What’s the hottest Earth has been “lately”?
Difference from historic average temperature since last ice age. NOAA Climate.gov cartoon by Emily Greenhalgh. Inspired by Figure 1(b) in Marcott et al., 2014.
This article is the second of two articles describing the hottest time periods in Earth’s history.
Throughout its 4.54-billion-year history, Earth has experienced multiple periods of temperatures hotter than today’s. But as far as the “recent” past, a study published in March 2013 concluded that global average temperature is now higher than it has been for most of the last 11,300 years.
The scientists assembled dozens of temperature records from multiple studies, including data from sediment cores drilled in lake bottoms and sea floors, and from ice cores. Assembling data from 73 records that overlap in time, the scientists pieced together global average temperatures since the end of the last ice age.
A researcher examines an ice core extracted from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Photo courtesy Thomas Bauska, Oregon State University, National Science Foundation.
The 11,000-year temperature reconstruction shows global average temperature increasing after the end of the last ice age and leveling off about 7550 and 3550 BC. After that time, global temperatures dropped until the “Little Ice Age,” bottoming out somewhere between AD 1450 and 1850. Afterwards temperatures rose again, first slowly then very rapidly. (The estimated temperatures for the past 1,500 years correlated with previous research that covered the same time period.)
Global temperature anomalies over the past 11,300 years compared to historic average (1961-1990). The purple line shows the annual anomaly, and the light blue band shows the statistical uncertainty (one standard deviation). The gray line shows temperature from a separate analysis spanning the past 1,500 years. Image adapted from Figure 1(b) in Marcott et al.
Natural variability can explain much of the temperature variation since the end of the last ice age, resulting from factors such as changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis. Over the past century, though, global average temperatures have “risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels” in the past 11,300 years, the 2013 study authors explain. Over this same period, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have increased.
Given the uncertainty inherent in estimating ancient temperatures, the scientists conservatively concluded that the last decade has brought global average temperatures higher than they have been for at least 75 percent of the last 11,300 years. The recent increase in global average temperature is so abrupt compared to the rest of the time period that when the scientists make a graph of the data, the end of the line is nearly vertical.
What about the future? To project future temperatures, the research team used greenhouse gas emission scenarios outlined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis report, and the authors expect the steep increase to continue through the year 2100 regardless of which one of the emission scenarios from the 2007 report is considered.
Most of what we consider modern civilization fits within the last 11,000 years—a period of remarkable climatic stability in which people have been able to continuously inhabit in the same regions for millennia. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization describes Tell es-Sultan (ancient Jericho) as “the oldest town on earth.” Photo courtesy Seetheholyland.net (some rights reserved).
For most of the past 10,000 years, global average temperature has remained relatively stable and low compared to earlier hothouse conditions in our planet’s history. Now, temperature is among the highest experienced not only in the “recent” past—the past 11,000 years or so, during which modern human civilization developed—but also probably for a much longer period.
Carrie Morrill of the National Climatic Data Center explains, “You’d have to go back to the last interglacial [warm period between ice ages] about 125,000 years ago to find temperatures significantly higher than temperatures of today.”
References
Mann, M.E., Zhang, Z., Hughes, M.K., Bradley, R.S., Miller, S.K., Rutherford, S., Ni, F. (2008). Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105(36), 13252-13257.
Marcott, S.A., Shakun, J.D., Clark, P.U., Mix, A.C. (2013). A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. 339(6124), 1198-1201.
Otto-Bliesner, B. L., Rosenbloom, N., Stone, E. J., McKay, N.P., Lunt, D.J., Brady, E.C., Overpeck, J.T. (2013). How warm was the last Interglacial? New model-data comparisons. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series A, 371(2001), 20130097.
Perkins, S. (2013, March 7). Global temperatures are close to 11,000-year peak. Nature News. Accessed February 4, 2014.
