zlacker

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)

>>codeli+(OP)
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...