Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years

http://kottke.org/13/09/temperature-chart-for-the-last-11000-years

by deusclovis • 13 years ago

220 164 13 years ago

exit• 13 years ago

googling "industrial revolution averted iceage" returns a few conservative blogs, smugly pleased with the possibility

the only credible commentary i can find is in a nytimes article:

"Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. 'We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age,' Dr. Marcott said."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/science/earth/global-tempe...

kaybe• 13 years ago

I cannot cite the exact words, but in discussions professors have indeed expressed the opinion that a next ice age won't be of concern for us.

Those charts, especially those going back further, are a good argument for why we will need to control the climate at some point in the future (but please not when we have not figured out how to without significant risk).

temphn• 13 years ago

This plot compares an inferred model to the instrumental record. Here is the study expressed in the words of Real Climate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoc...

  Over the last decades, numerous researchers have 
  painstakingly collected, analyzed, dated, and calibrated 
  many data series that allow us to reconstruct climate 
  before the age of direct measurements. Such data come e.g. 
  from sediment drilling in the deep sea, from corals, ice 
  cores and other sources. Shaun Marcott and colleagues for 
  the first time assembled 73 such data sets from around the 
  world into a global temperature reconstruction for the 
  Holocene, published in Science. Or strictly speaking, many 
  such reconstructions: they have tried about twenty 
  different averaging methods and also carried out 1,000 
  Monte Carlo simulations with random errors added to the 
  dating of the individual data series to demonstrate the 
  robustness of their results.

Marcott et al.'s graphic states that their model reflects historical temperatures so accurately that it can measure the average temperature of the entire globe continuously back to 8000 years ago, to within a small fraction of 1 degree Celsius (i.e. the 1-sigma error bars). That is simply an extraordinary claim given:

1) The "divergence problem". The lack of correlation between model inputs like tree rings and the instrumental record over the last few decades is acknowledged by all; climate scientists generally state that it is due to anthropogenic factors, arguably assuming the consequent.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies-divergence...

2) Serious climate model prediction failures over the past 10 year period, as acknowledged in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...

In other words, key model inputs used in climate reconstructions do not strongly correlate with the instrumental record over the last 30-40 years ("the divergence problem") and climate models have so far had a poor track record over the last 15 years, with average temperatures winding up below the envelope of model predictions. These predictive failures in the datasets we can check bode ill for the prospect of hindcasting global average temperatures to within 1 degree more than 8000 years ago.

jdgiese• 13 years ago

The plot does seem too precise to take seriously IMO, although I am an engineer, and not a climate scientist.

saalweachter• 13 years ago

Well, there are a certain number of explicit and implicit caveats that don't make it into the made-it-to-the-top-of-HN pretty graph.

One is that this is based on other people's work, as the GP mentioned. Updates to those works will affect this one; the hope is that those 73 underlying datasets aren't systematically biased and any errors will cancel out. Another is that those error bars are probably 95% confidence. So we fully expect that about 550 out of the 11,000 years in this chart will fall outside of that range. A final bit is that we're only reconstructing averages here; it's a lot easier to guess the average number of shoes owned by 1000 people than the exact number of shoes owned by 1.

These extra caveats don't invalidate the data or render it useless, they just qualify it. You shouldn't look at the graph and think, "Here is the exact temperature for the last 11,000 years", you should think, "Given our current best understanding of the available data, the average global temperature for 10,450 out of the last 11,000 years probably fell into this 0.4 degree C range."

asgard10243• 13 years ago

In the same article, they explicitly mention that the study is not based on tree ring proxies. In fact, all the global reconstructions are based on many different proxies.

I also think you misrepresent the 2nd article. The question is what and on what time scale are you trying to predict. I believe they are talking about more precision more short-term models. Just like we can predict winter and not predict weather, we can predict warming due to human forcing, but not the specific details.

In the end, however, it's completely irrelevant to AGW if there was a higher temperature in the past or not. The theory of AGW doesn't stand just on that argument (nor any other single argument, for that matter).

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

Without trying to say too much, one big reason we can predict winter is that we've had hundreds of thousands of years of experience with it.

ctdonath6• 13 years ago

Temperature chart for the last 425,000 years: http://ctdonath.blogspot.com/2012/02/global-climate-change-i...

kolbe• 13 years ago

Do you know why the original 11,000 year chart doesn't look anything like the 10,000 year chart in your link?

wffurr• 13 years ago

Different data set. The 10,000 year chart is only Antarctic ice cores. The 11,000 year chart is a composite of a number of temperature records - tree rings, etc.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

I suspect that "geological record" quoted is only one source - the graph in the original link is many sources combined.

Also, note the scales are totally different, and that the original link at least states sigma (uncertainty.)

anon13853• 13 years ago

His chart is based on a single data set (the vostok ice core) for the majority of that period (plus modern temp records slapped on at the end, but it's not visible in the 10,000 year graph) which is not representative of global climate. Correlating proxy records with modern instrument records of temperature is not trivial either (which becomes far more apparent once you look at more than a single proxy record).

