There is nothing unprecedented or even significant about modern warming magnitudes or rates.

Antarctic ice cores are routinely used to represent not only global-scale CO2 records, but global temperature records over the last 800,000 years. Interestingly, if we compare modern Antarctica to paleo Antarctica we learn “no continent-scale warming of Antarctic temperature is evident in the last century.”

A new statistical probability analysis (Hatton, 2026) using Vostok temperature data indicates the reported 1.1°C global warming over the last century (since the 1920s) is “not even unusual” within the context of the last 20,000 years, as “16% of the centuries since the end of the last Ice Age show a rise at least as big [1.1°C] as the current century.”

As modern warming rates are “quite commonplace,” this calls into question the push to attribute temperature changes to human activity.

Image Source: Hatton, 2026

For further context, the Northern Hemisphere is said to have warmed by 4-5°C “within a few decades” 14,500 years ago (Ivanovic et al., 2017), and during these centuries sea levels rose at rates of up to 7.5 meters per century (Smith et al., 2011), which is 20-30 times faster than modern rates.

Image Source: Ivanovic et al., 2017 and Smith et al., 2011