Recently, many media outlets touted a new scientific study “A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature” as proof that the current modest rise in temperature over the last 150 years is going to be catastrophic. The data and the methodology used strongly suggest that such claims are false.
For example, in their coverage, The Washington Post (WaPo) quoted one of the study authors, saying:
At no point in the nearly half-billion years that Judd and her colleagues analyzed did the Earth change as fast as it is changing now, she added:
“In the same way as a massive asteroid hitting the Earth, what we’re doing now is unprecedented.”
How absurd. In no way is a world ending event from space anything at all like the gentle warming we’ve seen over the past century.
Second, using the proxy data that their research was limited to, there is no way of determining whether the speed with which past temperature shifts occurred was faster, slower, or similar to what we are experiencing at present.
Bloomberg, in We Just Got a Wake-Up Call From the Time Before Dinosaurs, said this: “Earth has been through periods of rapid climate change before. They all produced mass death.” The implication is that we are on the same track as the dinosaurs, which ironically were ended by “a massive asteroid hitting the Earth.”
Tech news had this foreboding headline: 500 Million Years of Climate History Tells Us of a Coming Catastrophe
All of these media outlets predict doom and gloom in our immediate future due to climate change, but in doing so, they completely ignore the bigger picture presented by the study. Most importantly, the study itself made no predictions of future doom due to climate change; such dire predictions are spun entirely by the media.
What is clearly evident in the graph provided by WaPo and the graph in the actual study (Figure 1 seen below), yet ignored by the media, is that fact that the present-day is the coolest Earth has been in 485 million years. Furthermore, the media completely ignored the fact that the wide swings in temperature recorded throughout history all naturally happened well before humans and the industrial revolution came on the scene.
Note the blue line in Figure 1 (added), denoting that according to their data, the present-day is the coolest in that 485-million-year history of temperature.
Yet somehow, this is lost on the media. WaPo focuses entirely on the small blip at the very end of the graph, with their own magnified version, seen below:
WaPo completely ignores the evidence in presented research, such as the recent surface stations project conducted by The Heartland Institute, showing that the Urban Heat Island effect and the poor placement of temperature stations used to measure temperatures, from which long-term trend data is gathered, may account for as much as 50 percent of recent warming, with the remainder likely being partly or wholly natural.
Then WaPo sounds the obligatory “climate crisis” alarm, saying:
The planet has been heating up for the past 20,000 years – but human-caused emissions in recent centuries have pushed the rate of warming into unprecedented territory.
Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
That is false. We are not in “unprecedented territory.” The graph itself proves that as does other parts of the WaPo article, such as, “At its hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year.”
Of course, that 96.8°F peak happened well before humans even existed, suggesting that the planet has, as a result of entirely natural factors, dramatically warmed and cooled in the past without any human contribution whatsoever. To be clear, WaPo cites no data or theory, and certainly nothing contained in the study suggests, that human CO2 emissions could lead to the highs reached in the past. A 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius is increase is not dangerous, and certainly doesn’t get the world from its present 14.98℃ to the 36℃ figure WaPo is discussing to scare its readers.
This passage from the WaPo story does come to the honest conclusion that Earth tends to run warmer than today throughout its geological history:
The study also makes clear that the conditions humans are accustomed to are quite different from those that have dominated our planet’s history. For most of the Phanerozoic, the research suggests, average temperatures have exceeded 71.6 F (22 C), with little or no ice at the poles. Coldhouse climates — including our current one — prevailed just 13 percent of the time.
Therefore, it is quite possible Earth will return to a “hothouse climate” without any help from humans at all.
It is clear that the media wanted to spin this scientific study, which makes no alarming claims at all, into a tool to bolster their erroneous viewpoint that the world presently faces a “climate crisis” caused by humans. However, the data clearly show that the Earth’s temperature and the climates of its varied regions, have shifted radically in the past, that present temperatures are much cooler than has been the norm for the majority of Earth’s geological history, and that humans have lived through both cooler and warmer temperatures than we are currently experiencing at various points in history.
It is a shame, but not unexpected, that the mainstream media spins reports such as these into something frightening. Such behavior is not only dishonest, but reprehensible.
