I want to answer the biggest misconception I see about climate change on the internet. Has Earth been warmer than it has now? Of course it has. For most of Earth’s history, temperatures have been warmer than they have today. Earth is the warmest it has been in roughly ~125,000 years. But, guess what? Our modern world did not develop in this rapidly warming world. Our infrastructure and Industrial Revolution occurred in the stable, cooler climate of the 19th and 20th centuries. Humans and our world’s ecosystems have never had to adapt to a climate changing and warming so fast. Modern civilizations flourished in the interglacial period of the last 11,000 years. Earth has always had natural cycles and the climate is always changing. The key difference is the speed of the current change. About 10x then the average warming observed after Earth’s recent ice ages. And CO2 is rising 250x faster than after our last ice age. In the last 10 years, Earth has warmed 0.35°C. Emerging from the last Ice Age, it took about 700 to 900 years for Earth to warm that much. That combination of rapid temperature rise and extremely fast CO₂ increase is what makes the present period so different from the natural shifts of the past.