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Climate Change(d)?

But what was the temperature in Santa Monica back then? :unsure:
 
The Eemian was named after the Eem River in the Netherlands, and it's the Ipswichian of the UK, the Mikulin interglacial of Russia, the Valdivia interglacial of Chile and the Riss-Würm interglacial of the Alps. It is either all or part of the Sangamonian Stage of North America.

Where was everybody in the Eemian?

Let us look up at the stars. The nearest ones, like Sirius and Alpha Centauri, moved sizable distances across the sky, while the more distant ones moved less. The Big Dipper in the year 92,000 and Gaia shows the motions of nearby stars for 1.6 million years - YouTube

The Earth's day was about 3 seconds shorter than at present, and the Moon was about 5 kilometers closer, meaning a lunar month about 30 seconds shorter.

The continents looked pretty much the same, but with typically around 1 kilometer of continental drift. Much of the topography would have looked pretty much the same. Since this is an interglacial, its sea level would have been close to the present-day sea level, and the climate patterns pretty much the same.

So Eemian Earth would have looked very familiar.
 
Now for the Eemian Earth's inhabitants.

Most of them would have looked very similar to present-day ones, with some exceptions that I will note. But there was a lot of megafauna that was alive back then that went extinct around the Pleistocene - Holocene boundary, nearly 12,000 years ago, megafauna like furry elephants and rhinos and giant ground sloths and giant armadillos and sabertooth cats and North American horses and camelids and European lions and hyenas and ...

Our ancestors?

They were living in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time, but they were likely our present species instead of some predecessor one.  Archaic humans and  Early modern human and  Behavioral modernity

But in western Eurasia lived the Neanderthals and in eastern Eurasia the Denisovans, both very close to our present species, but with more limited technology. The last known member of  Homo erectus - an older species - dates back to then, and lived in the Indonesian islands.

Neanderthals Hunted in Groups, One More Strike Against the Dumb Brute Myth | Science| Smithsonian Magazine
On an autumn day around 120,000 years ago, in the dense forests of what would come to be Germany, fierce hunters prowled the landscape.

These hunters regularly brought down mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, deer, wild horses, aurochs (extinct bulls) and straight-tusked elephants. They competed for these prizes against other predators like hyenas and lions, sometimes losing their lives in the process. But today their skills and tools proved their worth: A group of Neanderthals used their hand-crafted wooden spears to kill two male fallow deer, both in the prime of their life and heavy with valuable meat and fat.

We know this because those skeletons, with bones bearing the signs the people who killed them, were recovered in 1988 and 1997 in a site called Neumark-Nord.
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They also took care of each other when they got injured, as is evident from healed bone fractures: [The oldest treated bone fracture in Croatia--130,000 years ago] - PubMed

To Understand Neanderthal Night-Hunting Methods, Scientists Caught Thousands of Birds With Their Bare Hands in Spanish Caves | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine - "Researchers captured more than 5,000 birds to learn how our now-extinct ancestors foraged for food"
 
AZ (Phoenix) tie the record for 110+ highs today (18), they broke the record for most consecutive days with a low of 90 or higher (7). The 110 record appears certain to reach 23.
 
lpetrich said:
The early Holocene was somewhat warmer than the more recent Holocene, but by how much?
In the early Holocene, about 8,000 BP (6,000 BCE), it was about 0.25 C warmer than in early modern times, just before the Industrial Revolution.

When it was last this warm? In the  Eemian interglacial period, from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Its temperature was about 1 - 2 C warmer than for most of the Holocene, our current interglacial period, and its atmospheric CO2 was 280 ppm.
Click to expand...
Simple test: Ice sheets. If we can drill an ice core going back X years we can conclude there has been ice there for X years--if we now see it melting the average temperature is higher than it has been for X years. We have some substantial values for X.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
lpetrich said:
The early Holocene was somewhat warmer than the more recent Holocene, but by how much?
In the early Holocene, about 8,000 BP (6,000 BCE), it was about 0.25 C warmer than in early modern times, just before the Industrial Revolution.

When it was last this warm? In the  Eemian interglacial period, from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Its temperature was about 1 - 2 C warmer than for most of the Holocene, our current interglacial period, and its atmospheric CO2 was 280 ppm.
Click to expand...
Simple test: Ice sheets. If we can drill an ice core going back X years we can conclude there has been ice there for X years--if we now see it melting the average temperature is higher than it has been for X years. We have some substantial values for X.
Click to expand...
I don't think that holds. You need prolonged heat to melt ice. It could actually be warmer now than before the first ice was laid down, we just haven't reached the bottom yet.
 
Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada over the past 15 years - IOPscience from 2021
In this study, we systematically assessed the accuracy of media coverage of human contributions to climate change. We conducted a content analysis of coverage across 4856 articles over 15 years (January 2005 to December 2019) by analyzing 17 high-circulation national print media sources in five countries: the United Kingdom (U.K.), Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (U.S.). We selected these five countries because the phenomenon of climate contrarianism is primarily an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon (Painter 2011). Therefore, focusing specifically on newsprint sources in Anglophone countries enables a meaningful exploration of whether the previously observed norm of 'balanced' reporting has continued to amplify outlier perspectives that bely the scientific consensus.
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They looked at
  • U.K.: Guardian and Observer, Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, Times and Sunday Times
  • Australia: Sydney Morning Herald, Courier Mail and Sunday Mail, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, The Age
  • New Zealand: New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post, The Press
  • Canada: Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post
  • U.S.: New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post
How they classified articles in their research:
  • Category 1: anthropogenic global warming only contributes to climate change (distinct from natural variations)
  • Category 2: anthropogenic global warming significantly contributes to climate change (in combination with natural variation)
  • Category 3: anthropogenic global warming and natural variability equally contribute to climate change
  • Category 4: anthropogenic global warming negligently contributes to climate change
  • Category 5: not applicable: includes articles that are not about anthropogenic climate change 12 . Category 5 articles were removed from the final sample.
Category 2 refers to articles that portrayed the scientific consensus view that humans are the main driver of currently observed climate change, while Category 3 refers to articles that provide false balance between scientific consensus and contrarian views regarding the existence or causes of climate change. Category 4 refers to articles that either refute the existence of climate change or else make claims that observed climate change is not driven primarily by humans.
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Results:

