MY TURN: Climate change: Important facts missing
Earth breaks yearly heat record … (Jan. 11, page C7). This article is missing many important facts because it is designed to scare an uninformed public. For example, ("Earth had its hottest year ever in 2024 …"). False. Our record keeping does not go back more than 200 years, which is about .000006% of the age of our planet. This small sample has no meaning in the larger picture. (Try making an accurate weather forecast by looking out the window for 1/2 a second each day.) The geological record is much longer, reaching back billions of years. It shows much larger planetary variations. It was about 30 degrees warmer during the age of the dinosaurs. Earth has been cooling for the last 80 million years. There were several ice-free periods and some Iceball Earth episodes (google Iceball Earth).
Thirty million years ago, the planet was 10 or more degrees above present values, and mangoes and bananas grew wild in Oregon. About 3 million years ago, volcanoes closed the Central American peninsulas, and separated the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This drastic change in ocean currents allowed our world to fall into a pattern of cyclical ice ages, some of which covered the United States in ice; 1 mile deep in New York. With billions of people now living on our planet, maybe some planetary warming would be a good thing; It would certainly make feeding everyone at least more possible. Satellite imaging suggests that our planet is starting to undergo a "greening."
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