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RE: A Discussion About Climate Change - Part 3: Proxies
Great post. I am glad to see people talking about climate change here on Steemit. Looking at some of the provided graphs, I find it puzzling why scientists will plot temperature anomalies against a changing baseline. I'm sure they have good reasons, but when the Paris climate accord says that we have to limit temperature to no more than 2 degrees C above the preindustrial baseline, but then you have graphs illustrating anomalies over the 1981-2010 average, or the 1960-1990 average, as in the diagrams above, it becomes difficult for the average person to get a picture of where we are ...other than basically that the temperature is going up. Any way, I hope to see more articles like this one.
Thanks for your support! It does seem a little misleading to plot temperatures like this, but I think the primary reason is to show the annual fluctuations about a steady average baseline. It can be confusing to look at the changes over different time scales; too short and it just looks like a steady slow rise, too long and the change seems so sudden and drastic that it must be an anomaly. I think the idea of controlling temperature increase is also confusing, as temperatures would be increasing due to natural Milankovitch cycles even if we didn't exist. Eventually, I hope to do another post in this series looking at the current state of climate modeling and predictions for the future of our planet...stay tuned!