Date: 2024-06-30 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0300-CL-a01-temperature-timeline
CLIMATE CHANGE
HISTORICAL RECORD
A timeline of Earth's average temperature going back to 20000 BCE
HISTORICAL RECORD
A timeline of Earth's average temperature going back to 20000 BCE
The most recent 1000 years
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Modern science is impressive, but not as widely appreciated as it should be. A radio show ITMA in the UK in the late 1940s had the tag line 'Ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise' and it sums up the attitude of far too many people in the modern world which, in my view, is very dangerous.
The idea that a climate crisis could emerge in the relatively near future has been talked about for several decades. My own realization that climate change was already in progress happened in the early 1990s when I listened in to a lecture given at the New York Public Library by a Cambridge scientist from my old College (Sidney Sussex) who had participated in some surveying and climate research in Greenland where two peaks had been named Sidney and Sussex! One of my memories from that lecture were photographs of a glacier taken 20 years apart that showed the scale and pace of ice melt already in the years before the early 1990s.
I would like to see all the powerful people who promulgated misinformation about climate change over the past several decades to be identified and the damage that they promoted and caused to be quantified in some sensible way. At the present time there is no easy mechanism for these people to be held to account and the financial wealth they accumulated while natural capital was being destroyed to be confiscated. In a world where meaningful accountability were truly to exist, most of the wealth that has been accumulated through involvement with the fossil fuel energy sector would be confiscated in order to fund the essential remediation that now needs to be done!
Now have a look at the temperature information going back to 20000 BCE.
Peter Burgess
|