Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Earth’s Past Climates

[rangerrebew]

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Earth’s Past Climates
They have a lot to tell us about our future
By Rachel E. Gross
smithsonian.com
April 16, 2018
 
In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson considers the Western sagebrush. “For here the natural landscape is eloquent of the interplay of forces that have created it,” she writes. “It is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve its integrity. But the pages lie unread.” She is lamenting the disappearance of a threatened landscape, but she may just as well be talking about markers of paleoclimate.

To know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been. That’s particularly true for climate scientists, who need to understand the full range of the planet’s shifts in order to chart the course of our future. But without a time machine, how do they get this kind of data?

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-earths-past-climates-180968797/#wXV6kJxXRITimfPh.99

[The_Reader_David]

The title is a lie.  The article doesn't have graphs or tables comparing CO2 concentrations, arctic and antarctic albedo, strengths of notable ocean currents, northern and southern hemisphere mean snow cover and global temperatures for any stretch of the past, which would summarize most of what I would want to know about Earth's past climates.