File talk:Holocene Temperature Variations.png
 | This file was nominated for deletion on 7 May 2019 but was kept. If you are thinking about re-nominating it for deletion, please read that discussion first. |
http://hot-topic.co.nz/cooling-gate-easterbrook-fakes-his-figures-hides-the-incline/ William M. Connolley (talk) 21:42, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
Funny. Actually Easterbrook has something of a point in replacing the 2004 temperature with what could be either the average of the first half of the 20th century, or of the past two centuries. Given that the horizontal resolution of much of Rohde's graph is only good to three centuries or so according to the caption, this is arguably more sound than indicating the temperature for a single year, since the year-to-year fluctuations are themselves on the order of half a degree.
The catch is that the present-day threat is a rate of change of temperature that is off the scale relative to any prior rate of change during the Holocene (or probably any other time except during megavolcanoes or giant meteor strikes). Hence what's a good enough horizontal resolution for most of the Holocene is no good for today: in three centuries business-as-usual will boil us alive.
Instead of giving the temperature for 2004, Rohde should have fitted a straight line to the past 40 years and intersected that with today's date. This would represent 40 times as much data as his 2004 number and therefore be much less objectionable methodologically, while also being more meaningful for the current predicament we're in than Easterbrook's solution of averaging temperature at a period when (a) CO2 was nowhere near the problem it is today and (b) weather balloon technology was in its infancy and satellite-borne microwave sounding units and OLR sensors weren't even a gleam in anyone's eye.
It's important to recognize that things are changing very quickly now relative to most of the Holocene, even to the tiny part of it constituting the 19th century. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 23:54, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
Please update and adjust graph[edit]
Ideally the graph space would be expanded, so that the recent proxies don't obscure data in the main chart. Anastrophe (talk) 23:53, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
