“Is that fire behind us. I feel warm.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Mmph!”
“I’m sure everything is fine.”
There is a great group of folks over at Climate Town that make compelling videos about the science of climate change, and the ridiculousness of the world largely in denial about the problem. They describe what they do as: Videos to educate and entertain — but mostly to get more people comfortable talking about climate change without feeling embarrassed or uninformed about it.
I recommend you check it out. If nothing else, it will give you a smile and arm you with videos to send your climate skeptic friends. You can also find them on Substack, here.
Recently, they made a great video and supplemented it with a Substack essay (link below) on Joe Rogan showing why his mensa card will not be coming anytime soon.
First, take a look at this graphic. What does it look like to you?
That is quite obviously a graphic showing something that oscillates a bit over time and at the end of the period measured, seems to be on a bit of a downward trajectory.
Now, what if I told you that this graphic shows global mean temperatures on earth going back nearly 500 million years? This chart is from a Washington Post story that ran late in 2024. The end of the graphic depicts “today”, as in our current time.
The climate change denier can say “aha” the temperature today on Earth is much lower than it has been historically. Climate change is fake! To save you the clicking through the above links, that was essentially the position of Joe Rogan, and his guest, Mel Gibson, when Mr. Rogan brought up this chart on his show soon after the Washington post article came out in late 2024.
Pease pay attention to that little uptick at the far right of the chart. That is the period of the last 20,000 years or so - when humans started gathering in larger groups and building societies and a civilization. In the context of the climate change story - that is the only part that matters.
Sixty-five million years ago, immediately after the dinosaurs were largely wiped out, you could have put our current civilization in that time period and nearly all of us would parish rather quickly. The global average temperatures then would have been far too much for us, for our agriculture, for nearly every natural system that we depend on.
Look at those C and F numbers at either end of the graphic from the Washington Post - now with the temperatures added in (sorry it is a little fuzzy - this is a screengrab). When the dinosaurs bit the dust, average temperatures were about 20 degrees F (7 degrees C) warmer than they are today. You would not last long back then. No one would. For most of this graphic, humanity was not an option. We just couldn’t hack it. It took nearly 65 million years for us to evolve, and we only did so because the environment, including the temperature, was conducive for us to do so.
Side note: I had a colleague I worked with in the world of finance about 6 - 7 years ago, who told me climate change was not a problem because it was much hotter when the dinosaurs were around. When I challenged that people were not around then, and could not survive then, he simply did not accept my argument. This was a highly educated guy, one level above me on the corporate org-chart. Not inspiring.
Our civilizations, which began growing roughly 10,000 years ago, came about partially because we could come about. We came about because we are in the goldilocks zone of global climate for humanity to exist. Before conditions entered that goldilocks zone, we just couldn’t have existed, and the societies we have built could not have existed. You can’t raise crops, when the climate just doesn’t allow it. Until about 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, that was the case.
It’s the speed of the change Einstein.
The folks at Climate Town ran a great essay recently titled; “We made a graph.” They show that what matters when you are considering the ability of life to survive a change in climate, is the speed of the change of a climate. Yes, we can adapt to a changing climate. No, we likely can’t adapt at the speed we are changing our climate today. We say we can adapt, and geological history says - “hold my beer”.
Here is a graphic Climate Town created, highlighting “the great dying” about 250 million years ago.
That “great dying” coincided with a climate that rose in average temperature of about 10 degrees C over 50,000 years. This is a muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch slower rate of climate acceleration than we have today.
Climate Town also produced a graphic that shows the speed of climate change from 250,000,000 years ago compared to today’s rate of change. Here it is.
The pace at which we are changing the climate is unprecedented in the history of the planet. The pace of our heating now when graphed against the pace of the LARGEST MASS EXTINCTION ON EARTH IN WHICH 90 PERCENT OF ALL LIFE DIED, looks like a Space X rocket racing a snail. Speed is not what we want here.
Check out Climate Town. They are smart people, with a great sense of humor, which is always a good combination. Please forward that story from Climate Town to your nearest and dearest climate skeptic and dare them to tell you that everything is fine.
I’d send it to my former co-worker, but I’ve forgotten his name.
Photo by János Venczák on Unsplash
This is a good, simple rebuttal for those that like to talk about dinosaurs 66 million years ago and CO2 being good for plants. Unfortunately, some people will do anything to avoid embracing frightening truths.
Yes, good article.
One of the things that study - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705 - revealed most clearly is the deep and abiding relationship of global temperatures to CO2 - showing a (deeply alarming) climate sensitivity MUCH higher than most climate scientists are concluding - ~8C for a doubling of CO2. Let us hope, fervently, that the climate scientists are closer to the mark with ~3C. And 3C, not taken seriously enough - or at all by those holding the highest Offices of trust, where the clearest duty of care as well as the greatest capabilities of science, analysis, planning and funding is - is likely to be disastrous.
I encountered that graph as 'evidence' that Earth is an especially cool period and therefore warming is not a big deal. That it was quite a bit cooler for most of the time homo sapiens has existed - the glacial minimum Holocene being quite warm in comparison - wasn't mentioned. Nor that the Holocene was (definitely past tense now) a period of exceptional climate stability during which humans thrived like never before and that rapid change of climate does enormous harms to the species around at the time.
A climate state that is stable, that doesn't change much is 'the best'. 'The warmer the better' is pure denialist delusion. If any climate state could be considered 'best for humans' it was the pre-industrial Holocene and for most of half a billion years it was not.
As for warming preventing the end of this unusual glacial maxima and the onset of global cooling - saving the world from the next 'ice age' - enough warming for that was probably achieved early last century, but the increase of sulfate aerosols that came with accelerating fossil fuel use masked it, giving the outward appearance (bare global average temperatures) that not much was changing when it had already changed a lot. Sulfates even managed to make global cooling look like the human made climate problem of greatest significance for a time - although even then not showing enough 'cooling' to offset the accumulated warming up till then.