it's contradicted by its own source. The graph claims to use Marcott et. al 2013 as a source (see top right). Now, study the graph carefully. Then read the following from Marcott et.al 2013 (the abstract, even):
"Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history."
Now study the XKCD graph again.
it's in my head
I can vote government out and you bet your ass the republicans will be losing Michigan over Flint. I cannot vote out PG&E.
Thats the difference. History has almost no examples at all of elected governments killing many citizens.
In the case of Flint the fuckup was enforced by the state government against the demands of the local government who actually wanted to stop it. Interestingly the state government was the party of small government. See when you make government too small to stop corporations from killing you, you also made it too small to stop itself. You need a government of competing interests to act as watchdogs over each other. That unfortunately requires it to be large enough to have competing interests. Such a larger government is more efficient than a smaller one too because government departments actually have competition.
The failure of the EPA to prevent Flint is a direct result of congressional cuts to the EPA budget. Making government smaller kills the watchdogs that restrain it.
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>the amount of industrialization 150 years ago was trivial compared to today comparable to volcanic activity
And you were doing so well. You almost sounded like what you were saying wasn't complete bullshit... and then you come up with this such and complete and utter fabrication that it's impossible to believe somebody could actually still seriously claim this.
The good news is - we don't have to guess, we have actual numbers. See the American Geophysical Union - who are pretty much the premier experts on volcanoes - actually answered the question. The average annual total CO2 output from volcanoes is 0.025% of what is put out by coal power plants. Just power plants, and just coal. That's not counting cars, or oil plants, or gas plants or any of the other emission generating fossil fuel industries. Just power plants alone put out 4000 times as much CO2 every year as all the volcanoes in the world.
Oh and volcanic climate change, more often than not, is cooling - not heating. Volcanoes are more likely to cover the atmosphere in sun-blocking ash and sulphur, which makes it colder. It was a volcano, after all, that gave Europe it's infamous 19th century year without a summer. Volcanic heating from CO2 is actually extremely rare. It's just not a factor - which is why we believe that most previous major shifts in climate had to do with solar activity or changes in the eath's orbit. Things which are not happening to any significant degree at the moment.
>So then - the rise in temperatures 150 years ago was not a result of man-made global warming,
Firstly, the industrial revolution started in the 18th century, not in the 19th, and was well along by 150 years ago - so your claim about the level of industrialization is another flagrant lie easily disputed by anybody who passed high school history class. Now high school history classes tend to be less than stellar in accuracy, being more obsessed with propaganda than actual history but they do tend to get the damn *dates* right.
Besides which - nobody claims there was a significant rise 150 years ago because there wasn't. What there was, was the beginning of the rise that is significant TODAY. It started then, small, and has been accelerating ever since.
>do you think that a libertarian property owner would have no problem (and no recourse in a libertarian society)
Recourse isn't good enough. Recourse cannot happen until after somebody did something bad - perhaps fatal. The ONLY reason to have recourse at all, since there is neither justice nor any other good served by vengeance, is as a deterrent. Prevention is what we actually need.
It's not GOOD enough to punish the ones who did it for what harm they cause - you need to make it so damn scary that they don't try. Civl lawsuits don't work for that, we have them now - and they are not working (that was what Murray Rothbard proposed and it's pretty much the only well developed libertarian theory on the subject).
And what's worse is that the court system as a whole - and indeed any recourse system - is fatally flawed as a way of dealing with this and property rights even moreso. For several reasons:
1) Poluting your OWN land is STILL evil - because polution doesn't obey land borders
2) Recourse need to exist for people who don't own land as well - in fact, currently, they are the ones most in need of protection, most current toxic polution events happen on land without clear single-person ownership under western law.
3) It's extremely hard to prove, how *do* I prove this poison came from YOUR factory and not your competitors ? What about air polution ? A recent study showed that a sigificant portion of the smog in LA originates from factories in china. Polution not only doesn't obey land borders - it doesn't even obey national borders. All polution is global polution. That brings up matters of jurisdiction, huge costs and difficulty proving the guilty party and then proving that the harm you suffered was from that polution. It's a nightmare and, generally, only rich people g
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Oh, and all this is academic. Lets assume your insanity is true and climate change to this degree is normal and the historical record actually supports that claim. It's bullshit but lets pretend it was real.
See we have other records - archeological, anthropological etc. etc and the thing is - they show that every major climate shift humanity has experienced was a major calamity and we very nearly didn't survive any of them as a species. Every single one came close to an extinction level event for us. Every single one caused massive displacement, starvation and wars.
