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How hot can Earth get? Our planet's climate history holds clues
By Elise Cutts
JULY 17, 2025 AT 9:00 AM
Our species likes it cold.
Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths but by ice caps at the poles. For most of its 4.5-billion-year history, our planet was too warm for polar ice. Tyrannosaurus rex’s steamy Cretaceous kingdom 66 million years ago was in many ways a more representative slice of history than our own. Back then, reefs blanketed the beds of shallow seas as warm as bathwater, and jungle creatures watched the southern lights dance behind gaps in the thick canopies of Antarctic rainforests.
--more--
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-history-earth-warming
JULY 17, 2025 AT 9:00 AM
Our species likes it cold.
Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths but by ice caps at the poles. For most of its 4.5-billion-year history, our planet was too warm for polar ice. Tyrannosaurus rex’s steamy Cretaceous kingdom 66 million years ago was in many ways a more representative slice of history than our own. Back then, reefs blanketed the beds of shallow seas as warm as bathwater, and jungle creatures watched the southern lights dance behind gaps in the thick canopies of Antarctic rainforests.
--more--
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-history-earth-warming
This is an excellent deep dive into geologic time and what the past might tell us about the future.
What folly it was to trash the unique environment we humans evolved in, but no worries, our fossil fueled civilization is unsustainable and will be gone, from the perspective of geological time, in a blink of an eye.
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Scientists have captured Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years. Here’s the surprising place we stand now.
An effort to understand Earth’s past climates uncovered a history of wild temperature shifts and offered a warning on the consequences of human-caused warming.
Sarah Kaplan, Simon Ducroquet | Washington Post | September 19, 2024
An ambitious effort to understand the Earth’s climate over the past 485 million years has revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized — offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured and a warning about the unprecedented rate of warming caused by humans.
The timeline, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced, the authors say. 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...more
https://archive.ph/vG0CO
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/
An effort to understand Earth’s past climates uncovered a history of wild temperature shifts and offered a warning on the consequences of human-caused warming.
Sarah Kaplan, Simon Ducroquet | Washington Post | September 19, 2024
An ambitious effort to understand the Earth’s climate over the past 485 million years has revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized — offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured and a warning about the unprecedented rate of warming caused by humans.
The timeline, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced, the authors say. 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...more
https://archive.ph/vG0CO
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/19/earth-temperature-global-warming-planet/
