Climate Tracker

@climate.skyfleet.blue

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Monitoring Mainstream and Independent Media about Climate related news and events. Tracking Climate disruption related news and protests around the issue of Climate Breakdown. 🆘 @skyfleet.blue

This is a reconstruction of earth’s global climate for the past 12,000 years, with the 20th century average as the baseline. It paints a pretty clear picture. Climate change deniers love to scream, “but the climate has changed naturally in the past.” That is certainly true, but even a cursory glance at this figure shows why that is a problematic argument. First, the planet is currently warmer than at any point in the past 12,000 years. Second, and most importantly, the rate of change today is substantially different from natural cycles. Look at the graph, look at how gradually natural changes take place, then look at the sudden, abrupt change part way through the 20th century. That’s not how natural climate changes look, making it clear that this one is from us. Also, note that naturally, the climate fluctuates on a roughly 10,000-year cycle. You can clearly see this in the graph, and it should also be clear that we should still be in a cold period, not a warm period. Full credit for this goes to Alexander Radtke (follow him on Twitter: @alxrdk). He did all the hard work, I just added some arrows and labels. I’ll just quote him for more info about this figure: “For all the people asking for axes: 9980 BC - 2020 AD. Baseline is 20th century mean. Minimum temperature shown = -1.37°C, Max T = 0.99°C (2020). 16 colors with each bin = 4/7 of a standard deviation of the 20th century (~0.134°C). Sources for the 12k->2k before now data: https://nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7, for the 2k->170 years before now data: https://nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0400-0 and for 1850-2020 it is an equal blend of HadCRUT 4, GISTEMP, Berkeley Earth, Cowtan and Way and NOAA datasets. Some caveats before it is actually done: We don't know the temperature in 8437 BC. We only know the probability distribution of the 8450-8350 BC period. So those 12k stripes will be a 'plausible, stylized interpretation', based on data, but not mirroring it.”