It’s a nightmare scenario: The earth has become so hot that areas around the equator are devoid of almost all life. The polar ice caps have all melted. There are no glaciers left on any of the mountains. Palm trees are growing above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic Circle. There are alligators living on Greenland. Carbon Dioxide levels are two to four times what we see right now. Ocean Levels are several hundred feet higher than where they are now. And the average global temperature is 73-degrees Fahrenheit–much warmer than the 60-degrees that is the current global average.
Is this a vision of our dystopian future? Not really. It’s actually an average day here on Earth during the Phanerozoic Era–which to us common folk is the last 500-million years.
It has certainly been hot in the Northern Hemisphere this week. And that is leading to increased concern about global climate change and the future of all life on earth. There are lots of graphs showing the number of new record high temperatures and of course, the “hockey stick graph” showing the rise in average global temperature over the last couple of decades.
But what I always like to refer back to as everyone else is running around like their hair is on fire is the Phanerozoic Era chart prepared in 2020 by researchers with the Smithsonian Institute and published on climate.gov:
It always helps to put things in perspective to know that for the majority of the last 500-million years (and for most of Earth’s entire history), we have been a pretty hot planet. In fact, for the majority of that time, there have been no ice caps or perennial ocean ice. And during our hottest periods, life on Earth flourished. Consider that all of the oil, natural gas, and coal that we pull from inside the earth today, is the decayed remains of the planet’s most bountiful periods–times when giant forests of giant trees grew everywhere, and temperatures were warm enough to allow lizards the size of school buses to roam all parts of the globe.
If you were to take the entire span of human history–300,000 years or so–and plot it onto a graph with a timeline as short as the last 50-million years, we would be a very small blip. And that blip just happens to coincide with what is the coldest period of the last 50-million years. And the trajectory of global average temperatures matches that seen in previous “warm ups” in Earth’s history.
There is a term in statistics called “regression to the mean”. It holds that when you see a sample that is far outside the average already established for a pattern, the next sample will move the statistics set back toward the mean. And that is where we now live, in the “regression”. And that is true for almost every other species currently in existence–not to mention the ice patterns, weather, rain cycles and size of the continents. We are all products of an unusually cold period in Earth’s history. A period that, invariably, was going to come to an end.
I know this sounds rather fatalistic (just wait until a do a My Two Cents about the million year average for a species’ existence on Earth–meaning we are 1/3 of the way to extinction already). Perhaps man will become the first species to actually tame the natural cycles of Earth and keep our planet artificially “cold” for a period longer than historic data shows it should be. We are obviously the first ones to understand that carbon dioxide is the driving factor, and that gives us a leg up. But all of those average, hot periods that came before us were driven by increased volcanic activity (which has been relatively tame during “human history”) and by the movement of the continents changing global ocean patterns–not cars and factories.
So while we wait for those uncontrollable elements to return, just sit back and enjoy the unusually cold temperatures were are dealing with right now.
