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)."
Industrial revolution came too early (Score:2, Interesting)
We're at perihelion now, already where Earth is at its hottest. In a few hundred or thousand years they'll welcome global warming... if global warming hasn't killed everyone by then.
We're at the worst possible place to add to the warming.
This is good news (Score:5, Interesting)
We're preventing the temperature decline that would lead us into the next glaciation. And like another poster mentioned, we're still in an "ice age" but we're toward the end of one of the interglacial periods. If we heat things up enough maybe we can get out of the ice age altogether. ;-)
Solution that can make all sides happy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:3, Interesting)
We'll still have plastics but they'll be from a different source than old oil. Corn has been modified to produce plastic instead of starch. Plastics can be synthesized from other organic molecules and we can produce those by fermentation from agricultural waste. Heck, when the program to reduce the human population really gets going we'll have lots of organic material to synthesize plastics from. Well, what doesn't get run into the soylent green factories, anyway.
Re:Industrial revolution came too early (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, what they probably are referring to is the timing of perihelion with respect to the seasons, or other parameters. Those do cause variations in the amount of solar energy arriving at the surface, and how it is distributed on the Earth. Look up Milankovitch cycles [wikipedia.org].
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:3, Interesting)
You're saying that hiring an eight year old with no experience is less risky than hiring a twenty year old with no experience?
Re:If only we could figure out.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that people are arguing about the wrong things. Instead of arguing about global warming we should be arguing about how to mitigate the effects. Crazy weather is a common byproduct of global warming and it has huge economic effects here and now. Think about the money the state of FL invests every year to keep their beaches from receding. Raise that water a few more inches and see how much harder it gets.
I have every faith that 300 years from now we'll still be around, how many people had to die to get us there is a huge looming question. If we continue to bury our heads in the sand about the issue then we'll ultimately cause more harm. Will good come of it afterwards? Absolutely, once things are destroyed we have a tendancy to build them back up and build them better. It's a heavy price to pay when we could invest in technology now instead of going to war and end up with workable solutions to move forward with. Instead we'll continue to fund the military industrial complex along with the healthcare debacle that everyone refuses to actually deal with as well.