Study: Earth Warmer Than Any Time in Last 12,000 Years
January 29, 2021
The findings were released amid mixed moves by the Biden administration on
climate policy.
Astronaut photograph. (NASA)
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams
Climate campaigners on Thursday pointed to a study showing that Earth is
hotter than it's ever been during the entire epoch of human civilization as
the latest proof of the need to treat human-caused global heating like the
dire emergency that it is.
On Wednesday, the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature published a report
revealing that an analysis of ocean surface temperatures found that the
planet is hotter now than at any other time in the past 12,000 years, and
that it may actually be warmer than at any point during the last 125,000
years.
Researchers Samantha Bova, Yair Rosenthal, Zhengyu Liu, Shital P. Godad and
Mi Yan determined this by solving what scientists call the "Holocene
temperature conundrum."
This was the mystery of why the global heating that began at the end of the
last ice age 12,000 years ago peaked around 6,000 years later - before
giving way to the onset of a cooling period that lasted until the Industrial
Revolution, when the current anthropogenic warming period began.
It turns out that the collected data, obtained from fossilized seashells,
was inaccurate, showing only hot summers while missing the colder winters.
"We demonstrate that global average annual temperature has been rising over
the last 12,000 years, contrary to previous results," research leader Bova,
from Rutgers University in New Jersey, told The Guardian.
"This means that the modern, human-caused global warming period is
accelerating a long-term increase in global temperatures, making today
completely uncharted territory. It changes the baseline and emphasizes just
how critical it is to take our situation seriously."
The study was published on the same day that President Joe Biden announced a
series of executive actions on the climate crisis that were hailed by the
youth-led Sunrise Movement as "historic."
The orders will - among other things - freeze new oil and natural gas leases
on public lands and offshore waters, establish an Office of Domestic Climate
Policy and National Climate Task Force, and mandate that federal agencies
eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and "identify new opportunities to spur
innovation, commercialization, and deployment of clean energy technologies."
The White House said that the orders "follow through on President Biden's
promise to take aggressive action to tackle climate change and build on the
executive actions that the president took on his first day in office,
including rejoining the Paris agreement and immediate review of harmful
rollbacks of standards that protect our air, water, and communities."
While Biden's directives were welcomed as a necessary reversal from the
policies and actions of the Donald Trump administration, climate advocates
said that much more must be done - and in the case of fossil fuel expansion,
not done.
Fridays for Future founder Greta Thunberg noted that the Biden
administration has so far issued more than 30 new fossil fuel drilling
permits, according to a Bloomberg report.
The drilling authorizations are being issued despite the administration's
planned moratorium.
This article is from Common Dreams.
