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."

Comments

Re:She's right

[Namarrgon]

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.

Re:we were just heading back into an ice age.

[Layzej]

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/

Re: we were just heading back into an ice age.

[silentcoder]

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.