It's just cherry picked data to make a cheap political point. The scale of the vertical axis makes it very hard to see what is happening during interglacials, which is what we are in at the moment. If we were worried about an ice age arriving in the next couple of centuries the choice of scale might have some merit, to show how much colder it could possibly get. But we are worried about rapid heating, which that scale does a good job of hiding.

mistercow3• 13 years ago

Possibly because it's a three word AGW denying blog post, and includes only from ice core data from Antarctica, whereas the 11,000 year data in the original post is compiled from multiple combined sources.

I'd hate to assume bad faith on the part of a climate change denier, but I can't help but speculate that the data source was chosen specifically because it made the point s/he wanted to make.

Gugel• 13 years ago

Also, look at the scale of the Y-axis. One has a range of 1C and the other has a range of 15C.

skoob• 13 years ago

Right, lets just "cope" with climate change the same way we did 425,000 years ago. By dying, I guess?

What's wierd is that despite that fact that's you've done your best to make AGW look like a non-issue, the chart for the 100 last years looks extremely worrying.

ctdonath6• 13 years ago

Fact is there's a 125,000 year cycle. We're at the high of one, due for a long drop. When I bring out this long term data, funny how many people shriek at it - but there it is, and the "warmers" won't produce any graphs covering the same (or longer) periods.

Yes, the data is limited. BUT - I hunted it down, put it together, gave it what I considered fair context, and there it is. Don't like it? counter with your own half-million year graph, not snide religious insults.

grey-area• 13 years ago

It's really important to consider the well established cycles in climate, not because they are proof that human changes don't exist, but to put our change in context.

Anthropogenic climate change is IMHO indisputably real and startlingly fast in geological terms, BUT it is dwarfed by the natural variations in climate over the long term and may even (if we don't overdo it) have saved us from another ice age in the long term. I'm not sure anyone understands what the climate is doing enough in order to make concrete predictions or to know what the interaction of our global warming with the long term cycle's cooling will do. It's great that attention is becoming more and more focused on this topic, but we don't need dire predictions and polarisation which have taken place - it is counterproductive.

It startles me how people pick sides and start using labels like denier and apologist on this topic - surely there is room for debate on what we should do about climate change? Do we have to be either for or against AGW and therefore for or against mitigating it? Isn't it reasonable to suggest looking at AGW in context, and also to show that humanity is going to have to deal with far greater swings over the long term in climate than just a few degrees?

If anything I'd say this long-term chart indicates we have to redouble our efforts to understand climate change, and if we can't control it, work on ways to mitigate its effects, because even if we control our own short term effects, long term the earth will move from ice age to tropical and we'll have to adapt.

davyjones• 13 years ago

Wait...are we in "summer" on that time-scale now?!

ctdonath6• 13 years ago

Yup. At the end of the Dog Days of August, expecting an early hard frost. We'll be wishing for "warming" soon enough.

_delirium4• 13 years ago

Sources,

The Science paper: http://www.usu.edu/geo/physical/MarcottEtal_Science_2013.pdf

Online supplemental material: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/03/07/339.6124....

The figure itself is a new plot by Potsdam University researchers for realclimate.org, though, using the same dataset, but not a graphic taken directly from the paper (the paper's Fig. 1 has some alternate versions).

throwaway_yy2Di2• 13 years ago

I think this stinks. The Science paper says their reconstruction is smoothed and has low time resolution. They say it preserves no variability at all on timescales <300 years, and attenuates even 1,000 year variations. Superimposing this with the 30-year Hadley data seems misleading, because it is on a very short timescale which is suppressed from the paleologic data.

(edit):

"Because the relatively low resolution and time uncertainty of our data sets should generally suppress higher-frequency temperature variability, an important question is whether the Holocene stack adequately represents centennial- or millennial scale variability. [...] The results suggest that at longer periods, more variability is preserved, with essentially no variability preserved at periods shorter than 300 years, ~50% preserved at 1000-year periods, and nearly all of the variability preserved for periods longer than 2000 years (figs. S17 and S18)."

_delirium4• 13 years ago

The realclimate.org post discusses that as a potential issue, yes. See the section following the sentence: Because the proxy data have only a coarse time resolution – would they have shown it if there had been a similarly rapid warming earlier in the Holocene?

brownbat4• 13 years ago

Out of idle curiosity, can anyone tell me more about what a 0.4 (0.6, 1, 2...) °C anomaly feels like, maybe with reference to cities that have climates with differing annual averages? I mean, is it like shifting every city 5 ° in latitude closer to the equator, or what?

(I know this wouldn't capture the whole story, I'm just curious.)