Revkin, A. (2013, April 1). Fresh thoughts from authors of a paper on 11,300 years of global temperature changes. The New York Times. Accessed June 13, 2014.
Superbly misleading! As you say, time to call our man Josh. 🙂
What, another study that confirms Mann et al.’s findings? It’s gotta be a global conspiracy!
Or willful incompetence, take your pick.
Its not a study at all. It was referencing long debunked studies.
How about ‘These results don’t match my expectations, so I must need to adjust the input data.’
Carrie Morrill of the National Climatic Data Center explains, “You’d have to go back to the last interglacial [warm period between ice ages] about 125,000 years ago to find temperatures significantly higher than temperatures of today.”
PeteMB, read the above and think really really hard.
I have a hard time believing anyone can figure out temperature anomalies in the plus/minus half a degree range going back 11,300 years with an uncertainty range of a mere plus/minus tenth of a degree. Call me skeptical.
The Earth is tiny, that is what makes it so easy for them to measure the entire average global temp in 4000 bc to .01 degrees of uncertainty. Temp variations from the Arctic to Equator are small too.
You can trust them.
+1 for the nice sarc.
+1
Any bridges for sale in Brooklyn?
Anthony, any chance of a like/dislike feature for the posts? One for belly laughs would work too 🙂
Temperatures were recorded to the nearest whole degree for most of the 20th century, ie +/- 0.5 degree recording accuracy. It makes a mockery of the +/-0.1 degree claim.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/EQUIPMENT.pdf
page 11:
“The At Observation temperature is the current temperature displayed.
Record temperatures in whole degrees only.
For example, if the display shows a temperature of 76.5, record “77”.
For a temperature of 76.4, record “76”.
I was taught in undergrad statistics to round down on even numbers and round up on odd numbers; i.e., 76.5 is 76 and 77.5 is 78. The rounding error balances out over multiple observations.
Using the NOAA method would introduce an upward bias.
Then take into consideration that these global-temperature anomalies with (at best) a precision of 0.5 degree C were used to calculate the corresponding anomaly from the proxy measurement. I’ve seen the result of similar reconstructions done by a real scientist and the uncertainty is so large that no conclusion can be drawn.
Is the range of uncertainty one standard deviation? That is a 68% confidence interval. Some honesty would be good, especially as it is highly unlikely that the actual global temperatures changed so smoothly prior to the invention of the thermometer.
Yes, clearly it’s nonsense.
The whole ‘average’ temperature concept is ridiculous. The natural cycles between day and night and the hourly changes that are caused by weather, wind, clouds etc would make it impossible for me to sensibly define the ‘average’ temperature, over a week, in my back garden – never mind globally.
The only chance I would have is if I could eliminate as many variables as possible, so using the same thermometer in the same location read at the same time of day might yield an average for that part of the garden but 20 feet away, where there’s some cover, it might be different by several degrees.
These clowns aren’t even eliminating a single variable, nothing is consistent. But putting a +/- 0.2° error range on a 10000 year old proxy reconstruction is just silly. Why won’t other real scientists point this out?
Fear.
Jaffa
I support the answer to your question provided by lawrence Cornell that “fear” has inhibited scientists from pointing out that the global “average temperature concept is ridiculous”.
However, I write to remind that not all scientists have been suppressed by that fear. Please see the list of signatories to this assessment of average global temperature.
Richard
Not only do they claim they can, they, like Mann, feel they can overturn, with out so much as even an acknowledgement, dozens of historic past peer reviewed publications showing much warmer past periods.
In normal science you are suppose to explain why the past science you are overturning is wrong.
In addition they neglect that the past T reconstructions have virtually zero resolution on periods less then 100 years, and are therefore not valid to compare to the last thirty years.
You are right
Note to self, must have clipboard when “doing” serious science.
… and ski goggles on the head in the dark 😉 Wot, no lab coat ?
A clipboard makes the observations 10 times more accurate.
