What's one of those life skills you wish you had, but never learn? Mine is the phonetic alphabet (i.e., "C as in Charlie"). I always panic and give the most unhinged, top-of-my-brain examples, like "M as in mammoths" or "P as in poop." I hope I at least entertain service workers.
Jacquelyn Gill
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I research Earth's past and present for a better future. Podcaster for the planet. Chaotic good professor at the University of Maine. Settler on Penobscot lands. Pronouns: She/her
In an essay out today in the AGU journal Eos, @jeffcorbin, Meghan Duffy, @carlyziter and I discuss the urgent need to move beyond the "it's real, it's bad, it's us" approach to climate education. What is desperately needed instead are pathways towards climate action that engage and empower students, while helping to fight the immobility of climate despair.
https://eos.org/opinions/climate-education-that-builds-hope-and-agency-not-fear
So maybe-- just maybe -- Milloy's apparent confusion* about what's going on with past, present, and future climates has more to do with who pays his salary: corporations and groups funded by the Koch brothers and dark money.
*He has a natural sciences BA. He actually does know better.
If you want to hold me to that same standard (and you should): In contrast, you want to know who pays my salary (which is public information, by the way)? American taxpayers. That's who I serve. That's whose pocket I'm in. And compared with paid lobbyists and shills, public science is vetted, transparent, accessible, and open.
This is why it's always important to vet who is making an argument, and how they're making it. One side lies, misleads, and doctors poorly sourced Excel graphs to convince you that what you can see with your own eyes isn't happening. All while on the payroll of corporations trying to make as much money as possible as fast as possible, and damn the rest of us.
I'm surprised that as a lawyer, Milloy doesn't care about past precedence. But as a tobacco lobbyist, he clearly proved he's happy making arguments that contradict the science. And as a former policy strategist for the largest coal company in the US, he sure knows how to spin.
So, where were we? Rather, WHEN were we? Right! 125,000 years ago, in the balmy climates of the last interglacial, which was 1-2 degrees C warmer than today. Sea levels were 4-6 (and maybe as much as 10) meters higher than today (that's 13-32 feet, to us Yanks). Sounds fun!
(What we do know is that based on these natural cycles, we should not be warming now. In fact, Earth's paleoclimate record is one of the most powerful lines of evidence we have that current warming is caused by adding heat-trapping gases, plus changing the land surface with deforestation for agriculture).
(As a side note, In 1911, a scientist named Milutin Milankovitch produced a series of hand calculations predicting how changes in Earth's tilt and orbit would affect how much of the sun's energy the northern hemisphere would receive, causing cold glacials and warm interglacials. His work was later validated when we had long-term climate records from the first ice cores!).
So, how are the temperatures of 125,000 years ago relevant to today? Thanks for asking! That was the peak of our last warm period (remember, Earth has had a series of glacial cycles over the last 2.5 million years). It was a warm one, for different reasons than today is warm.