Originally published on Climate Realism
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
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We are still in an Ice Age, period. And all those variations in the past were not caused by fishies or dinosaurs driving around in SUVs.
We don’t know that for sure…
Did they find any rust with the fossilized bones? 😆😅
Um, when hunting trilobites and many other fossils, watch for iron stained layers as those are the layers with the fossils or impressions.
Fools gold, iron pyrite, is a common mineral found in coal.
Oh, clearly a fishie that had the ability to build an SUV would have also been smart enough to build it of plastic. You know, that plastic that can’t be created without fossil fuels. /sarc.
What crap! Clearly fishies would drive _submarines_, not SUV’s.
But the Ice Age must be preserved at all costs.
It was the Egyptians and aliens….the History Channel told me so!!
C’mon, man. Didn’t you ever watch the Flintstones?
And where is the Eemian peak that was much warmer than today? Why is it not shown in this graph ?
We know Hippos swam in the river we today call the Thames.
Unfortunately, analyses like this, even if not hidden by the mainstream media, would still not be persuasive to the average person. Most people cannot comprehend even the short (in geological terms) history of human civilization, or even the last 200 years, let alone the past 485 million years.
What people are most interested in is, what does rising CO2 do to, or for, me, right now, in my lifetime, and my family’s lifetimes. And there is plenty to promote along that line of thinking in opposition to the scaremongering of the media and the warmunists.
No – if you live in a coastal area, you aren’t going to be swimming to work in your lifetime, or the lifetimes of your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
No – you aren’t going to boil to death, or die of heat stroke due to global warming.
No – you aren’t going to starve, or die of pandemics caused by the tiniest amount of warming this planet is experiencing.
On and on and on. I think if we keep things grounded on what people might actually be concerned with, that’s persuasive and that’s where our focus needs to be.
And yes, the cost of mitigating this non-problem will make you and you children poorer.
Beat me to it, Loren.
THAT is the only absolute certainty of negative effects of climate hysteria –
a pandemic of impoverishment caused by UN / WEF promoted “climate change” agendas.
“what does rising CO2 do to, or for, me, right now, in my lifetime, and my family’s lifetimes.?”
Helps provide you and every other person and creature on the planet with food for more than just basic survival.
. . . but despite all of this, you WILL be taxed by governments (Federal and state) to “fight climate change”, like it or not.
Except for China who knows AGW is pure BS.
How does the resolution of the last 500 millions years temperature reconstruction (how many years per data point) compare to the data resolution of the last 2 centuries ?
Are you really all that concerned if the resolution over the interval of 200 years-to-500 million years ago was, say, a data point every million years (implying 500 data points used to construct that span in plots give above) versus a data point, say, every 3 months for the interval of 200 years ago to the present (implying 800 data points used to construct that span in plots given above)?
My, my . . . what sharp eyes you have!
I think the point is, the further we look into the past, the higher the degree of uncertainty.
But truth be told, our contemporary measurements aren’t fit for purpose.
I agree with your point. However, the issue that Petit-Barde asked was related to resolution in terms of time (i.e., years per successive data points), NOT is terms of temperature magnitude measurement uncertainty.
I thinks it’s somewhat obvious that a temperature derived from a proxy will always have more uncertainty than a temperature derived from any post-1820 thermometer.
Yes the issue was “fastest ever”. If old samples were spaced by a million years then how would one know what happened in 200 years?
Mr. M: It’s almost like CliScis look for things that can’t be disproven. I wonder if they do that on purpose?
When you control the media you control the narrative until the lies catch up and the people realize it.
It took Germans 12 years and a lost war to realize it. Let’s free the media!
Musk is trying to give us freedom to examine and discuss the lies we are fed.
Control the language, control the ideas.
– K. Marx
As long as the continents and major mountain ranges are in their current positions, there’s no way in Hades that we’ll enter a “hothouse” situation. We’ll be in an extended ice age for a long, long time. Remember the Eemian? We’re nowhere close to that, and I seriously doubt we’ll see that during the current interglacial.
