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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."
Recently posted perspective here.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Here is another perspective based on non smoothed data.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
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"?
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/
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
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 *
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *