I’ve been reading the paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas that basically proves the present it not at all unusually warm, that the Little Ice Age was real and global, and that the Medieval Warm Period was also global and quite real. It is worth having a copy just for the 5 1/5 pages (!) of references in it. Full paper at this link:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2006Q2/211/articles_optional/Soon2003_paleorecord.pdf
Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years
Willie Soon 1, 2,*, Sallie Baliunas 1, 2
1 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MS 16, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
2 Mount Wilson Observatory, Mount Wilson, California 91023, USAABSTRACT:
The 1000 yr climatic and environmental history of the Earth contained in various proxy records is reviewed. As indicators, the proxies duly represent local climate. Because each is of a different nature, the results from the proxy indicators cannot be combined into a hemispheric or global quantitative composite. However, considered as an ensemble of individual expert opinions, the assemblage of local representations of climate establishes both the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as climatic anomalies with worldwide imprints, extending earlier results by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965), and numerous intervening research efforts. Furthermore, the individual proxies can be used to address the question of whether the 20th century is the warmest of the 2nd millennium locally. Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.
KEY WORDS: Paleoclimate proxies · Climate change · Environmental change · Little Ice Age ·
Medieval Warm Period
The real meat in it comes on pages 7 and 8 of the PDF (pages 95 and 96 of the publication page numbers). There they have 3 global images (maps) with each site of proxy data marked, and with each one color coded. I’m not going to take the time to do screen caps and carve out a copy, since you can just hit the PDF link. The first two look at ‘objectively discernible… Little Ice Age’ and ‘objectively discernible … Medieval Warm Period’, while the third answers “Fig. 3. Geographical distribution of local answers to the following question: Is there an objectively discernible climatic anomaly within the 20th century that is the most extreme (the warmest, if such information is available) period in the record? ‘Yes’ is indicated by red filled squares, ‘No’ is indicated by green filled circles or unfilled boxes and ‘Yes? or No??’ (undecided) is shown with blue filled triangles or unfilled boxes. Answer of ‘Yes a’ is indicated by yellow filled diamonds to mark an early to middle-20th century warming rather than the post-1970s warming”
Just looking at those images has weight. The first two are largely RED for YES. The last one is substantially GREEN for NO. You have to hunt around on the first two to find tiny samples of the other colors, and on the last one there are only a few very scattered “yes” and “maybe” spots.
FWIW, as near as I can tell they did not allow for the approximate 200 year lag between when a temperature anomaly shows up in Greenland and when it gets to Antarctica, so some of those outliers might be timing related, IMHO.
Those graphs alone would set the hair on fire for a Global Warmist…
6. DISCUSSION
The widespread geographical evidence assembled here supports the existence of both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, and should serve as useful validation targets for any reconstruction of global climate history of the last 1000 yr. Our results suggest a different interpretation of the multiproxy climates compared to recent conclusions of Mann et al. (1998, 1999, 2000). Because the calibration of proxy indicators to instrumental data is still a matter of openended research (with differing sensitivities not only for the same proxy at different locations but also for different proxies at the same location), it is premature to select a year or decade as the warmest or coldest in a multiproxy-based record.
Barnett et al. (1999) has pointed out that it is impossible to use available instrumental records to provide estimates for the multi-decadal and century-long type of natural climatic variations, owing to the specific period and short duration of instrumental records. Thus, paleo-proxies remain the only hope for assessing the amplitude and pattern of climatic and environmental change in the pre-anthropogenic era. We agree with Barnett et al. (1999) that each proxy should be studied first in terms of local change before several records can be combined for regional and larger spatial-scale analyses and interpretations. The conclusion derives mainly from the real possibility of non-stationarity in the proxy-climate calibration to instrumental records, the lack of adequate superposition rules given variability in each type of proxy, as well as the lack of clear physical understanding on the multidecadal climate variability from theoretical or empirical studies.
All current calibration of proxies to large-scale instrumental measurements have been mainly valid over phases of rising temperature (Ogilvie & Jónsson 2001). The concern is that a different calibration response arises when the procedure is extended to an untested climate regime associated with a persistent cooling phase. Evans et al. (2002) worried about the reality of spurious frequency evolution that may contaminate a multiproxy reconstruction, in which the type of proxy data changes over time and no sufficient overlap of proxy data exists for a proper inter-proxy calibration/validation procedure.
In other words, each proxy may have its distinct frequency response function, which could confuse the interpretation of climate variability. Finally, another concern is the lack of understanding of the air-sea relationship at the multidecadal timescale, even in the reasonably well observed region of the North Atlantic (Häkkinen 2000, Seager et al. 2000, Marshall et al. 2001, Slonosky & Yiou 2001, von Storch et al. 2001).