The first category was rare: {{The Press, 1.7}, {Sydney Morning Herald, 0.5}, {Courier Mail & Sunday Mail, 0.}, {Daily Mail & Mail on Sunday, 0.}, {Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, 0.}, {Dominion Post, 0.}, {Globe & Mail, 0.}, {Guardian & Observer, 0.}, {National Post, 0.}, {New York Times, 0.}, {New Zealand Herald, 0.}, {Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, 0.}, {The Age, 0.}, {Times & Sunday Times, 0.}, {Toronto Star, 0.}, {USA Today, 0.}, {Washington Post, 0.}}

I then calculated (2) - (1) - (3) - (4) to calculate reliability and (3) - (4) to assess amount of denialism: {{Toronto Star, 94.7, 1.3}, {Guardian & Observer, 90., 2.6}, {Globe & Mail, 89.6, 5.2}, {USA Today, 88.8, 0.}, {The Age, 88.4, 4.2}, {New Zealand Herald, 88.1, 2.}, {Washington Post, 87.4, 1.5}, {Sydney Morning Herald, 85.6, 1.9}, {The Press, 83.4, 0.}, {New York Times, 82.5, 5.1}, {Dominion Post, 77.7, 0.}, {Times & Sunday Times, 77.1, 1.1}, {Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, 62.7, -3.1}, {Courier Mail & Sunday Mail, 58.8, 3.}, {Daily Mail & Mail on Sunday, 44.9, -10.}, {Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, 42.3, 1.9}, {National Post, 41.6, -10.8}}

Category 2 slowly rose with time, from a fitted value of 87% in 2005 to a fitted value of 92% in 2019.

As a second example—and similar to the findings of other research (i.e. Boykoff and Mansfield 2008, Painter and Gavin 2016, Stoddart et al 2016, Ruiu 2021)—the sources with significantly less accurate climate change coverage, Canada's National Post, Australia's Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph (owned by Rupert Murdoch) and the U.K.'s Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, all have a right leaning political orientation, while the left-leaning sources within the U.K., the Guardian and Observer, and Canada, the Toronto Star, had the most accurate climate coverage. As studied elsewhere (i.e. Carvalho 2007, Dunlap 2008, Boykoff 2011), ideological cultures and stances are among several factors that shape media coverage of climate change. Combined with our finding that these outlets have run fewer stories on anthropogenic climate change than their in-country counterparts over this time-period, the coverage in these conservative outlets has comparatively remained more 'silent' on these critical issues while these sources have continued to contribute to informational biases in the public arena.
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The UK Telegraph is sometimes nicknamed the Torygraph on account of its political leanings.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Loren Pechtel said:
lpetrich said:
The early Holocene was somewhat warmer than the more recent Holocene, but by how much?
In the early Holocene, about 8,000 BP (6,000 BCE), it was about 0.25 C warmer than in early modern times, just before the Industrial Revolution.

When it was last this warm? In the  Eemian interglacial period, from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Its temperature was about 1 - 2 C warmer than for most of the Holocene, our current interglacial period, and its atmospheric CO2 was 280 ppm.
Click to expand...
Simple test: Ice sheets. If we can drill an ice core going back X years we can conclude there has been ice there for X years--if we now see it melting the average temperature is higher than it has been for X years. We have some substantial values for X.
Click to expand...
I don't think that holds. You need prolonged heat to melt ice. It could actually be warmer now than before the first ice was laid down, we just haven't reached the bottom yet.
Click to expand...
I'm not saying this sets a maximum time, but rather a minimum time.
 
Sorry, but I still can't fathom why humans have flocked to hell holes like Phoenix. Oregun summers are bad enough.
 
My brother is law loves golf. And 20 years ago, you could golf year round. That might not be the case any more. But yeah, I'm not big on a place that is cold when it is 60 degrees. That just doesn't feel right.

Personally, I like the Great Lakes. Massive amount of fresh surface water. More rain than the pacific NW (hope that doesn't change) to help recharge the aquifers. This El Nino has been nice, as the temps aren't as hot as during La Nina. And we just had a couple days of dry (low humidity), something that used to be more common 15 years ago.
 
The secret of where I live is its microclimate. Locals have long referred to it as the banana belt.
What’s getting to me after more than a quarter century, is the temperature fluctuation, and the rapidity with which it occurs. 50° swings are common, and it can go from perfectly comfortable to burning or freezing virtually instantaneously.
It’s probably just my age.
 
In the news the the color of the ocean is changing indicating changes in plankton.

A drastic drop in plankton could be catastrophic.

www.postguam.com

Scientists: Climate change is affecting the color of the ocean - at a fast pace

Beachgoers around the world would probably give different descriptions of the ocean. Those gazing at the Caribbean Sea might describe clear or turquoise water, while those along Argentina's coastline, where
www.postguam.com www.postguam.com
 
Just read a paper on the faunal tropicalization of our estuary. I've also got a few bushels of mangoes from the tree in our front yard. I think they are going to have to move the boundaries on the USDA zones again.
 
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