The article has major flaws, such as CO2 being the control knob, which is IPCC
propaganda, and our impact being like a major meteor, which is pure, unscientific scare-mongering
A graph of CO2 ppm should be added, which would blow CO2/warming out of the water.
That graph was purposely left out, because it would have contradicted much in the article.
Why is Antony Watts spreading this spurious article?
Please explain
What’s to explain? Our present geography encourages an ice age.
WaPo is losing so much money that even Bezos cannot afford it and ordered significant staffing cuts. This post explains why.
WAPO says in the article, if you go read it:
I sincerely doubt the study said this. If it did, then I sincerely doubt the Journal Science had any peer review of the study before publishing it. No can know what the Earths average temperature was derived from proxies, let alone tenths of degree.
Of course WAPO did publish this, because they would not know any better even if they were told this.
If that little uptick at the end is 20,000 years the period before that is wrong. The earth was in a glacial ice age period for some 100,000 years before warming to the Holocene Optimum. There should be a flat portion 5 times as long as the horizontal part of the uptick. Maybe 100,000 yrs is too short to see on that scale.
Any 1.4 C uptick since 1850 would be invisible on this graph.
Pure scare-mongering of the author!
Indeed, and also it is impossible to chart 200 year temperature swings over 450 million years.
We do not know, what we do know is that we are presently in an ice age, and primates migrated during the temperature maximum from asia to south america via alaska. The PETM was not an extinction event.
One of the other graphics from the paper clearly shows that we are still very much in a “coldhouse” period
(I’ve added the red line to show where current CO2 levels are)
If the planet warms a bit more, CO2 may climb to 600ppm, but we would still be in a “coolhouse” period.
Y= C02, X= Climate state? Okay whatever.
Just using the graphs from the paper. 😉
We all know CO2 does NOT drive climate anything.
The political left want to lie to us and buy our votes. They are hatred junkies.
BTW, as Anthony Watts clearly knows but unfortunately barely commented on in his above article, atmospheric CO2 levels are known to have varied greatly over the span last of 50 to 450 million years ago . . . and, critically, there is no obvious correlation of atmospheric temperatures to atmospheric CO2 concentration levels during that interval.
Thus, the most central meme of today’s climate alarmists—that increasing atmospheric CO2 levels are the primary driver of global warming—is throughly falsified by paleoclimatology data.
See attached chart, noting in particular the trending of atmospheric CO2 levels by R. A. Berner [2001].
Also note the temperature chart at the top of the above article shows that about 100 million years ago, global atmospheric temperatures were about 40 deg-F higher than today but Earth survived that just fine . . . yet here we are now with the IPCC and many sheeple wringing their hands over a 3 deg-C (5.4 deg-F) postulated rise in Earth’s global atmospheric temperature from the mid-1800’s to 2050.
Of course, these facts don’t matter at all to AGW and CAGW alarmists, nor to 95% of the MSM. And that includes the IPCC, Joe Biden, Al Gore, AOC, Greta Thunberg and similar idiots that believe “climate change” (aka “global warming”) is an existential threat to mankind. Good grief!
One thing I find interesting about the plot “Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time” offered by ToldYouSo, is there appear to be discrete set points of approximately 28, 25, 22, 19, 16, & 10 Deg C. Since we are currently around 16 Deg C, it is interesting to speculate whether the earth’s temperature will remain essentially flat over the next 100’s or 1,000’s of years.
That could well be true for times earlier than about 30 million years ago . . . probably indicative of Berner “bin-ing” proxy-reconstructed temperatures in intervals of 3 deg-C.
However finer temperature variations plotted for data more recent than about 30 million years ago indicates better proxy data/sampling enabled temperature resolution improvement to about +/- 0.5 deg-C.
There is no reason to suspect that climatologists won’t be reporting average global atmospheric temperature to a resolution of +/- 0.1 deg C going forward . . . but of course, that’s a totally separate thing from claiming average temperature measurement accuracy to such a level.
And there is no physical reason whatsoever to believe “the earth’s temperature will remain essentially flat over the next 100’s or 1,000’s of years”.