EDIT: I guess the state of New York has a range of annual average temperatures from 4 °C to 12 °C, so maybe this isn't useful at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_New_York#Temperature...

pcrh• 13 years ago

In the maps linked below, each isotherm represents a 2 C difference. So a global rise of 2 C would be equivalent to a 100-200 km or so shift towards the equator, for a given location. Or nearly equivalent to the temperature difference in the center of a major city compared to its suburbs.

http://solargis.info/doc/_pics/SolarGIS-iMaps--World-air-tem...

noiv5• 13 years ago

If the temperatures are be equally distributed plus 1°C feels like 1°C plus. But that's not the case neither in space nor time. I worry more about the peaks.

sethrin3• 13 years ago

Think of it more as extra energy being imparted to the global weather system. This will have all sorts of fun and exciting effects, and as I understand the warming will be greatest at the poles. Alaska has warmed by about 1.6[0] in the last 60 years, and the interior of Alaska by 1.4° C in the last 100[1], compared to a global temperature rise of .8° C over the same period. This has resulted in the melting of thousands of cubic kilometers of glacial ice, with this study[2] suggesting that this is the largest glaciological factor in rising sea levels.

To the eyes of the native inhabitant, the glacial retreat is shocking, with the lower altitude glaciers most affected. We've built glacier overlooks in some places, where once the glacier was a stone's throw away, and now it's barely visible, and in another few decades the only thing they'll be able to show anyone there are photos. I've seen photos from the early 1900s of glacial termini which towered over the masts of a sail-rigged steamer. Today there is a fjord there, and the glacier is more than 13km away.

And you want to know what that feels like?

How about instead you imagine how it feels to watch the Arctic melting around you, while an endless circus of millions deny that it's even happening.

[0] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.ht... [1] http://oldclimate.gi.alaska.edu/papers/Arctic62-3-295.pdf [2] http://glaciers.gi.alaska.edu/material/arendt_phd.pdf

brownbat4• 13 years ago

And you want to know what that feels like? How about instead you imagine how it feels to watch the Arctic melting around you,

I said in the original comment that I was well aware this wasn't the entire story.

There are some subjects where I really wish I could ask questions like someone new to the topic and not immediately be branded as some kind of enemy.

bjz_3• 13 years ago

Great post, but I don't think the parent was attempting to make some kind of rhetorical point, merely asking an honest question.

nhoss2• 13 years ago

Am I alone in finding the graph scary? This rate of change in temperature is probably not something that would be easy to slow down, yet it feels like not many people care about this.

rjdagost2• 13 years ago

For a little while I was interested in paleoclimatology and I started studying how researchers developed these historical temperature reconstruction curves. Basically you take “proxies” for temperature, things like tree rings, coral growth, sediment layer thickness, etc. and you posit a relationship between the proxy measurements and temperature. Measurements that better fit the hypothesized model get more weight in the temperature reconstruction.

The main problem is that no one knows if the hypothesized models (temperature vs. tree ring thickness, sediment layer thickness, etc.) have any validity. Why should tree rings grow linearly with temperature- what about a huge number of other variables? The temperature “signal” is at best very weak. Decoupling the temperature signal from other variables (humidity, elevation, tree species, CO2 concentration, etc.) is a hugely difficult multivariate statistics problem and most of the researchers I've corresponded with do not seem to appreciate this fact.

Another major problem is that proxies get weighted in the temperature reconstruction based on how well they fit the hypothesized temperature model. The weighting is where things get really shaky. Right away, you have biased your results in such a way that that nonconforming data is discarded / de-weighted. Note that there is not anything wrong with these nonconforming samples that invalidates them; they just don't fit the proposed models very well. Typically researchers develop their own methods for weighting samples in the temperature reconstructions and many of these methods would make a statistician cringe. Often during the weighting phase you find that a handful of proxy samples (out of a sample size of hundreds) get the vast majority of the weight in the temperature reconstructions. Sometimes the weight of a temperature reconstruction in a location is almost completely computed from a few proxy samples taken halfway around the world at a completely different elevation.

If you try to discuss these fundamental problems with climate scientists you'll typically get told that you're not a scientist (not true) or that you're a "denialist" being paid by big oil (not true). I am convinced that these temperature reconstructions are useless at best.

_delirium4• 13 years ago

It's definitely not the case that climate scientists are uninterested in discussing methodological problems with paleoclimate proxies. A considerable amount of the literature is taken up with doing precisely that, and it takes up a good portion of the Paleoclimatology section of the IPCC report: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-cha...

rjdagost2• 13 years ago

I know that some folks in paleoclimatology are interested in these core methodology problems. But these concerns are not conveyed to a wider audience. When a temperature reconstruction graph is released to the public there is no mention at all of these problems and one can easily get the impression that these reconstructed temperatures can be known almost as accurately as going outside and taking a reading from a thermometer.

twinge• 13 years ago

How accurately can we track CO2 concentration over long timespans? I get that climate science is hard and produces nebulous answers based on arguably nebulous data, but when I read about about ocean acidification and see the long-term graphs from respected organizations [1] as a layman it's really quite alarming.

