Recently, many media outlets have promoted a new scientific study, “The 485-Million-Year History of Earth's Surface Temperature,” which proves that a small increase in temperature over the past 150 years will be catastrophic. [emphasis, links added]
The data and methods used strongly suggest that this claim is false.
For example, in their report, washington post (WaPo) quotes one of the study's authors as saying:
In the nearly half a billion years Judd and her colleagues analyzed, Earth has never changed as fast, she added:
“Like a giant asteroid hitting the Earth, what we're doing now is unprecedented.”
How ridiculous. An apocalyptic event in space will never be anything like the mild warming we've seen over the past century.
Second, using proxy data to which their study was limited, it was not possible to determine whether past temperature changes occurred faster, slower, or similar to what we are currently experiencing.
Bloomberg said this in the book “We Just Got the Warning Bell Before the Dinosaurs”:
“The Earth has experienced periods of rapid climate change before. They all caused mass deaths.
This means we're in the same orbit as the dinosaurs, which ironically ended up being “a giant asteroid hitting the Earth.”
Science and technology news carries this ominous headline: 500 Million Years of Climate History Tells Us of a Coming Catastrophe .
All of this media predicts that we will be in trouble in the near future due to climate change, completely ignoring the bigger picture presented by this research.
Most importantly, the study itself does not predict future doom from climate change; such dire predictions are entirely fabricated by the media.
What is obvious in the charts provided by WaPo and in the actual study (see Figure 1 below) but ignored by the media is: Today is the coldest day in the earth's 485 million years.
Furthermore, the media completely ignores the fact that the large temperature fluctuations recorded throughout history occurred naturally long before humans and the Industrial Revolution.
Please note the blue line (newly added) in Figure 1, indicating that according to their data, Today is the coolest day in 485 million year history.
Yet somehow the media ignored this. WaPo focuses entirely on the small dot at the end of the chart, a zoomed-in version of which looks like this:
WaPo completely ignores the evidence presented in studies, such as the ground station project conducted by the Heartland Institute, showing The urban heat island effect and poor placement of temperature stations used to measure temperatures (from which long-term trend data is collected) may be responsible for 50% of recent warming, with the remainder likely partly or entirely due to natural factors.
Then WaPo sounded the obligatory alarm, saying:
This planet has heating up Over the past 20,000 years, human-caused emissions have driven warming rates to unprecedented levels.
If swift action is not taken to contain Scientists say that due to greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century – the highest on record since the Miocene Epoch more than 5 million years ago.
That's wrong.
We are not in “unprecedented territory.” This graph proves this, as do other parts of the WaPo article, such as:
“Research shows that during the hottest period, Earth's average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius), well above the Earth's record high temperature of 58.96 degrees Fahrenheit (14.98 degrees Celsius) last year.”
Of course, the peak of 96.8°F occurred before humans existed, suggesting that Earth has, The result of entirely natural factors, dramatic warming and cooling without any human contribution in the past.
To be clear, WaPo cites no data or theory, and there's certainly nothing in the study that suggests human CO2 emissions could lead to the highest levels seen in the past.
A rise of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius is not dangerous and certainly will not take the world from the current 14.98 degrees Celsius to the 36 degrees Celsius that WaPo discusses to scare readers.
This passage from the WaPo story does lead to an honest conclusion: throughout geological history, the Earth has tended to be warmer than it is today:
Research also clearly shows that the conditions humans are accustomed to are very different from those that have dominated Earth's history. Research shows that the average temperature over much of the Phanerozoic was over 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), with almost no ice at the poles. Cold storage climate – including our current climate — Only a 13% success rate.
Therefore, the earth may return to a “greenhouse climate” without any help from humans.
The media wants to turn this scientific study, which makes no alarming claims at all, into a tool to support their false belief that the world currently faces a human-caused “climate crisis.”
However, the data clearly show that the temperature of the Earth and the climate of different regions have changed fundamentally in the past, with current temperatures being much lower than normal for most of Earth's geological history, and that humans have experienced both periods of greater than We currently experience cooler and warmer temperatures at different times in history.
It is regrettable but not surprising that the mainstream media has turned such reports into frightening content. This behavior is not only dishonest, it is reprehensible.
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