Data dominates the skeptic’s view of the state of the globe’s temperature and where that temperature may be heading. The climate computer models dominate the warmers view. Temperature is at the heart of the global warming issue in that just about every other indicator is a function of the temperature. For example, sea level change is the product of melting ice at the South Pole and Greenland along with the lesser masses of ice in the high elevations of the mountain ranges. Rainfall, and its shadow drought are said to be forced by changes in the temperature. Higher ocean temperatures, we are assured, breed the hurricanes and typhoons. So this posting will focus on global temperatures.
First it would be well to try to understand the past. Ice core analyses from the Antarctica were used to reconstruct global temperatures for the last 420,000 years. Figure 2 below, from climate4you.com illustrates the temperature for that period of time:
Fig.2. Reconstructed global temperature over the past 420,000 years based on the Vostok ice core from the Antarctica (Petit et al. 2001). The record spans over four glacial periods and five interglacials, including the present. The horizontal line indicates the modern temperature.
From climate4you.com comes the following discussion: “The present interglacial period (the Holocene) is seen to the right (red square). The preceding four interglacials are seen at about 125,000, 280,000, 325,000 and 415,000 years before now, with the longer glacial periods in between. All four previous interglacials are seen to be warmer (1-3°C) than the present. The typical length of a glacial period is about 100,000 years, while an interglacial period typical lasts for about 10-15,000 years. The present interglacial period has now lasted about 11,600 years.
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