Pirate's Cove

Well, if only all those Warmists had given up their use of fossil fuels

Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline

Whatever your stance is on climate change (it’s real, let’s move on) (WT-it is real, the debate is on causation. If it’s mankind, then why do so few Warmists practice what they preach?), it’s impossible to have missed the near-ubiquitous call to action to “keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.” Over the past few years, the somewhat bureaucratic phrase has become a rallying cry for the climate conscious.

This ambitious target first surfaced following the Paris Climate Agreement, and describes a sort of climate threshold—if we pass a long-term average increase in temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and hold at those levels for several years, we’re going to do some serious damage to ourselves and our environment.

Well, a paper from the University Western Australia Oceans Institute has some bad news: the world might’ve blown past that threshold four years ago. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the paper reaches this conclusion via an unlikely route—analyzing six sclerosponges, a kind of sea sponge that clings to underwater caves in the ocean. These sponges are commonly studied by climate scientists and are referred to as “natural archives” because they grow so slowly. Like, a-fraction-of-a-millimeter-a-year slow. This essentially allows them to lock away climate data in their limestone skeletons, not entirely unlike tree rings or ice cores.

Zoinks! 4 years ago! Doom…..oh, wait, 6 sponges in Australia? That’s it? That’s the proof? Using temperatures from one part of the ocean to determine there is global warming is not science, it’s the complete opposite; It’s speculation.

By analyzing strontium to calcium ratios in these sponges, the team could effectively calculate water temperatures dating back to 1700. The sponges watery home in the Caribbean is also a plus, as major ocean currents don’t muck up or distort temperature readings. This data could be particularly useful,as direct human measurement of sea temperature only dates back to roughly 1850, when sailors dipped buckets into the ocean. That’s why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses 1850 and 1900 as its preindustrial baseline, according to the website Grist.

Yeah, and what was 1700? Deep in the Little Ice Age. Which ended around 1850. Leading into a Holocene warm period. Which have happened numerous times over the last 8,000 years.