Created by combining more than 150,000 pieces of fossil evidence with state-of-the-art climate models, it shows the intimate link between carbon dioxide and global temperatures and reveals that the world was in a much warmer state for most of the history of complex animal life. At its hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year. ...
At the timeline’s start, some 485 million years ago, Earth was in what is known as a hothouse climate, with no polar ice caps and average temperatures above 86 F (30 C). The oceans teemed with mollusks and arthropods, and the very first plants were just beginning to get a toehold on the land. .. rapid cooling is thought to have triggered the first of Earth’s “big five” mass extinction.. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his analyses of past global temperatures, said he was also surprised by the suggestion that the planet got so warm. ... Even under the worst-case scenarios, human-caused warming will not push the Earth beyond the bounds of habitability. But it will create conditions unlike anything seen in the....years our species has existed. - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-have-captured-earth-s-climate-over-the-last-485-million-years-here-s-the-surprising-place-we-stand-now/ar-AA1qRbUP
So does warm weather cause animals or do animals cause warm weather? 🤔
Created by combining more than 150,000 pieces of fossil evidence with state-of-the-art climate models, it shows the intimate link between carbon dioxide and global temperatures and reveals that the world was in a much warmer state for most of the history of complex animal life. At its hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year.
—
Good catch, the devil is in the details. I found a link too after a little digging. [1] The reconstruction has some validity. It picks up the great die-off of 250 million ybp. Pangaea was beginning to break-up, releasing water vapor, sulfates and CO2 into the atmosphere. I read that when super-continents formed, after about 100 million years, large plumes of magma well-up underneath resulting in increased volcanism, leading to a break-up of the super-continent.
The proxies seem to add value to the reconstruction [Michael Mann’s 1998 Principle Component Analysis (PCA) was complete garbage] but they added model simulations into the mix which are notoriously unreliable.
I remember reviewing satellite derived global annual temperature back in 1989. I remember that the average for that year was ~58.5F [see The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP)]. But NOAA hides these data archives from the public, so sad. The global annual average temperature is essentially unchanged, especially when uncertainty is added. They like to hide the uncertainty too. The spike in global temperatures after 2021 are most likely from the Hunga Tonga volcanic explosion of Jan. 2022. The explosion rang the Earth like a bell. But the injection of water vapor into the stratosphere is beginning to dissipate. I expect a slight cooling to resume into the 2030s from low solar and a stadium wave effect of warming and cooling (with a period of ~60 years (see Judith Curry).
1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads1526