‘T-Rex’ of winters in store for Canada: Old Farmer’s Almanac
http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/t-rex-of-winters-in-store-for-canada-old-farmer-s-almanac-1.2012804
“We’re looking at the T-Rex of winters,” Jack Burnett, editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, said on CTV’s Canada AM on Thursday. From Calgary to Quebec, we’re going to be up to our neck,” Burnett said.
Dave Phillips of Environment Canada doesn’t quite buy the almanac’s prediction, though. “This winter is not going to be as long and cold as last year,” he said. “Even if it’s a normal winter, it will feel like a tropical heat wave compared to what we had to endure as Canadians last year.”
===========
So there we have it. Farmers Almanac versus Environment Canada. Any bets on who will be the more accurate?
Old Farmers Almanac, not Farmers Almanac. http://www.almanac.com/content/2014%E2%80%932015-winter-weather-forecast-map-us
The Old Farmers Almanac is published in Dublin NH, so we NH residents have to defend it from the lookalike from Maine.
Joe Bastardi is expecting something like 1976/1977, frigid from Ohio to Louisiana.
If you’re east of the Rockies, split an extra cord of wood.
Make the most of using wood too, as the EPA is banning most wood burning stoves ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2014/01/29/epas-wood-burning-stove-ban-has-chilling-consequences-for-many-rural-people/ and other refs). They haven’t said whether EPA SWAT teams will be inspecting homes and demanding the removal of existing stoves; but don’t depend on that not happening.
Expect an EPA on ban camp fires to follow shortly.
Lets see if the good Doctor will claim that on his CV!
What would a T-Rex winter be like? Hot, lukewarm, cold?
There will be Hot Love.
We merely live in a temporary, warm interglacial among many, and repeated glacial ages. The next will return as surely as the sun rises. It may be sooner, it may be later, but it will return.
New mantra: CO2 is good. It feeds the plants upon which all higher life on Earth depends. It keeps us warm and buffers against cool downs and the next ice age. CO2 is our friend.
The “Vinland Saga” clearly shows that the Medieval Warm period was warmer than today, as it states about Newfoundland: “There was never any frost all winter and the grass hardly withered at all”. Furthermore, the Vikings farmed and had cattle in southwest Greenland, which could not be done today.
” Norsemen in Greenland were primarily farmers, raising cattle, sheep and goats, but supplementing that regimen with local marine and terrestrial fauna, trading polar bear fur, narwhal ivory and falcons for grain and metals from Iceland and eventually Norway.”
http://archaeology.about.com/od/vikings/qt/eastern_settlement.htm
“Potatoes, Sheep and Strawberries in Greenland – …..A thousand years ago the Vikings had farms here, and for much of the last century many Greenlanders have had them too, focusing mostly on sheep and potatoes.”
http://modernfarmer.com/2013/10/arctic-farming/
Vinland almost certainly was further south than Newfoundland, most likely in the bay of Fundy. And keeping cattle (mostly sheep) is actually possible once more on Greenland, though only in the warmest part of the former Eystribygd (Eastern settlement). It is still impossible in the old Vesterbygd (near Nuuk). And barley still can’t be grown anywhere in Greenland, which it was in Eystribygd during the MWP, as shown both by archaeology and historical sources (Konungs skugsjá).
So, it has been getting warmer in Greenland, but it is still colder than the MWP.
The Vinland Saga states: “On the shortest day of the year, the sun was already up by 9AM, and did not set until after 3PM. Call it 8:45AM and 3:15PM — up for 6 1/2 hours on Dec 21. So what latitude is that?
NZ Willy September 19, 2014 at 3:29 am
So what latitude is that?
according to http://www.orchidculture.com/COD/daylength.html#60N that would be around 60 N.
Seward, Alaska, is at 60 degrees north lat. and has 6:23 daylight on 21 Dec (see navy link). Kujalleq, at the southern tip of Greenland is at about 60 degrees north, too.
