In addition to August 2014 being another
'hottest on record' type of month, globally, this year....
hottest on record!!!
do the ice core records count as records?
...
Can you point to where “August” would be, in your “record” above? Then no, but....
It would be interesting to compare this present Inter-Glacial Period (IGP) with earlier IGPs,
especially the most recent “Eemian” period, from about 120,000 years ago.
The Eemian does get “warmer” than any time in our current IGP, by several degrees,
but look at the duration for the Eemian IGP, compared with the duration of this current IGP,
and look at the rate of change for temperature, during the Eemian.
Historically, what we perceive as ‘radical’ change, such as between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age,
is caused by a ‘small’ change in the long-term average temperature, of about a half a degree Celsius
or about one degree F, over centuries.
And as long as that ‘radical change’ keeps drifting back and forth
around some
roughly constant temperature over thousands of years,
agriculture and civilizations can evolve and grow and develop.
The horizontal ‘zero’ line on these graphs essentially shows us where that “roughly constant” temperature has been set for this IGP.
In the past century, we’ve added about 1 C degree (2 F) onto the ‘mini-ice-age’ temperatures,
and we are now on track to double or triple that change within the next century.
On the scale of these ice age graphs, that much change over so little time is graphed as a vertical line.
CO2 (
the red line) has reached the 400 ppm level (off these charts) over the past year and it will continue increasing.
Even the sharp rise, and the following sharp fall, in temperatures during the Eemian
would be considered slow by the standards of what we are now forcing the planetary systems to experience.
Look at how flat and almost level (
+/- 0.5 degree) the averages are for any century over the past 8-10 thousand years,
and compare that with the centuries and millennia of constant large change that builds up the Eemian average.
Do you think agriculture could have developed during an Eemian climate regime?
Do you think civilization will survive, in some form at least,
while we superimpose an Eemian-like climate excursion
onto a graph of our next century?
~