I.e. maybe the climate won't spiral out of control, but it seems reasonable to be concerned about the alarming levels of CO2. As a new parent I'd love to have my dire fears of catastrophe awaiting future generations assuaged by rational hard science, but (as a layman) everywhere you look the picture is pretty bleak.

1: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html

danmaz74• 13 years ago

AFAIK one of the main ways to reconstruct CO2 concentration is to study samples of air trapped inside old ice. This looks like a pretty direct and reliable method to me.

argon81• 13 years ago

Some more discussion of the problem here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tree-ring-proxies-divergence...

throwaway98482• 13 years ago

Okay. What do you say of purely geological phenomena, like glacier coverage. You can look at hydrostatic rebound, erosion patterns, etc to see where glaciers usually are. And you just have to look at pictures within the last 50 years to see where they're not. Much harder data. Same for ecological ones like flora and fauna existing in and being habituated in environments that are no longer very compatible climatologically. And for anyone in their forties or older, there's always your own damn lying eyes.

There's a billion pieces of supporting evidences for global warming. As far as I have ever heard, there's not a single piece of evidence against it, just piles and piles of FUD thrown at each model that tries to explain it.

tpainton• 13 years ago

Noone is arguing that there WAS a warming trend. The onous to prove its due to humans lies on the chicken littles. It has not yet been accomplished.

cossatot• 13 years ago

I worked in a dendrochronology/dendroclimatology lab[1] for several years and can assure you that the researchers involved are well aware of the issue of multiple influences on tree ring growth. There are a couple of ways that they go about dealing with it. NB I was more involved in precipitation reconstructions than temperature reconstructions, but I know enough about the process to discuss it here.

The first is experimental design, much like is necessary in any aspect of science: Annual tree growth is definitely a response to a variety of regional, site-specific, and tree-specific factors for any given species in a location. So in order to increase the 'signal to noise' ratio for a given signal (temperature, precip, fire, disease or whatever reconstructions), you look for combinations of species and sites for which the factor you want to study is the limiting growth factor; in other words, other things the tree needs to grow are present in abundance and one is in shortage. If you want to make a precipitation reconstruction, you find a site that has very little soil moisture storage, such as trees basically growing out of fractures in steep bedrock. If you want to study temperature, you pick species like Bristlecone Pine that grow at high elevations (which are typically relatively wet), so that the temperature/length of growing season is the annual limiting growth factor. That sort of thing.

The second is that researchers use many other forms of measurements than simply ring width to tease these problems out. For example, many people use oxygen isotopic ratios[2], latewood (the dark outer part of the tree ring) density measurements[3], and other measurements in tree rings, both because of the unique and accessible response of the tree, and because (unlike, say, sediment cores) the tree rings are much more quickly, accurately and reliably dated at the single-year precision.

Third, there is a lot of statistical analysis thrown at the problem. I didn't work a lot with this, or see people in my lab do it, but I am aware of researchers doing multivariate statistics techniques such as principal component analysis[4]. I'm sure there is a lot more, but you can do a Scholar search as easily as I can.

Fourth, one of the strengths of the multiproxy technique is that many of them are independent, and they all show a lot of correlation to the temperature records during the instrumental calibration period. There is some divergence before this period, but not as much as would be expected otherwise. There is also the problem of weighting, like you mention, and I don't think anyone is comfortable with it but I don't think it's as ad-hoc as you make it out to be. A review (by a statistician) that discusses this is here[5]; I didn't read it in depth.

[1] http://www.uark.edu/misc/dendro/

[2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-013-1674-3

[3] http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00139....

[4] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2010.... [5] http://www.stat.unc.edu/postscript/rs/Sensitivities-Submitte...

leot6• 13 years ago

You know, nearly everything is a "proxy". Kitchen thermometers use bending metal as a "proxy" for temperature. All that matters is accuracy and precision. This is how science works, at its base. There's no such thing as "sense data".

True, the signals from tree rings (etc.) are noisier than those from kitchen thermometers. Let's consider, for a moment, how you could verify the precision and come to a conclusion as to the accuracy of those signals: well, when you get the same information coming from multiple seemingly independent sources, it greatly increases your confidence in that information. Hence, if you're doing your modeling right, if you get tree ring data from all over the world, and soil samples from all over the world, and find that, sure enough, there is a common signal visible across all of them, then you say "well, the only thing that can explain this global correlation is the modulation of some global parameters". And you present your data and conclusions to a bunch of people whose job it is to poke holes in it and prove you wrong, and after a bunch of time eventually people whose job it is to prove each other wrong end up roughly agreeing on a small sliver of information that lies at the intersection of all their understandings of the world.

