A new paper (like so many before it) shows that the sea started warming half a century before the first coal fired power plant was ever built, demonstrating yet again, the skeptics are right, and CO2 is irrelevant. Despite that, the world’s supposedly top science journal lauded it in excitement because it showed the world had warmed “more than we thought”, and somehow, in their brains, ipso delerium, all warming was caused by man-made CO2 even if it occurred when there were no flights, no cars, and no electricity.
Life in 1820 was the ultimate “Net Zero” world: literally every flight was grounded and all petrol stations were closed for 80 years yet the world warmed.
Absurdly, evangelistic headlines decreed the world was “hotter than we thought”, had breached 1.5C earlier than we thought and three hundred year old sea sponges were telling us to hurry up and install solar panels. The point that the geniuses who are 99% certain didn’t know how hot the 1800s were until last week isn’t exactly inspiring. But the political activists at Nature felt that breaching the Paris Agreement (before it was even made) was big news and said so in their first paragraph. All the major nations are failing to meet their Paris targets anyway, and if the targets were expired before they were even set, that only makes the UN look stupid. And to top that off, somehow a thousand thermometers, ship buckets and tree rings have just been superseded by some old Puerto Rican sponges.
As it happens the team at Nature also seem to have forgotten they already announced in 2016 that global warming started 180 years ago. Perhaps they don’t read their own papers? (That was Abram et al).
Really, this new paper makes a great study in just how bad current science communication is — every single person in the chain of nonsense failed to see the bleeding obvious. The academics, the journal, the press release team and the “media” all missed the most important message the corals were shouting from the bottom of the ocean. Humans don’t control the climate.
[Nature] The world has warmed 1.5 °C, according to 300-year-old sponges
By the time that official temperature records began, global temperatures had already risen by half a degree.
The planet has already passed 1.5 °C of warming, according to a new measuring technique that goes back further in time than current methods. At the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, nations agreed not to exceed 1.5 °C, a guardrail of climate change.
“We have an alternate record of global warming,” says coral-reef geochemist Malcolm McCulloch at the University of West Australia Oceans Institute in Crawley, who is lead author of the study. “It looks like temperatures were underestimated by about half a degree.”
Even though the paper says the warming started in 1860, the data shows it started earlier, more like 1820. Apparently the Sr/Ca ratio is a good proxy for the temperature they say.
But 90% of human emissions have been emitted since World War II.
…
Source: OWID
It does however look similar to graphs of rising sea levels that we’ve known about for years.
Jevrejeva et al 2008
And a lot like graphs of 120 proxies from the Northern Hemisphere:
Ljungqvist et al.
And other proxies from China
….
Absurdities of the modern era — that newspapers all over the world tell us CO2 is even more dangerous than we thought because of some sponges in the Caribbean.
REFERENCES
McCulloch, M.T., Winter, A., Sherman, C.E. et al. 300 years of sclerosponge thermometry shows global warming has exceeded 1.5 °C. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 171–177 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01919-7
Abram, et al (2016) Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents, Nature, VOL 536, p 415
Christiansen, B. and Ljungqvist F. C. (2012). The extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperature in the last two millennia: reconstructions of low-frequency variability. Climate of the Past, 8(2):765–786, 2012. [abstract] [PDF] [NASA copy] [Discussion on CA noted a lack of complete archives and code]
Jevrejeva, S., A. Grinsted, J. C. Moore, and S. Holgate (2006), Nonlinear trends and multiyear cycles in sea level records, J. Geophys. Res., 111,
Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008), Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611. [PDF]
Ljungqvist, F. C., Krusic, P. J., Brattström, G., and Sundqvist, H. S (2012).: Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries, Clim. Past, 8, 227-249, doi:10.5194/cp-8-227-2012, 2012. [abstract] [PDF] or try this [PDF] [CO2science discussion]
Quansheng Ge et al, Characteristics of temperature change in China over the last 2000 years and spatial patterns of dryness/wetness during cold and warm periods, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1007/s00376-017-6238-8