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/aa_durtablew.pl
Yet the schools keep repeating the nonsense about the vikings calling Greenland green to con other people to move there. I corrected that part of their curriculum for my son.
Ask any Newfie if they or any of their old folk ever mentioned a winter without snow where the grass didn’t die. They’ll laugh and ask if you’ve been into the skreech?
I don’t get it.
The joke is in the last line of the climate.gov article.
“Carrie Morrill of the National Climatic Data Center explains, “You’d have to go back to the last interglacial [warm period between ice ages] about 125,000 years ago to find temperatures significantly higher than temperatures of today.””
Of course we live in an interglacial… NOW.
But wait….. hang on…. drum roll…. CO2 is higher now, BUT today’s temps are lower than the last interglacial per Ms Morrill. So where is the causation? Which direction does the causation arrow lie? Did the Earth not then fall back into a hard, devastating glacial? Lack of stabilizingCO2 maybe????
Even Anthropologists clearly have shown the devastating effects of the descent into the Pleistocene. Genetic analysis shows Homo sapiens bottlenecked to only a few handful or so breeding pairs 70K-80K ya during the onset of the worst of the Pleistocene cooldown.
Climate.gov just refuted their own evil-CO2 AGW alarmism. CO2 is good.
Ahhhhhhh. I love the smell of scientists paying attention in the morning.
That’s a beautiful thing you just did their Joel. Thanks for the morning lift.
I had wondered what the magic marker black arrow pointed too.
Say it isn’t snow: September flurries hit northwestern Ontario
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/say-it-isn-t-snow-september-flurries-hit-northwestern-ontario-1.2011014
Calgary, Alberta and area had snow last week.
So did the Australian Alps, one of the latest heavy snowfalls I can remember.
Is Mikie trying to tell reasonable thinking men and women he’s re-found the MWP and it was 0.2° C cooler back then than today. Really, 0.2° warmer now and the error bars are ±0.2°?
He’s kidding, right?
I’m glad they made Mikie give back the MWP but, I wonder how he treated the real data while he had it in hiding? Was Penn State paying attention?
Once again Mikie’s been able to make me point and laugh at him and The Team and The Cause.
Is it more reasonable that they know the exact global temperature of the MWP or that some one is manipulating the data while ensuring the correct language is always out in front, you know, embellishing?
Elevators and alligators
h/t to kim
?????
19 Sept: Mashable: Andrew Freedman: World Smashes All-Time Temperature Records Ahead of UN Climate Summit
The June through August period was the warmest such period on Earth since record-keeping began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Thursday.
In addition, the month of August was the warmest such month on record since 1880 as well, and featured the warmest ocean temperatures ever recorded for any month…
These temperature records, along with others, have set the world on course to have its warmest year on record, NOAA said…
The NOAA said record warmth was observed across much of the central and western equatorial Pacific Ocean, as well as parts of the western Indian Ocean, especially in the vicinity of Madagascar…
The new temperature data also comes just before one of the largest gatherings of world leaders ever to take place on the subject of global warming. The daylong U.N. Climate Summit will be held in New York on Sept. 23.
http://mashable.com/2014/09/18/world-smashes-all-time-temperature-records-ahead-of-un-climate-summit/
Record numbers of wind mills are slowing the winds, causing higher temperatures:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/09/are-record-ocean-surface-temperatures-due-to-record-low-wind-speeds/
Odd that the NASA satellite data does not agree with the NOAA fudged GISS.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/rule-1/
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/screenhunter_2913-sep-18-21-19.gif
P.S. Prepare for another outbreak of ‘polar’ vortex (aka record snowfall and record cold) this winter.
Puzzling that there is record sea in the Antarctic and recovering sea in the Arctic.
Have just read a lovely book – “The Holocene” by Neil Roberts (1989). Old fashioned science – just listing all the climate and environmental changes throughout the last 12000 years. All the evidence is there, shown dispassionately. A joy to read. No fancy propositions or novel interpretations of the past. Just plain observations (and possible deductions). Just as science ought to be.
