The Inconvenient Skeptic: The Comprehensive Guide to the Earth's Climate

by John Kehr

I used the EPICA Ice core data for this chapter because it is longest ice core and it can show the most interglacials. There are other sources of data available including the Vostok ice core and numerous sediment sets. The dates end up slightly different despite all the work to align the different sets. Since the EPICA data is the longest ice core data available that is the one I used. Another bias issue is evident in the historical temperature anomaly charts that I have used. That is the actual temperature used to generate the temperature anomaly. What is referred to as the “normal” temperature of the Earth is no such thing. For most of the past million years the Earth has spent very little time at the current temperature or warmer. The bias is one hopelessly corrupted by the short-term view that dominates the discussion about the Earth's climate. As I discussed in the previous chapter's scientific content, ice cores are truly wonderful proxies for reconstructing global temperature. This is primarily because most climate change takes place in the Polar Regions of the Earth and that is where ice cores are available. Well, actually Antarctica is the best place for the really old ice cores. That is because in the longest interglacial that happened 400,000 years ago melted most of the Greenland ice sheets. Even the Eemian caused some problems with the ice sheets in Greenland.