Recently, many media outlets touted a new scientific study “A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature” as proof that the current modest rise in temperature over the last 150 years is going to be catastrophic. The data and the methodology used strongly suggest that such claims are false.
For example, in their coverage, The Washington Post (WaPo) quoted one of the study authors, saying:
At no point in the nearly half-billion years that Judd and her colleagues analyzed did the Earth change as fast as it is changing now, she added:
“In the same way as a massive asteroid hitting the Earth, what we’re doing now is unprecedented.”
How absurd. In no way is a world ending event from space anything at all like the gentle warming we’ve seen over the past century.
Second, using the proxy data that their research was limited to, there is no way of determining whether the speed with which past temperature shifts occurred was faster, slower, or similar to what we are experiencing at present.
Bloomberg, in We Just Got a Wake-Up Call From the Time Before Dinosaurs, said this: “Earth has been through periods of rapid climate change before. They all produced mass death.” The implication is that we are on the same track as the dinosaurs, which ironically were ended by “a massive asteroid hitting the Earth.”
Tech news had this foreboding headline: 500 Million Years of Climate History Tells Us of a Coming Catastrophe
All of these media outlets predict doom and gloom in our immediate future due to climate change, but in doing so, they completely ignore the bigger picture presented by the study. Most importantly, the study itself made no predictions of future doom due to climate change; such dire predictions are spun entirely by the media.
What is clearly evident in the graph provided by WaPo and the graph in the actual study (Figure 1 seen below), yet ignored by the media, is that fact that the present-day is the coolest Earth has been in 485 million years. Furthermore, the media completely ignored the fact that the wide swings in temperature recorded throughout history all naturally happened well before humans and the industrial revolution came on the scene.
Note the blue line in Figure 1 (added), denoting that according to their data, the present-day is the coolest in that 485-million-year history of temperature.
Yet somehow, this is lost on the media. WaPo focuses entirely on the small blip at the very end of the graph, with their own magnified version, seen below:
WaPo completely ignores the evidence presented research, such as the surface stations project conducted by The Heartland Institute, showing that the Urban Heat Island effect and the poor placement of temperature stations used to measure temperatures, from which long-term trend data is gathered, may account for as much as 50 percent of recent warming, with the remainder likely being partly or wholly natural.
Then WaPo sounds the obligatory alarm, saying:
The planet has been heating up for the past 20,000 years – but human-caused emissions in recent centuries have pushed the rate of warming into unprecedented territory.
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.
That is false. We are not in “unprecedented territory.” The graph itself proves that as does other parts of the WaPo article, such as, “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.”
Of course, that 96.8°F peak happened well before humans even existed, suggesting that the planet has, as a result of entirely natural factors, dramatically warmed and cooled in the past without any human contribution whatsoever. To be clear, WaPo cites no data or theory, and certainly nothing contained in the study suggests, that human CO2 emissions could lead to the highs reached in the past. A 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius is increase is not dangerous, and certainly doesn’t get the world from its present 14.98℃ to the 36℃ figure WaPo is discussing to scare its readers.
This passage from the WaPo story does come to the honest conclusion that Earth tends to run warmer than today throughout its geological history:
The study also makes clear that the conditions humans are accustomed to are quite different from those that have dominated our planet’s history. 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. Coldhouse climates — including our current one — prevailed just 13 percent of the time.
Therefore, it is quite possible Earth will return to a “hothouse climate” without any help from humans at all.
It is clear that the media wanted to spin this scientific study, which makes no alarming claims at all, into a tool to bolster their erroneous viewpoint that the world presently faces a “climate crisis” caused by humans. However, the data clearly show that the Earth’s temperature and the climates of its varied regions, have shifted radically in the past, that present temperatures are much cooler than has been the norm for the majority of Earth’s geological history, and that humans have lived through both cooler and warmer temperatures than we are currently experiencing at various points in history.
It is a shame, but not unexpected, that the mainstream media spins reports such as these into something frightening. Such behavior is not only dishonest, but reprehensible.
