14 September 2016

Randall Munroe at XKCD Puts it All in Perspective

Posted by Dan Satterfield

Like most geeky people, I’m a big fan of the comic XKCD (along with Bloom County). Munroe has had some great ones but this ranks with the best.
Almost all of civilization as we know it developed during what Brian Fagan called “The Long Summer“. He was talking about the very stable climate of the last 5,000 years. Take a look at the image below, and you’ll see that it dispels a surprisingly widespread myth that our warming is “just the Earth coming out of the ice age”. The data says that’s nearly as preposterous as blaming it on a Chinese plot. We reached the warm spot of this interglacial thousands of years ago, and then began a slow..very slow cool down.

Then coal,oil,gas…