Let us get over these present (and I hope only temporary) diversions into very questionable research where results are aimed-for and predetermined, and all previous findings quietly swept under the carpet.
Climatology has been hijacked by some marauders who are using it for a political agenda and yes the discipline has been degraded.
What that graph really needs is a person resembling Hansen or Schmidt, with a level pulling on that very right hand end.to turn it to an upright position.
That is the best comment!
Just a couple more days of this type of stunt , then following the none event a break before the ‘stunts return’ has Paris 5 start hotels revive a boast to their income .
Amongst other faults with the reconstruction, the pre-1000 AD data is smoothed to heck to about a 500 year moving average (if my memory serves) and carried up to a current end point, a trick designed to fool the unwary.
For the mathematically challenged, like me, this is a good explanation of the principles of data smoothing in a time series graph: “… extending smoothed graphs beyond their formal endpoints represents an unfortunate habit which should be avoided in the analysis of meteorological data series. Always ask to see a plot of the original data along with the smoothed graph …”.
http://www.climate4you.com/DataSmoothing
+1
Based on better evidence, and comparing apples to apples, the current temperature should be shown at about the same level as Medieval times. More consistent smoothing would probably have that result. A critique of science.gov around this graph needs to mention this issue, and ideally should offer a better graph.
“The scientists assembled dozens of temperature records from multiple studies, including data from sediment cores drilled in lake bottoms and sea floors, and from ice cores.”
Notice how that is stated. What do you want to bet some of those studies include treemometer data?
Note that many proxies don’t catch spikes in temperature of a brief duration similar to that of the recent warming. There’s no guarantee that there haven’t been multiple occurrences over the past 1000 years of temperatures well in excess of current.
Sometimes I wonder if proxy data is equivalent to hear-say evidence in court.
I know in a court of law hear-say is not allowed and if that is the only evidence the case is dismissed.
I realise that proxies are more related to indirect evidence, such as proving poisoning, not by finding poison in the body but the specific chemical effects on the body of certain poisons. The poison is gone but there is a clear signature of the poison left.
But posion effects are easily replicated and specific, they are proven. Proxy records as a signature of temperatures is all over the place, with different proxies giving different results. They are unreliable and subject to bias in the same way hear-say evidence is.
Rather than a Josh riposte, how about The Minnesotans for Global Warming weaving their musical magic on Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”.
Here’s a start:-
Gravy Train….
I’ve listened to preachers,
I’ve listened to fools
I’ve watched all the dropouts
Who make their own rules
The Science conditioned to rule and control
The media sells it along with their soul
Mental wounds still screaming
Driving me insane
I’m goin’ off the rails on this gravy train
I’m goin’ off the rails on this gravy train
+1^^^ Well done!!
Looks like that ride car is defying gravity as well as most other sciences. how could get up that high unless it was pushed?
This is Marcott back from the grave. Marcott and Mann’s hockey sticks are both disgraceful fraud.
Mann’s skulduggery involved extreme selection of trees – the key result depended on a single Yamal tree.
Marcott’s trick was to smudge together many proxies including some that deliberately chosen due to their weakness. Many studies show that some sediment record or shell deposit layer or pollen or some other biological indicator has SOME correspondence with past climate. However these proxies vary hugely in their precision and accuracy. The objective of the studies using these proxies is not to claim “this is exactly how the climate was” but instead to show “this particular proxy shows SOME correspondence with some aspect of historic climate”. This is obvious from the huge discrepancy between them in results.
Some “proxies” hardly even resolve the Holocene itself, let alone features within the Holocene such as warm and cold periods. It is deeply – and deliberately – fraudulent to mix such weak proxies with others such as the much higher quality ice core records and claim that this adds value to the proxy record. It does not add value, it subtracts value, and this is deliberate.
