One nutball era ends, another begins

 

ROFLMAO WaPo's "most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past [Phanerozoic] temperatures ever produced" surprises Michael Mann, says human-caused warming will not make the planet uninhabitable

The article has this response from Michael Mann:

 The timeline, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced, the authors say. ...

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his analyses of past global temperatures, said he was also surprised by the suggestion that the planet got so warm. The finding supports many scientists’ concern that feedback loops in the Earth system could lead to much higher temperatures than most climate models predict, he wrote in an email. But it’s also possible that the data assimilation assumes too much warming and is missing factors that might forestall a runaway greenhouse effect. “While I applaud the authors for this ambitious and thoughtful study, I am skeptical about the specific, quantitative conclusions,” Mann said. ...

Even under the worst-case scenarios, human-caused warming will not push the Earth beyond the bounds of habitability.

 

The article, which places us today in some of the still coolest climate conditions in 500 million years, never connects the dots.

It maintains that a dramatic warming event 250 million years ago caused the largest mass extinction ever, spewing carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, 25 million years BEFORE the first mammals appeared, who breathe the OXYGEN emitted by carbon dioxide consuming PLANTS, who then in their turn THRIVED for 125 million years under EVEN WARMER conditions than that extinction event produced.

Evolution was evidently turbocharged by this warming and its carbon dioxide, but then suddenly the first humans supposedly started to evolve 6.5 million years ago at the end of 50 million years of cooling conditions, WHEN THE TEMPERATURE WAS 62.6 F*, and continued to evolve into modern humans 300,000 years ago just as temperature KEPT FALLING to the coldest point in the record (51.8 F).

How did that happen?

The study authors are worried about what warmer conditions in the future will mean for humans, but seem oddly uninterested in how humans supposedly evolved in relatively much cooler conditions.

Maybe we don't really understand the evolution of mammals. Maybe humans are much older than the record indicates, and much more resilient.

 

At its hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year. ...

At the timeline’s start, some 485 million years ago, Earth was in what is known as a hothouse climate, with no polar ice caps and average temperatures above 86 F (30 C). ...

For most of the Phanerozoic, the research suggests, average temperatures have exceeded 71.6 F (22 C), with little or no ice at the poles. ...

But humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic, when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).

Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the * Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.

 

 

Your reminder that the world was warmer in 1300BC, 100BC and 1100AD than it is today

That's why we bought Alaska, dummy, firing from Greenland puts you down wind from the fallout

These damn Yankees haven't learned anything since McClellan.

Governor Moonbeam is clueless about how much warmer it was in Greco-Roman antiquity than today

Jerry Brown, quoted here:

The governor added that "since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is."

Good Lord, Jeeves, The Atlantic fired Williamson but keeps nitwit writers who can't write

For example, this boob, who are clearly a college graduate, for whom mines excavate and unearth miraculously all by themselves:

But for all those years, the source material for the arguments have [sic] remained largely the same. ...

A team of archaeologists, historians, and climate scientists have [sic] constructed a history of Rome’s lead pollution, which allows them [sic] to approximate Mediterranean economic activity from 1,100 b.c. to 800 a.d. They [sic] found it hiding thousands of miles from the Roman Forum: deep in the Greenland Ice Sheet, the enormous, miles-thick plate of ice that entombs the North Atlantic island. In short, they [sic] have reconstructed year-by-year economic data documenting the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and Empire. ...

But these mines didn’t excavate [sic] pure silver: Instead, they unearthed [sic] an ore of silver, lead, and copper that had to be smelted into silver. ...

Once in the air, these lead emissions did not stay in one place. Instead, it [sic] wafted with the winds, eventually blowing into squalls and storms over Greenland. ...

The Crisis of the Roman Republic—the series of civil wars and political strife, spanning 134 b.c. to 27 b.c., that brought the Roman Republic to an end— were [sic] associated with a broad period of economic stagnation and disintegration, the study finds. And the early Roman Empire—especially the Pax Romana, the 206 years of mostly uninterrupted peace throughout the Mediterranean—were [sic] accompanied by an economic boom. ...

These simulations allow scientists to estimate how air from the Iberian peninsula—air that, in Roman times, would have been full of lead pollution—wafted up to the Greenland ice sheet. It [sic] also allowed them to distinguish between air from the Iberian peninsula specifically and ambient air from farther east in Europe.   

Former environmental activist takes aim at anthropogenic global warming

AGW gets a dressing down from Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, Ph.D. in ecology, of Rainbow Warrior fame, here:

"[T]he Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

"The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous. ...

"Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.

"At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide. The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today. Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields. Farms and forests will produce more if carbon-dioxide keeps rising.

"We have no proof increased carbon dioxide is responsible for the earth’s slight warming over the past 300 years. There has been no significant warming for 18 years while we have emitted 25 per cent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted. Carbon dioxide is vital for life on Earth and plants would like more of it."

Can you find yourself on this temperature chart?

The modern warm period is at the right in red.

Our entire history as a species as preserved in the usual objects of historical inquiry occurred in a period much warmer than now, and it could all be coming to an end because of cooling, not warming.

Discussed here, but from an inferior chart.