A claim full of hot air: Earth’s temperature historically high, not colder than 10,000 years ago

An Instagram post suggested that people shouldn’t worry much about global warming because the average global temperature is historically low.

"We are about 1 degree Celsius above the coldest it’s been in the last 10,000 years," read text in a May 15 Instagram post.  

The post showed a video clip in which a man made the same claim to an interviewer, who replied: "So, in a sense, that’s why we shouldn’t be panicking."

(One degree Celsius is equivalent to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.)

The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The clip is from an August interview by London-based TalkTV with Brian Catt. Catt’s LinkedIn profile says he lives in England and has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in business.

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The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science told Agence France-Presse Fact Check that Catt has no qualifications on climate change.

The claim is "not even close to being accurate with respect to the situation going on with climate change and global warming," said Howard Diamond, climate science program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Air Resources Laboratory.

Bethan Davies, senior lecturer in physical geography at Newcastle University in England, said the Earth is "warmer than at any point in the last 125,000 years, warming faster than at any point in the last 2,000 years, and warming due to human emissions rather than natural causes." 

A landmark 2021 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the past decade is likely the hottest the planet has been in 125,000 years.

Davies cited a 2020 study led by a Northern Arizona University researcher that shows the last decade was warmer than any other multicentury period in the last 125,000 years.

Most of the world’s scientists agree that climate change is driven by greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere from human activity. The gases, notably carbon dioxide, are produced when fossil fuels such as coal and oil are burned for energy. When these gases accumulate in the atmosphere, they trap heat and raise surface temperatures, leading to climate changes. 

We rate the claim False.