Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak 416
ananyo writes "Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years, a study published in Science suggests. Researchers have reconstructed global climate trends all the way back to when the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from the most recent ice age. They looked at 73 overlapping temperature records including sediment cores drilled from lake bottoms and sea floors around the world, and ice cores collected in Antarctica and Greenland. For some records, the researchers inferred past temperatures from the ratio of magnesium and calcium ions in the shells of microscopic creatures that had died and dropped to the ocean floor; for others, they measured the lengths of long-chain organic molecules called alkenones that were trapped in the sediments. From the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest, they report (abstract)."
Re:Most recent? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Clear bias against the oil industry (Score:2, Informative)
It didn't take a vast money machine to convince millions of young people to tattoo and pierce themselves in weird places. It doesn't take a vast money machine to convince everybody in academia that AGW is fact.
In both cases, all it takes is peer pressure.
Just because corporations prefer to use big money campaigns as their tool, doesn't mean it's the only tool required to instill a mass belief or activity.
Now, I'm not saying that AGW is or isn't real. The debate over the GW part is pretty much over. It's the 'A' that still looks more like religion than science. There are probably literally a handfull of people who actually have opinions formed on science. They're sitting in universities looking at models run on supercomputers. Everybody else is using these people as priests, even if they didn't ask to be priests.
That's the way I see it, and no oil industry lobbyist paid me. I wouldn't even know where to find one.
Title vs summary (Score:5, Informative)
Title: Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak
Actual first line: Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years
Some peak - it's barely in the first quartile.
Good News! Warmer since the ice age (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that is wonderful news since about that long ago was the 'end' of the last ice age when temperatures were so low we were having massive die offs due to the cold climate.
Warming is good for life. You might not be acclimated to it but the reality is when we have periods of cooling we have die offs and when we have periods of warming there is an expansion of species, of biodiversity. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and that was good for life.
I welcome warmer temperatures. It has been too cold in the last thousands of years.
All this fussing about warming is ignoring the real problem. Global Warming is just a distraction from the real issue of toxic pollution.
Re:Scary and scarier (Score:5, Informative)
The US is highest per capita, yes, but China holds the majority in total emissions. [wikipedia.org] And those are 2011 numbers, they've had a whole year to up the ante(note from 2010-2011, the US went down a little bit, China went up 17%). Think where the world will be when China surpasses us per capita.
captcha: equality
Re:Scary and scarier (Score:4, Informative)
I don’t think the US is the #1 greenhouse gas emitter. IRC
Canada and Australia are higher per person then the USA, having a lot of extractive industries.
China admits more than the US, having a higher population and a greater reliance on inefficient coal for energy.
India has the fastest growth.
(Not trying to diminish your concerns, just adding facts.)
Scare-tactics.... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Most recent? (Score:3, Informative)
The "less technical" meaning is meaningless. Basically when the media or average person says "ice age" they mean glacial maximum, or more personally, ice sheets extending from the pole to... wherever they happen to live.
We will be out of the current ice age when Greenland and even Antarctica are ice-sheet free... Which is the normal (average) state of the planet. Cool glacial periods, like the one we're in now, are the exceptional periods vs. the rule Average global temperature, geologically speaking, is about 10C higher than present. The cool periods when ice sheets are possible tend to only last a few million years at most, separated by warmer (than now) periods lasting a hundred million years or longer.
The next glacial maximum may be 50,000 years off. If we cut CO2 concentrations to 2/3 current levels, the next glacial maximum may only be 15,000 years off.
This (Score:3, Informative)
As with all "global warming" topics, I can divide the opinions based on their mod points:
[-1,1] = "global warming is a farce"
[2,5] = "global warming is supported by a majority of scientists, debate over, hand over the keys to your SUV"
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Here's why you should care:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives-intermediate.htm [skepticalscience.com]
Re:Industrial revolution came too early (Score:4, Informative)
Er, you know that Perihelions happen every year, right? That the kinetic energy of the earth doesn't vary year-to-year? This is physics 101 stuff.
Re:So much misleading. (Score:4, Informative)
2) It is the rate of those changes that the authors are highlighting. Absolute temperatures aren't that telling (it has been both much colder and much warmer on earth at various times in history). If the current rate of temperature change had previously occurred in the past 11,300 years (i.e. was driven by natural sources) then they would have seen some indication of it. It would not have been as pronounced as the current trend, due to lower temporal resolution (which acts as a low pass filter), but it still would have appeared.
I don't think anyone is arguing that there are not climate cycles (see Milankovish, also, straw man). But you are comparing events that are happening on much different time scales. Prior to 100 years ago, the temperature had been falling for ~5000 years. In the past 100 years, the temperature has risen to what it was 5000 years ago. Clearly whatever cycle was occurring on a 10000 year period is not the same cycle that we are dealing with now.
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:2, Informative)
Ruminant burps, not farts are the primary methane source from livestock.
Re:Clear bias against the oil industry (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not an AGW denier, but I can't tolerate the scare tactics. And I'm still pretty mad at East Anglia -- you just don't do science by gathering data, adjusting that data, and then throwing the original data out and not allowing (or even recording) the methods by which you adjusted that data. They could have just fucking made it all up, it's non-verifiable UNLESS someone else was keeping track of those weather stations that oh, no, all the records were kept at one place and then thrown out 20 years ago. Bad science. Heck, it could be accidentally bad science, but FUCKING OWN UP TO IT! Cannot stand people who talk their way around unsubstantiated data and try to pass it off as fucking immutable gospel.
Perhaps you should get your information somewhere other than denier blogs, your version of what happened at UEA is pure fantasy. They didn't collect any original data of their own, the data came from the organisations that ran the weather stations who have their own records. They deleted THEIR copy of the data not the originals which still exist. Their results have been confirmed by three separate organisations including one funded by deniers to disprove it.