“The period January – July was the warmest such 7-month period in the planet’s history…”
Hilarious!! That statement might have been powerful and persuasive if we’d actually monitored temperatures since the first moment in the planet’s history.
But the fact is that we have only been monitoring temperatures for a VERY TINY percentage of the history of this planet. The concensus for the age of the planet Earth seems to be 4.5 to 5 billion years. Of that immense time, human beings, the only living things on this planet capable of building temperature-measuring devices, have only existed for roughly 2 million of those years. In our 2 million years on this planet, humans have only had the technology to measure temperature since the early 1600s (See the Wikipedia article on thermometers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermometer). The actual habit of routinely measuring temperatures in populated areas and recording and archiving them started even more recently. In some areas, temperature monitoring only started within the last 50 or 60 years.
Jeff Masters remark IMPLIES that January to July this year is the warmest 7-month period in 5 billion years. However, given that we’ve only been able to measure temperature for at most a few centuries, he actually MEANS that it’s the warmest such period in the last few centuries. And that is only a tiny percentage of the entire life of this planet.
We simply don’t know with any real certainty what temperatures this planet experienced prior to the invention of the thermometer. Does he really think people are so utterly clueless about the history of technology that everyone is going to be fooled by his ridiculous claim?
