zlacker

Claiming something is the hottest day on earth when your data only goes back half a century is the reason people think all these groups are little more than grifters. It’s bad science and hyperbole.

>>edgyqu+(OP)
It would be beneficial to your understanding if you read the article. The title is slightly misleading.

> Even though the dataset used for the unofficial record goes back only to 1979, Kapnick said that given other data, the world is likely seeing the hottest day in “several hundred years that we’ve experienced.”

>>edgyqu+(OP)
Record setting was never science. You need to separate the people doing science from the people making marketing posts. Record setting is marketing.

>>edgyqu+(OP)
I used to think the same thing, and it was the argument that my dad would make against climate change (i.e. "we've only been tracking the temperature since the late 1800's"). But then I found out about climate proxies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_(climate)

>>edgyqu+(OP)
Direct temperature measurements go back century or so, but proxies for temperature go back much further. Error bars may be larger but it's not like there's nothing to base the models on.

>>edgyqu+(OP)
Bill McKibben's reporting says scientists estimate via temperature proxies that this is the hottest the earth has been in 125,000 years. Is that better for you? https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/no-human-has-ever-seen-i...

>>boveus+b1
Even then, “hundreds of years,” is not the hottest day in earth.

>>codeli+o5
There was a brief spike at the beginning of the Holocene, a bit over 10,000 years ago, when there was a brief slightly warmer average. Someday soon-ish we seem likely to have a day higher than whatever peak happened then. We won't know it but the odds are already non-zero and rising that we've crossed that threshold.

Walking back in time, we have to go to 115k-130k years ago to find a hotter time period. That's during a brief Eemian period, before the last glacial period (where the glaciars retreated for good). This is called the Pleistocene era. Heaven help us if we breach that peak, whatever it was, but for a couple hundred years it looks like it was +3.5 or 4 C hotter on average than our 1960-1990 average.

It was around 2.5m years ago that the earth actually stayed consistently hotter: the Pilocene era.

The data isnt exactly precise but the conclusion should be resounding & clear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Ov...

>>edgyqu+(OP)
Blaming the researchers for whatever sensational and misleading headline apnews puts on their work isn't really fair. Be better.

>>edgyqu+(OP)
Sure, there were very high temperatures in the Earth past. There were higher CO2 levels too. The problem is the acceleration, the rate of change. There never were such changes in such short time period as there are today. You have a quant in your nickname, I'm pretty sure you can understand what this means. To make an analogy - you have an oven and it's temperature is currently 150C, way less than the maximum observed 250C. But the problem is that the regulator is set to Max now.