Pirate's Cove

A bit of a reach, eh?

Earth may be hotter today than at any time in the last 540 million years

A new look at Earth’s deep past is reshaping how scientists understand the planet’s climate, and it carries a quiet warning about the future. Evidence now suggests that Earth may be closer to its hottest state than once believed, even when compared with hundreds of millions of years of history.

Researchers at University of Leeds have used a new method to estimate global temperatures across the Phanerozoic, a period spanning about 540 million years. Their findings challenge earlier ideas that Earth once reached extreme levels of heat far beyond today’s climate.

For years, scientists believed that parts of Earth’s past were far hotter than today. Some earlier estimates suggested global temperatures may have reached 20 to 30 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

Those numbers painted a picture of a much hotter planet, one that still managed to support life. But the new research offers a different view.

The study suggests that past warm periods likely reached about 10 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That is still warmer than today, but far below earlier claims.

This finding matters because it narrows the range of conditions under which life evolved. It also raises questions about how much warming modern ecosystems can tolerate.

Oh, wait, so, the article doesn’t actually support the unhinged, doomy headline? Color me shocked.

Senior author Benjamin Mills emphasized the stakes. “The findings suggest that that Earth’s temperature has been tightly regulated over time, and that human-driven warming of 10 degrees Celsius, which is possible if all fossil fuel reserves are burned, would take us to places the Earth may never have been before. How far can we push the planet?” (snip)

Earth’s natural systems can regulate climate, but they work slowly. Weathering and other processes take thousands to millions of years to balance changes.

Human activity, by contrast, is altering the climate over decades. This rapid shift may outpace the planet’s ability to respond.

“We shouldn’t be complacent when viewing ancient hot climates that supported diverse ecosystems, and we must understand that they were established extremely slowly, and may not have been as hot as recently proposed,” Mills said. “Earth’s natural regulation systems are slow, and humans must perform our own climate regulation to keep the planet in a habitable range.”

These are political statements meant to tell Government to take people’s money, life choices, and freedom away. All based on computer models, rather than actual hard data.