doomer

I looked really hard in the original paper for where it says the rate of change is greater than it has been at any other time in the Phanerozoic and for the life of me could not find it. This article from 2013 states that climate is changing faster now than in the last 65mya (since KT extinction). So I was eager to see this updated number in the paper. The cleantechnica article cites that from an interview with Judd.

My sense is that the paper does not specifically address rate because the time spans at which the rate of change is measure is dramatically different between contemporary climate change and climate change over the last 500mya. And this is what Judd observed, but did not try to get this number through the peer-review process because it might be difficult and the paper is about so much more than just rate.

I think it's a little irresponsible of the cleantechnica journalist here to use this as the title and main point. If you read the abstract and conclusion of the paper the rate is not mentioned at all. This article makes very important contributions, namely showing a strong consistent link between climate change and CO2 concentration, showing that global mean surface temperature (GMST) varied over a range from 11° to 36°C over the last 500mya, and calculating that for every doubling of CO2 concentration the GMST increases by 8°C (which is a lot higher than we thought).