Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy
Cherrypicking media alarmists select a short time window and go from there. But compared to most of Earth’s history, temperatures in 2023 are unusually cold. Modern warming is by no means unique – other similar periods in recent millennia, and sometimes much longer ones in the more distant past, are known to have occurred.
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Claim: “This summer is on track to be the hottest recorded on Earth.”
An article in Barron’s about rising food prices made the claim on Wednesday morning, says Breitbart.
CNN’s headline proclaimed: “The world has just experienced the hottest summer on record – by a significant margin.”
You can find similarly alarming headlines from CBS News, the Guardian, and the Associated Press.
Verdict: Misleading. Compared with most of the earth’s history, this summer is unusually cold.
The “record” referred to is kept by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization and European climate service Copernicus. It goes back only to 1940.
Researchers for the Smithsonian Institution surveyed the earth’s temperatures over the last 500 million years. As you can see from the chart [here], the earth has been much hotter for most of the past 500 million years.
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Let’s quote climate.gov again:
Modern human civilization, with its permanent agriculture and settlements, has developed over just the past 10,000 years or so. The period has generally been one of low temperatures and relative global (if not regional) climate stability. Compared to most of Earth’s history, today is unusually cold; we now live in what geologists call an interglacial—a period between glaciations of an ice age.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
September 10, 2023 at 04:48AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
