Palaeo Proxies

Key points: 

• Paleo proxies (short for paleoclimate or paleoenvironmental proxies) are tools scientists use to recreate past climate and environmental conditions.
• These indicators or records help researchers understand historical climate variations and long-term trends since direct measurements from the distant past are impossible.
• They provide invaluable insights into Earth’s climatic history and how it has evolved over time.
• These tools have limitations, with some proxies only capturing temperature changes over long timescales, and global temperature claims may lack precision.

Why in news?

• The recent claim that July 2023 included the warmest day in more than 100,000 years is unsupported by science.