The Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period
Carbon dioxide sits at roughly 400 parts per million — the same as today — and the world responds.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 239 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
Between 3.264 and 3.025 million years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide is reconstructed at 350 to 450 parts per million, values the atmosphere passed in 2015 and has since exceeded. The resulting world is 2 to 3 degrees warmer with seas up to 25 metres higher. The mismatch is the point: today's temperature has not yet caught up with today's carbon dioxide, and the Pliocene shows where the system settles once it has. It is the single most-modelled interval in palaeoclimatology for exactly this reason.