New Study Reveals Earth's Warmest Temperature to Happen in 100,000 Years

A climate study caused the web to go into chaos. It concluded that due to the amount of human carbon emissions in the atmosphere, the planet is up by 3 to 7 degrees Celsius of global warming. However, a new study contradicts this report.

"This is simply wrong," stated Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a report by Gizmodo. "The actual committed warming is only 0.5 to perhaps 1 [degree Celsius] -- and nothing in the study changes that."

The recent study, published in the journal Nature, reveals a reconstruction of planet Earth's average surface temperature in the past two million years. Carolyn Synder of Stanford had depended on sea surface temperature records and a whole lot of comparisons with the records from over two million years -- the amounting number was dubbed as "Earth system sensitivity" (ESS).

While some media outlets were quick to conclude that the impact of direct atmospheric CO2 could affect global temperatures, Synder immediately challenged this with her findings.

"This research cannot and does not provide a forecast or prediction for future climate change. All we can say is, if we take the past relationship [between temperature and CO2] and translate it forward, this is what we get," explained Synder.

Climatologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Ken Caldeira, also weighed in on the CO2 in the atmosphere and its correlation with global warming.

"Simply correlating the temperature with the CO2 level would tell you climate sensitivity only if you knew that CO2 changes explained the vast majority of the temperature changes," explained Caldeira. "However, we don't know that. So, the climate sensitivity numbers reported in this paper should be regarded as an upper bound on possible 'Earth System' climate sensitivity. Real 'Earth System' climate sensitivity is likely substantially lower."

To conclude, the planet is indeed warming but the warmest would roughly occur in about 100,000 years.