Exactly. People keep saying that we need to stop climate change to save the planet. The planet does not care and will be just fine. We need to stop climate change to save ourselves.
My god, I hate this line. Obviously people aren't referring to the ball of molten rock getting a case of the sniffles and achoo-ing all over the solar system. People are referring to - you know - ALL THE LIFE ON THAT PLANET. Wow, amazing, an amoeba will survive us fucking the planet up! Since life and the planet will survive, go nuts! Blow up your nukes, why should the rock care? That's all that matters, we will not literally destroy the planet!
No. "Save the ecosystem on our planet on which we rely on" is too long, and only incredibly pedantic people would come in and say "well, akshually, the planet will not care either way". People who say this are not people worth talking to.
And akshually, climate change doesn't kill people. Higher temperatures and catastrophes kill people.
The NYT article buries the fact by making it seem like they were only presenting data that far back, but it is literally in the first sentence of the WP article... directly contradicting the very same article's headline.
(also, just wanted to let you know this comes off as a bit unnecessarily rude -- you might want to phrase it more gently / give some reasons why you believe so next time)
Unfortunately their statement is too vague to be wrong, obviously there are numerous different ways to define global temperature, and different ways to measure it at the time, and different ways to infer it after the fact. amongst all that, probably one of them does only go back to the 70's. Does it make incomparable to any of the methods that go back centuries or millennia? Probably not.