The Last Time Our Planet Was This Hot, Woolly Mammoths Roamed the Earth

If you could go back to the Eemian period—from 116,000 to 129,000 years ago—you’d feel right at home. OK, the woolly mammoths lumbering about might take you aback, as might the hippopotami roaming freely across what would one day be the streets of Europe. But when it comes to climate, things would not be all that different. Mean global temperatures today are about 1ºC warmer than they were in the pre-industrial era, leading to the extreme weather and other events we’ve been experiencing: heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods, super storms, savage hurricanes, and more. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In the Eemian, things were warmer still, close to 2ºC hotter than in the pre-industrial era, surely leading to even more severe conditions. Individual weather events like hurricanes are too brief to be preserved in the so-called climate archive that Earth scientists use to study climate history, particularly deep cores drilled from ice sheets, the ocean floor, lake silt, and the land. But computer models coupled with the data from the cores do suggest a turbulent Eemian. “We are not exclusively tied to the climate archive,“ says Syee Weldeab, professor of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We can run [computer] models that change [the weather] as we increase the energy in the atmosphere and the ocean.” One study in Research Gate found that Eemian hurricanes were stronger and more n...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change extreme weather healthscienceclimate Source Type: news