Falsified in 2011 when the models were shown, absent and “forcing factors” to have a bias to increase temperature over time.
Well, I daresay that models cannot validate or falsify anything . . . they can be used to provide arguments for or against any given hypothesis, but that’s it.
I agree.
The point in my post was in the 2011 piece the author falsified the MODELS.
Bullshit alert!
The Holocene Climate OPTIMUM was considerably warmer than today, and a mere 7-8,000 years ago.
The planet has been COOLING OFF since then, with today’s “warming” just a short-term blip in a long-term cooling trend.
…
Interesting that humans evolved and spread during this ice age. Being an african species, however, I think we’ll be fine going forward.
What is interesting is that human beings are the only animal ever that can or could make fire. Fire, more properly controlled fire, is THE essential characteristic of the human animal. We cook, heat, light, protect, and alter the environment with fire. Our social and cultural behaviors arose around the common hearth, from language to family to mythos. The things that make us human are all derived or initiated from making fire.
Also interesting is that humans, the fire creatures, did not appear until the Earth’s temperature fell to levels unprecedented in history (geologic or biologic). It is almost as if Mother Earth created (evolved) fire creatures when temperatures descended to the point that life itself was threatened.
Our purpose, the biological reason for our very existence, is to warm the planet.
Or it might be something else, such as loving God, but that’s theology not biology. Philosophy is complex and perplexing.
Well, what about fire ants? 😳
Then too, humans have a history of engaging with fire breathing dragons, or so I’m told. 😳 😳
Cold also means dry. We’ll get incredible primary productivity/vegetation blooms around the world if the temperature continues to climb out of this ice age. Savanna turning to rainforest, and desert turning to savanna.
Please stretch that to 2000 words and submit it to a publisher. It’s an important point.
So … the “Climate” was fine until trilobites learned to rub two sticks together?
“Life” messed everything up?
Is the El Nino event warming effect finally subsiding ?
NCEP GFS 7-Day 2m Temperature Trend Run Sees 0.34°C Fall (notrickszone.com)
UAH for September will be interesting
WaPo says that “The planet has been heating up for the past 20,000 years…” Indeed it has. Back 20,000 years ago, the planet was in the most recent glacial maximum when temperatures were very low and the earth’s glacial coverage was very high including all of what is now Canada and most of the northern US States. It then started to warm until about 6,000 years ago when it approached a temperature plateau. The earth then continued to warm very slowly with many ups and downs to the present. For those concerned about human welfare effects from the 4C range of the highlight in WaPo’s chart, please note that the average annual temperature of Maine is about 42F while that of Florida’s is about 72F. Both States seem to be doing OK.
Are you sure Florida is ‘doing ok’? The “Florida Man” reports are disturbing to me as a Canadian.
Lots of old people golfing and English-speaking mice selling giant turkey legs looked like ‘doing ok’ to me. The greater question might be “what do you want it to look like?”.
Florida has very open criminal records reporting, so the details of various crimes are available to reporters without much effort on their part. Some unknown degree of the “Florida Man” memes are an artifact of that.
So the real situation is the exact opposite of what ‘the Authorities’ were telling us for years. Quelle surprise!
Shouldn’t there be enough crisis in the news that I should be afraid yet? I’ve never heard of Emily Judd, a researcher at University of Arizona, so her warning is new.
Yet I look out my window and absoultely nothing has changed. Same as when James Hanson was warning me. Same as when Phil Jones was warning me. And I’ve been looking out the same window for 50 years.
They keep mentioning the “unprecedented rate of change”. Of course, that by itself is irrelevant- it would be the alleged effects of the rate of change that would matter. I’ve seen no verifiable data on changes that can be tied solely to the rate of change. Hence, that’s why they always stop at “it’s the rate of change!” So?
“at no point in the nearly half-billion years that Judd and her colleagues analyzed did the Earth change as fast as it is changing now…”
Like, they could track a mere several decade long change millions of years ago? Of course not.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Existence, as you know it, is over.
The context of our current warm benign Holocene. Mankind has been very lucky for the last 10,000 years.
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/the-holocene-context-for-man-made-global-warming/