Signals in physics can be noisy too (fortunately, in physics you can take millions of samples). But to say "well, these error bars are too big, so therefore we shouldn't pay any attention to the trend at all -- we can decide to do something when we have much higher confidence in the precise figures. In the meantime, I'm going to oppose tighter fuel economy standards for vehicles, and revenue-neutral carbon taxation, and aggressive subsidization of alternative energy R+D, ... " because god forbid we should all drive around in smaller cars, or that we should stop subsidizing air travel, or that we should too quickly improve solar cell efficiency.

crazy1van3• 13 years ago

My skepticism in climate change is based on a long history of censuses in the scientific community that later proved to be completely wrong.

I'm not saying we should not try to understand the world. I'm saying we should realize we have limits. The more complex the system we seek to understand, the more we should be skeptical. The climate of the entire planet and to the degree one particular species impacts it seems extremely complex to me. Hence, I am highly skeptical.

bjz_3• 13 years ago

http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/settled-science.htm

leot6• 13 years ago

No one is saying that we should devote 100% of GDP to mitigating global warming. Go ahead, factor in the uncertainty. What % of GDP should we spend to avert the very real possibility catastrophic warning occurs? What % are we spending?

crazy1van3• 13 years ago

If it were left up to me, I would say we should have zero forced spending and an unlimited amount of voluntary spending to avert a potential global warming catastrophe.

Let me remind you, that at any time you are free to donate any amount of your own money to thwart global warming. That's not what some people really want though. They don't want to spend their own money on the problem. They want to spend other people's money on the problem. And I contend we don't know nearly enough about the issue to cross that line.

moe• 13 years ago

World population chart for the same timeframe: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Populatio...

rmrfrmrf5• 13 years ago

Throwing my hat into the ring here:

1) I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on principle, not just because of the threat of climate change. I think making it about climate change gives too many opportunities for argument derailment. Think about when "tree hugger" was a pejorative term; i mean, who DOESN'T want to hug a tree? I think it's a lot harder for people to argue against the idea of "leave a place as you found it" than to find flaws a data set. It also allows for much broader regulation. For example, we could then start focusing on legislation against pharm manufacturers allowing meds to seep into the water supply rather than just the air pollution they're producing.

2) I'm starting to wonder why we're not focusing more on adaptation to than prevention of climate change. I've been watching a lot of TED talks lately (thanks, Netflix!) about the impact of climate change, and the one that I'm thinking of was a researcher who spent time in the arctic studying the wildlife there, and made the case that we should prevent climate change so that we can save arctic wildlife. But I wonder, if we were alive in the age of dinosaurs, would we be saying that we need to clean up the atmosphere to prevent the impact winter that would inevitably kill them? While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility as humans to tamper with natural processes like extinction. In our prevention efforts, we may also be preventing natural selection and, by extension, adaptation. It could be a reality that we'll face an extinction event that wipes out all other non-domesticated mammalian life. While we can all agree that an Earth like that would suck, we know that, 600 million years from now, EVERYTHING will be wiped out. People speculate that, at this time, humans themselves will either become extinct or will have migrated off the planet. So, my question is, are we prepared to jump ship if Earth becomes uninhabitable? Is it realistic to try to change all 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms of atmosphere, or should we starting thinking about building habitats for space living?

noiv5• 13 years ago

There are enough gigatons of carbon (oil, coal, methanhydrates) available and ready to burn to render this planet uninhabitable in a time frame of centuries. That's nothing someone can adapt to. We can adapt to +2°C, likely to +4°C and perhaps even to +6°C, but there has to be an upper limit, otherwise you simply keep adapting until you run out of money.

Why is it so hard to imagine changing our lifestyle might be the easiest thing to do?

Dylan168076• 13 years ago

The tropics right now are cool enough to live in, right? I have hard time believing even +50°C would render the planet uninhabitable.

asgard10243• 13 years ago

why we're not focusing more on adaptation to than prevention of climate change

The reality is that prevention is cheaper (there is also an issue of distribution of the cost, though). Prevention of climate change effectively means not using energy from fossil fuels, while adaptation means paying extra energy cost for each unit of energy you get from fossil fuels.

This extra cost is actually greater than extra cost that would be incurred if you used non-fossil fuel source. So if you decide to continue to use fossil fuel sources at all, the total cost (savings due to cheap fuel + mitigation costs) will always be higher than the non-fossil energy sources (higher cost to get the energy but savings on mitigation).

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I'm with you on #2. One way to look at this chart is that if we 'correct' all of our input into the system then the system will revert to its previous norm, i.e. we'll plunge into an ice age and glaciers will begin to move south over North America and Europe. On the other hand our ability to 'fine tune' our control is all but impossible on these large scales so "control" of the climate is still beyond our reach.

So perhaps investing in keeping old people alive during hot and cold snaps might be a good investment and infrastructure that is impervious to same.

scarmig2• 13 years ago

A couple points:

1) CO2 concentration has a long half-life in the atmosphere, so even if we immediately stopped emitting every molecule of fossil fuel-derived CO2 into it, we'd still see the effects of what we've done for the past century for at least another couple centuries.