Briffa (2000) concluded that dendroclimatological records may support ‘the notion that the last 100 years have been unusually warm, at least within the context of the last two millennia’ Slightly later, Briffa et al. (2001), by adopting a new analysis procedure that seeks to preserve greater, long timescale variability (which shows a notable increase in variance at the 24–37 yr timescale compared with a previous standardization procedure) in their tree-ring density data than previously possible, stated that the 20th century is the globally warmest century of the last 600 yr. This conclusion is consistent with the borehole reconstruction results of Huang et al. (2000). However, longer and more carefully reconstructed tree-ring chronologies from Esper et al. (2002) showed that the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as the 20th century for at least a region covering the Northern Hemisphere extratropics from about 30 to 70° N.
An important aspect of both the Briffa et al. (2001) and Esper et al. (2002) studies is the new derivation of formal, time-dependent standard errors for their temperature reconstructions, amounting to about ±0.1 to 0.3°C from 1000 through 1960 (see also Jones et al. 1999, 2001). This assignment of standard errors contrasts with those assigned in Mann et al.’s (1999) annually-resolved series, where the uncertainties were assigned only for preinstrumental data points in their original publication (that assumption of ‘error-free’ instrumental thermometer data is incorrect—see Jones et al. 1999, Folland et al. 2001). Over the full 2nd millennium, Esper et al. (2002) deduced a slightly larger range in their confidence limits after 1950 (compared to the pre-1950 interval extending back to 800) and attributed those higher uncertainties to the accounting for the anomalous modern ring-growth problem (Graybill & Idso 1993, Jacoby & D’Arrigo 1995, Briffa et al. 1998, Feng 1999, Barber et al. 2000, Jacoby et al. 2000, Knapp et al. 2001).
I’ve bolded the bit where he uses Jones to toss Mann under the bus… Throughout the paper it is so heavily filled with citations that you would have to attack darned near everyone to tear it down.
One bit from the Conclusion section:
Climate proxy research provides an aggregate, broad perspective on questions regarding the reality of Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period and the 20th century surface thermometer global warming. The picture emerges from many localities that both the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm epoch are widespread and near-synchronous phenomena, as conceived by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965) and numerous researchers since. Overall, the 20th century does not contain the warmest anomaly of the past millennium in most of the proxy records, which have been sampled world-wide. Past researchers implied that unusual 20th century warming means a global human impact. However, the proxies show that the 20th century is not unusually warm or extreme.
Basically what they have done is taken the ‘rubber ruler’ of a spliced proxy-instrumental approach, shown that it is error prone (i.e. useless) and then taken an all-proxy approach that finds nothing is out of whack at all.
I can certainly see where that will just cause the Warmers to howl and thrash around in anger. Which likely explains all their howling and thrashing and desire to trash anyone involved, nearby bystanders, and anyone who reads the paper… Which leads me to:
A New Metric
I think there is a valuable metric that can be applied to Climate Science (and Climate ‘science’) papers. The “Woman Scorned” metric.
(From the well known folks wisdom “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Congreve
“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned,” spoken by Zara in Act III, Scene VIII. (This is usually paraphrased as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”)
(Or in this case a ‘Cranky Climate Warrior’ rhetorical “woman scorned”)
Simply look at how “outraged”, furious, angry and totally upset they are, and you know how good the paper is. Any added insults “to the person” via attempts to get them fired, have their funding revoked, block publication, or sue them ought to add additional points. I’d suggest as a starting formula, that “general fury” be graded on a 1 to 10 scale, then for each additional major assault on the authors, another 10 points be added.
On this scale I think as a rough first cut, this paper would rank 10+10+10+10 (they could not block publication as it is a ‘done deal’ and I think there was talk of a law suit, but don’t know if anything came of it). So that makes it a 40 score out of 50 possible. I think.
As a future enhancement, one could assign negative points for the praise heaped on steaming piles of nonsense, and in that way get the Warmista papers ranked as well. But that I’ll leave for others to design.
One hopes that someone will put up a page (someone who knows the literature better than I do and can pull out the “big ones” from memory) where they list the major papers, and assign the Woman-Scorned index score to them. In cases where finer grain sorting is needed, the bonus “10” can be graded into single digits. So “talk of a suit” might rank a 1 or 2 while “actual suit in court” gets the full 10. In this way would could have a quick and easy reference to just which papers were the most important to read, print out, hand to friends, and graffiti on the sides of IPCC bound jets…
;-)
Musings from the Chiefio 
WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
R. Kipling
Wow! That is a pretty amazing peice of scholarship.
No wonder S&B have the Warmistas running scared for over a decade. The next time someone tells me “The Debate Is Over” I will invite them to prove it by explaining where S&B went wrong.
E.M.
