The Washington Post has published a possibly major story about how climate scientists have recreated the earth’s temperature record for the last 485 million years. Paleoclimatology, as it is called, is based on a wide range of ingenious “proxy” measures (fossil records, ice core samples, geology, astrophysics, etc) to estimate temperatures in the distant past up to the present.
How solid are these measurements? I have no idea, and I expect they will be endlessly revised for decades to come, just as there has been considerable controversy over the temperature reconstructions of the last 200 years, where we have much more data to go on (like tree rings). This is largely what the 2009 “climategate” scandal was about.
In any case, take a close look at the chart the Post produced, and tell us what you see. A controversy has broken out about what it means, because if it is accurate, it shows that the earth is currently near its lowest temperature for the last 485 million years, until we stopped cooling and started warming recently. Is it a bad thing that we stopped cooling? You can find serious scientists who conclude that a modest warming is a net benefit to the planet (and the IPCC kinda sorta admits this in corners of its behemoth reports).
But the thermegaddonites point to the sharp reversal in the right tail (circled) to suggest that this fully man-made (it is assumed) recent warming is a catastrophe for which we must all give up our cars and start eating bugs. Yet you can also make out several other sharp reversals and warmings when there were no SUVs on the road.
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