2) People mostly hope to lower the rate at which our CO2 emissions rate increases, and maybe in certain countries make it negative. Both of those, however, are derivatives of the relevant value for purposes of the greenhouse effect and ocean acidification: the absolute level in the atmosphere. Which has zero chance of decrease even under the most aggressive conceivable prevention efforts.

3) The graph doesn't even cover the last major glaciation event: the last glacial maximum was around 20k years ago.

4) Biggest issue: the people who will be most adversely effected by climate change are people who don't have the resources to adapt. I don't dismiss the idea out of hand that it might be cheaper to put efforts into mitigation than prevention: we're definitely going to have to do some mitigation work. But you are not going to convince Western countries to spend trillions of dollars building levees in Bangladesh.

mtts2• 13 years ago

Your #2 reminds me of something Bjorn Lomborg (yeah yeah, I'm not a fan either - nor a hater, in fact, I just don't know enough about the nuances of the issues involved to have an opinion that's well thought out enough to defend) said in an interview on Dutch television years ago.

He said the money spent on implementing Kyoto was much better spent combating the direct effects of global warming, for example by building dikes in areas that were too poor to build them themselves and that were likely to be affected by rising sea levels, like Bangladesh.

To my layman's ears, that sounded quite reasonable.

It still does, in fact.

scarmig2• 13 years ago

How do you fairly raise those revenues that'd fund the trillions of dollars worth of mitigation efforts? People who disproportionately generate CO2 emissions are disproportionately responsible for the need for mitigation efforts.

So Lomborg's argument isn't so much against putting a Pigouvian tax on carbon emissions, as it is earmarking the revenues derived from those emissions for mitigation efforts instead of using it to pay down deficits or pay for other services. Which is certainly something I can agree with, but it seems politically implausible. First lets get a carbon tax.

gugol• 13 years ago

"Thanks, Netflix"? www.ted.com

stinos• 13 years ago

I think that we, as the human population, should actively move toward more efficient, less destructive industry on principle

That's definitely a must. But I'm not sure if it's doable, seeing the global population just keeps on growing: as long as industry is destructive and always more of it is needed, the net result still is destructive. Might sound bold, but a lot of problems would be solved by combining clean industry with a _lot_ less people to serve.

quadrangle• 13 years ago

What's with thanking Netflix for TED talks??? They are available anyway at TED.com anyway or other places, given their Creative Commons license…

jaredmcateer• 13 years ago

I think he's thanking netflix for making them easily available and discoverable to him.

rmrfrmrf5• 13 years ago

Oh, I know. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor

sliverstorm7• 13 years ago

While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility as humans to tamper with natural processes like extinction.

The fundamental premise is not that extinction is bad, but that extinction we cause is bad. If a fox tramples your neighbor's garden, that's too bad. If you trample your neighbor's garden, you should fix it.

iopq• 13 years ago

I'd like mosquitoes to go extinct. Why would that be bad?

rmrfrmrf5• 13 years ago

I used to agree completely with you, but now I realize that, given the second law of thermodynamics, it's impossible to restore an entire ecosystem back to a previous state. From what I hear, one goal of ending climate change is to allow icecaps to re-form and to last longer throughout the year, which ostensibly will end the suffering of polar bears "stranded" at sea. However, even if we did remove all excess amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (which, as of today, is something that's barely discussed seriously), it's not going to suddenly reverse the adapted behavior of polar bears. This is a totally hypothetical and unscientific story, but let's pretend that the ice caps melted such that polar bears were forced inland and began foraging for food in human-populated areas. In response, the government of Canada single-handedly puts up the money to remove all excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Over a period of decades, the ice grows back, but: do we really expect the polar bear population, which has now adapted to foraging for garbage, to suddenly move back to their initial habitat? Chances are, food will be more plentiful for them in a human-populated area. Now let's assume that polar bears play a significant role in seal population control. Well, now that the polar bears have adapted and are now living further inland, the seal population booms in the arctic region. In fact, it gets so big, that now penguin populations are in rapid decline! So, at this point, we've spent probably trillions of dollars, haven't really helped the polar bears at all, and have directly contributed to the endangerment of penguins. And this is all assuming that our plan even works! Not to mention the fact that there may be other species that died off that played a huge impact on balancing the ice-filled arctic ecosystem.

So, given that scenario, I think the better question to ask is, what benefit would we, as humans, get from a return to a cooler Earth? IMO wildlife will take care of itself: adapt, die off, etc. the same way it always has. BUT, I think that too often the focus is put on sad-looking animals and melted snowcaps, which makes it seem like global warming is just an "environmentalist" issue rather than a serious threat to human life.

fleitz• 13 years ago

Humans are either fully part of the natural process, or everything we do interferes with it.