Averaging strong with weak proxies achieves the politically convenient objective of squashing the Holocene flat and giving life to the egregious fiction that the current warming spike is in any way remarkable within the Holocene. It is not.
This is an attack on proxy reconstruction, an attack on history and truth.
Marcott is IMO a case of scientific misconduct. I deconstructed it in a post at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc last year. Simply compared his thesis to Science. There was no hockey stick in the thesis, and the reconstruction method has zero resolution under 300 years. Is repeated as an essay in the forthcoming book, Blowing Smoke. Steve McIntyre did a more detailed analysis of the alkenone proxy subset. Same result.
I wrote Science last year with the evidence. Receipt acknowledged, no further reply or action. I wrote them again last Friday providing the entire essay. No response yet. Hopefully the book’s appearance may get them off their duff.
Finally Marcott rots.
Climate.gov was Pravda by design, easily skewered in our age of pocket fax machines:
http://s16.postimg.org/54921k0at/image.jpg
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” ― Theodore Dalrymple
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” ― Theodore Dalrymple
Really important and useful quote, thanks, I’ll save it.
Nik, where is the quote from?
It seems completely unbelievable to me that what is seemingly an official government site can publish such obvious lies and distortions and expect anyone to believe them. What about Greenland, just as one for instance? The clue lies in the name. Why would this area of the world have this name if it had always been like it is now? As a joke? We know there were farms there 1000 years ago because they have been found under the ice. But they want us to believe that the earth is warmer now than it was then.
There is a lack of accountability for malfeasance in public office that leads those working for such establishments to believe that there is no requirement for ethics. Can anyone cite a case where such accountability was enforced?
Eric the Red, according to the Norse saga, gave it the name Greenland because he thought that such a name would more readily attract settlers. He was a real estate promoter, you see.
Do you really think that after conning a bunch of the most blood-thirsty men ever to grace our planet Eric the Red would have survived two seconds once they saw nothing but snow where there was supposed to be green farmland
http://blog.epa.gov/epaconnect/2014/06/reddit-ask-me-anything-with-epa-administrator-gina-mccarthy/
Copy and Paste this link its an online public consultation with Obama,s Climate Change strategist.
Google “Reddit ask me anything Climate Change”.
Someone should have asked her if making Energy more restrictive and expensive and making thousands unemployed is really a good way to reduce CO2 and mitigate the effects of AGW and how many bedrooms she has in her private mansion?
Ah well the spurious blip disowned by its own authors. The history before the uptick is much more interesting even though it has such a low time resolution; it shows long term cooling. And that part of the graph is probably even defensible.
MAR 13 Marcott & Shakun
Via climateaudit I found this link
Shakun video
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/#more-48664
Video of loose cannon Shakun explaining Marcott & Shakun’s “findings” to Revkin. Revkin is fascinated. Not sceptical. Shakun explains they can’t resolve fast blips in the past but nevertherless both he and Revkin are totally confident that the M&S Hockeystick is real. Most fascinatingly neither of them says “But wait a minute, over the last 15 years we had zero warming, how does THAT go together”.
All in all a fascinating video of two stupid and deluded members of the same cult feeding each other’s confirmation bias.
CA
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/16/the-marcott-shakun-dating-service/#comments
Steve McIntyre:
Imagine if Craig Loehle or I had produced a reconstruction making a similar re-dating of cores dated by specialists. We’d have had our heads handed to us by the specialist community. Imagine what Gavin Schmidt would have written if Loehle had redated a core by 1000 years. He’d have run Loehle out of town
NOAA just destroyed its credibility if it had any left.
What amuses me is the picture of the researcher and ice core. There is no protection of the ice core from the researcher’s breath, 40% CO2. It must be important with so small quantities to measure to remove any chance of external inputs.
Mann is still wrong by light years.
Like everything else – that wasn’t a researcher it was a model
I think it is 4%. But I agree with your point on contamination of the ice core.