And we are MORE vulnerable now than we were when those happened. They happened when displacement was a much smaller problem. If you went somewhere else, there was a good chance you could find somewhere that somebody else wasn't already living and prepared to fight to keep you out off... there are no such places anymore. There is nowhere for the displaced to flee but to your country. America can't figure out how to deal with a few hundred thousand refugees from wars they caused - how the fuck are you going to deal when there's a few hundred million or more fleeing starvation and hunger and drought ? Sure it may make some places green which aren't now. Those places won't be producing much food anytime soon though - most of them are areas where the soil is not conducive to farming. No matter how much warmer and wetter you make it - Siberia will not have productive farmland for centuries. The soil is just to dead. And meantime - the places that were good farmland won't be anymore.
Oh and the plagues... you are having a political crisis trying to deal with Zika right now. Malaria kills more people every year than any other cause. Even a small increase in the global average *massive* increases the areas where these diseases can spread. Many economists have calculated that Africa's economic woes can be *entirely* attributed to Malaria. Sure we have wars and corruption but so does everywhere else. We alone have malaria to deal with. With all those productive people dying young. All those kids missing school because mommy is sick, husbands and family missing work to take care of her and all that money wasted on funerals in a classic broken window fallacy.
Imagine America with Africa's economy - all your wealth destroyed, all your resources spent just trying to avoid complete collapse - and for the same reason.
That's the thing you think is not a major problem. Just because nature can be a bitch doesn't mean it's not idiotic to horrible things to ourselves. The lesson to learn from natural climate shifts is not that climate shifts is just something that happens and so what... the lesson is that it has come pretty close to eradicating our species several times, and never failed to cause enormous hardship and uncountable deaths and it will be *worse* next time.
And, much like the zombie appocalypse, in a major climate change scenario - the single greatest threat is not the weather, it's the other humans. Who will happilly kill you for the water you have.
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My point wasn't about efficacy - frankly I don't believe it would be very effective, mass murder rarely is. Such a process would also require enormous resources, which creates a breeding ground for corruption. In practical terms - it would not be an effective way to achieve the goal and would open the door to many genuine atrocities.
My point was to put into perspective the point where libertarians ought to stop being libertarians - because of what becomes justified (justified != a good idea) when they do. People have a right to freedom of religion - but when you start believing you have the right to blow me up in the name of your deity I get the right to shoot you first. People have a right to freedom of speech - but when you are advocating that people should kills gays - we bloody well will lock you up, even in the USA. On the other side - I am (a kind of) socialist in my thinking, but at the point where socialists advocate violent revolutions I no longer support them. Those have historically caused massive hardship and slaughter of innocents, installed dictators and consistently failed to produce socialist outcomes anyway - the most successful socialist states achieved it by peaceful and democratic processes.
No matter how good your idea is, no matter how nobel your goals may seem to be - all ideas have limits, and that limit is where other people can make a reasonable argument that your pursuit of this idea puts their welbeing at risk.
Even if libertarians claim they would offer workable alternatives to government prevention (and so far none has - all I've heard is 'recourse' which is the old Murray Rothbard argument and doesn't offer anything resembling a workable solution but they like to push that one because it *sounds* like the are solving the problem without actually stopping anybody from killing you) a sane version would declare that all laws and regulations on matters of public safety will stay intact until AFTER their alternative systems are in place, tested and working.
You don't create a vaccuum in which slaughter can happen while going through the arduous process of building something else, even if you think that something is better (by whatever measure you decide it is better). You build the alternative BEFORE you dismantle the current one.
Because a bad system for public safety is still better than none at all, even if it's briefly - and legal changes are never 'briefly'.
I absolutely do agree that the best way to deal with the particular threat posed by libertarians is not through killing them in self defence. Hell even if somebody attacks you and wants to kill you right now my belief is that you shouldn't kill him in self defence if you have any other options. If you can escape - then you shouldn't kill. If you can disable without death then you should take that option.
Killing, even in self defence, is a last resort. I wasn't advocating we kill libertarians - I was merely putting into perspective the risk they pose. If you believe in libertarianism, fine, we will never agree but we can live alongside each other. On issues of social liberalism we could even be allies even if our economics will always be as opponents.
There's nothing wrong with that. But you ought to stop being a libertarians BEFORE the point where it risks the health and safety of other people. Just as you ought to stop being a christian BEFORE the point where you bash gays.
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