There's a very real choice about how we want to change the environment of the earth, but lets not couch it in meaningless terms like natural vs. unnatural.

Hunter gatherer societies are no more natural/unnatural than cities.

dchichkov3• 13 years ago

Loss of diversity is bad. Everything else is all right, as long as in the long term there is no loss of diversity.

The trouble is, that at the current state of science and technology we can not engineer and control ecosystems. We can not even model ecosystems. As a result we are breaking things and we even have no idea how badly we are breaking things when we are extracting resources. Like when we are turning diverse ecologies into monocultures, when forests are being turned into these 'beautiful' fields of golden wheat.

It does NOT have to be that way. There is no natural law that says that it is necessary to destroy diversity if one wants to grow food or extract resources. It is just that our technology is very primitive and that's the only way we've been able to do it so far. With right technology one can have it both ways. But we don't have it. Not yet.

And meanwhile, well. Conservation, common sense and minimizing our damage to the ecology is probably a best that we can do...

halfninety• 13 years ago

We have unfortunately already occupied much of our neighbor's garden, should we destroy our farms and cities and return all these land to animals?

microcolonel2• 13 years ago

Notice how abused land is mostly not privately owned by its abusers.

Clear cutters are given lumber rights temporarily, but since they don't own the lot, they gain nothing from replanting and controlled burning.

Another great asset of private ownership is the inherent drive toward efficiency, which has been great as far as environmental impact reduction goes.

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

While I love wildlife, I almost feel like it's not our responsibility

Two points:

1. The conditions on Earth which support other megafauna also, largely, are beneficial to humans. Change those conditions and it's likely that the extinctions aren't so much bad for humans as indicators of changing conditions which are bad for humans.

2. Conservation biologists have recognized that the Earth and its biosphere isn't a static system, and that conservation efforts shouldn't be aimed at "holding back the tides" so to speak. But noting when changes are happening at scales which are likely to have strongly negative impacts for humans, civilization, and the almighty economy, and deciding to take preemptive action, could be a very good thing.

There's a huge difference between wiping out all life (or much of it) within the next 200 years, and the next 800 million.

Assuming you've got an 85 year lifespan, that's the difference between living for your full life, or just 25 minutes.

My own definition of "sustainability" is "so long as the extrinsic conditions are conducive to human survival". Even with genetic drift, that's likely a few millions to tens of millions of years.

beedogs• 13 years ago

How on earth is this ludicrous wall of text the top comment? "We should look into moving into outer space once we've destroyed the planet" -- are you for real?

kjackson20122• 13 years ago

Global temperatures are basically flat for the last 17 years, and below every single computer model of climate change. This is even more stark given the fact that the most co2 has been produced in the last 17 years. I think the theory is pretty much broken and they need to figure a better model.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420783/Worlds-clima...

bjz_3• 13 years ago

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-19...

The Daily Mail? Really?

kjackson20122• 13 years ago

That's comparing apples to oranges. All the other data used to create the original graph o calculate temperature such as tree rings, etc do not take into account the temperature of the oceans, etc. There may be perfectly good explanations as to why the temperature may be flat, but those same explanations are not being fed into the graph that the OP posted.

noiv5• 13 years ago

What's flat is not global temperature, that's 2m air temperature. 90% of the greenhouse effect goes into the ocean. That's the place to look for rising temperatures and hopefully all that accumulated energy of latest 2 decades gets not released at once into the atmosphere with next El Niño.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

Please, you need to study statistics again.

Check the graph in the parent article.

Zoom into any 17 year period between -3000 and 1900 and it will "look flat", and during many 17 year periods the temperature temporarily went up, but nonetheless you can see there's a clear downward trend throughout that period.

It's impossible to deny that this trend has been sharply reversed.

A 17 year period is normally supposed to tell you nothing interesting - but the 17 year period up to 1996 clearly indicates something quite disturbing is going on.

Climate change is not negated by a temporary plateau.

clubhi• 13 years ago

Start burning tires folks. We need to save ourselves from an ice age.

serichsen• 13 years ago

It seems that the uncertainty is much higher at the end of the blue curve. I wonder why.

It also seems that the red curve has no uncertainty data.

I would not dare draw any conclusion from these curves before I have satisfying explanations for these two questions.

jellicle• 13 years ago

It's probably because all the climate scientists in the world are trying to trick you.

erikb• 13 years ago

Yes, and it is not clear on the diagram, if the red curve is actually inside the uncertainty range. At least on my screen I really can't tell.

jokoon• 13 years ago

Sorry but I hear a lot of speculation, not real reports of hard actual life threatening changes.

Maybe soft ones like the sea temperature and acidity, but most people can still go out and food still grows.

callmeed• 13 years ago

Can someone please explain how we're able to know the temperature in 4,000 BC with an accuracy of +/- .2° C?

codex• 13 years ago

I don't think this chart comes close to proving that Obama was born in the United States.

microcolonel2• 13 years ago

Of note is that the chart's error bars fill the entire scale near the end, so the measurements could really be anywhere there. It's anyone's guess whether or not temperatures have somehow mysteriously skyrocketed or not.

My personal inkling is that the alarmist reports are wrong, and the changes aren't as drastic as reported; since the same people publish results from proprietary, rigged climate models.

JulianMorrison• 13 years ago

Well, the upside is, we fixed the ice age that was trying to happen.

beloch• 13 years ago

The cyclical recurrence of interglacial and glacial periods (we're technically still in one of these) can theoretically be explained by cyclically evolving properties of the Earth's orbit around the sun such as the precession of the Earth's ratational axis (google Milankovitch cycles). This theory is consistent with the gradual cooling trend observed thus far into the Holocene epoch, and predicts it will continue for tens of thousands of years. The linked graph shows this very nicely.

A sudden, full-blown glacial period would be far more disastrous for human civilization than significant global warming. The latter would submerge densely populated coastal areas and force humans to move to the new coastlines, but the overall capacity of the Earth to support life would increase, just as it did at the start of the Holocene. The former would result in a large reduction in the Earth's carrying capacity and global famine.

Any change in the Earth's temperature is going to be disruptive to both human civilization and the existence of other species on Earth. We have reversed the effects of several thousand years of cooling in just a couple of centuries and, assuming we are able to continue extracting and burning hydrocarbons at an unabated pace indefinitely (dubious) we could significantly change the face of the world, but it will still support our civilization, just in a very changed state. Avoiding the pain of this change is ample incentive to curb the use of hydrocarbons. (Edit: It has taken centuries and a significant portion of the world's hydrocarbon reserves to produce less than a degree of warming. At this rate, even if we evaded peak-oil for another thousand years the Earth will still be in a glacial period.)

However, we should be much more aware of events that could trigger another glacial period. Megaeruptions or large meteor impacts could plunge global temperatures suddenly and catastrophically. These are far greater threats to our species, but we are both incapable of adequately predicting them or preventing them if we do predict them. The probability of this sort of event happening in a single human lifespan is remote, while global warming is a certainty, but these events will eventually occur with certainty. Managing global warming is certainly a good idea for the comfort of our civilization, but we should have more eyes on the bigger threats. (Edit: Even if we tried, we would be unable to maintain global warming indefinitely simply by burning hydrocarbons. In the ten-thousand year time-frame we will need to find other ways to combat gradual cooling.)

novalis78• 13 years ago

thanks for adding "the bigger picture" into the mix.

magicalist• 13 years ago

Managing global warming is certainly a good idea for the comfort of our civilization, but we should have more eyes on the bigger threats

Orrrr we could do more than one thing at once?

In any case, a "sudden, full-blown glacial period" has never happened according to any geological record we have. The most "sudden" have happened over centuries. The actual, demonstrated suddenness of current warming trends is a major part of the problem.

There are a bunch of problems in your post (I have no idea where you get the idea that we're in a glacial period, these are just labels, but no one calls the Holocene anything but an interglacial; it is well established that Milankovitch cycles do not explain current trends; current atmospheric carbon will be there for centuries to come and will not stop warming us even if we were to stop all emissions today; you neglect ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc), but the fact remains that its ridiculous to assert that "we should have our eyes" on one threat instead of another, when we could have much more scientists and funding for asteroid detection if someone would exert some political will. That is what's necessary, not trying to minimize other threats with specious (at best) arguments.

Gravityloss• 13 years ago

"Worry about global warming impacts in the next 100 years, not an ice age in over 10,000 years. "

http://www.skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-...

Basically none of these memes are new. They often rely on misunderstanding of context. (For those who didn't know, skeptical science rebuts these commonly found arguments against global warming.)

crististm• 13 years ago

Until you were there to measure the temperature, all you have is just the output of a model. The model is not the world.

dghughes• 13 years ago

How much do we humans contribute to the heating of the world? The heat we output from our bodies and population increases must mean more heat.

I say this because a friend has a small barn and in it two horses, two pigs and some chickens. He said the barn doesn't use any heat source because the heat from the two horses is enough to warm the barn. Even a bucket of water in the barn won't freeze.

mturmon3• 13 years ago

A human uses about 100W. I don't know about horses, but depending on how well-insulated the barn is, a few hundred watts would make a significant difference.

About those humans heating the Earth -- the effect of the GHG's we emit is tapping into solar insolation, which is huge, so it probably dwarfs the above figures (see next paragraph). Also, the energy that powers us (food) would be turned into heat by other processes anyway.

Order of magnitude: population of 7 billion * 100W/person = 9.7TW. Solar insolation 1361 W/m^2, over the projected area of the earth, which totals 175,000,000 TW.

I just throw that figure (100W) as a useful order of magnitude estimate.

Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years

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