This index might have wider potential – like rating other popular causes
Reblogged this on the WeatherAction News Blog and commented:
That is a great paper and a relatively easy read. Uncomfortable reading for believers in ‘unprecedented’
Considering the outcry against him, Dr Soon must have really hit a raw nerve with this paper. We can look forward to others finding their courage to exclaim “The Emperor has No cloths.” as this fraud unravels. pg
‘they did not allow for the approximate 200 year lag between when a temperature anomaly shows up in Greenland and when it gets to Antarctica’
The 200-year temperature lag only applies to abrupt climate changes. The linked paper says 18 were found in the last 68000 years, or one every ~3800 years. Soon is only looking at the last 1000 years.
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p.g.,
There are some honest scientists. They are mostly ignored by the new Lysenkoists of Climate Science. Unfortunately they tend to fall silent after a while. For example Richard Lindzen retired and Murray Salby lost his job:
Hey E.M.! You’re wrong!
Here’s something that’ll blow your mind: I think climate change is real and concerning AND I completely acknowledge the Little Ice Age is real and global. Turns out the Bubonic Plague ravaged Europe to such a degree that populations fell by about 25%, farms went untended and turned back to forest, and the carbon sequestration was so significant that the Earth’s greenhouse effect was diminished.
In other words, to acknowledge the Little Ice Age is to acknowledge the significant effect that greenhouse gases play in our atmosphere.
@Greg Amos:
Not the best way to start a polite posting “You’re wrong!”.
It is an amusing thesis that forest causes Little Ice Ages, but hard to see how the dinky bit that is Europe could cause a global L.I.A. Or why the Olmec and Maya abandonments didn’t do it too.
Oh, and you also have the problem that the Black Death peaked in 1350’s A.D. and the Renaissance ran from then to the 17th century, with population growth and all, yet the LIA continued into the mid 1800s. So you’ve got a few hundred year causality gap…
Also, IIRC, there is no evidence for the proposed drop in CO2, other than speculation about trees. But, just for grins, let’s say it DID cause the LIA. Then the proposal to stop using fossil fuels will also cause a LIA since we are only just holding steady at the moment (no, there is no ‘hockey stick’ warming… it is all in the temperature adjustments…) so reduction of CO2 source into steady or increasing sink would mean Cold Coming…
So “nice try” but I think your ‘thesis’ is from the “needs work” department…
Sorry, didn’t mean to be rude.
This Little Ice Age theory is an interesting one, and I’d have to read further into the research to be able to counter your arguments effectively. I was first exposed to in Harper’s Magazine, so there’s that (which you probably don’t like).
But off the top of my head, here goes:
– It seems logical that the Olmec or Maya abandonments didn’t have the same carbon sequestration effect, since Europe was covered in farms and Central America and present day Mexico were not.
– Are you sure there’s a few hundred years causality gap? I would argue it may have taken a few hundred years to restore Europe to its previous state of farm-fueled deforestation.
The last part , about no warming at the moment… is just plain wrong. For you and your readers, take a look at the fifth IPCC assessment report (sorry, but this is not an international conspiracy of hundreds of scientists):
Click to access WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
From page 5 of the above .pdf:
The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C3, over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist.
The total increase between the average of the 1850–1900 period and the 2003–2012 period is 0.78 [0.72 to 0.85] °C, based on the single longest dataset available 4 (see Figure SPM.1). {2.4}
I’m sure Willie Soon believes his interpretation is correct. Never mind the fact his research is funded almost exclusively by fossil fuels producers. But he’s in the vast majority of the less than 1% of climate scientists who come to similar conclusions.
@Greg:
All I know of Harper’s is that I saw the cover at the “Beauty Salon” when my Mom went there decades back. Never read it. No opinion.
Better look more at the Olmec and Maya. They had giant cities and very intensive agriculture along with some interesting innovations. (Including raised beds with water between them so the water stabilized lowbound temps and extended the growing season… or maybe that was the Aztec…)
The more folks have looked, the more they find evidence of large populations and lot of agriculture in the past in the Americas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
The indigenous were nearly wiped out by diseases like small pox and the cities collapsed. Forests overtook the land again. THEN white men came and thought the place “virginal”. It wasn’t.
Sorry right back at you, but it is. The IPCC is bought and paid for with a mandate that ONLY allows them to look for “man made” causality. The temperature records are fully cooked ( I’ve gone through the computer codes and analysed the data sets to some degree – see the GIStemp and NCDC topics at the right). Also look into Agenda 21 and the organized and well funded by multibillionairs deliberate effort to “cook the books” and force a desired political outcome. (Research Maurice Strong while you are at it). It took me somewhere around 1/2 a decade to realize that, having approached it from the “tech” side not being a politically oriented person. So, sorry again, but quoting an IPCC report is akin to saying “Here, drink this cool-aid, John Jones says it’s good for you.” and not knowing any better.
I have lived over 60 years. I have nearly extraordinary memory particularly about some things. One of them is a very accurate recording of weather and climate events since about 1955. ( I loved to watch the local farm / ag weather on TV at a very early age and talked to the locals from about age 6 about what prior climate was like). Very simply put: The 1930s were significantly warmer than now. The 1950s were not much different from now. It got cold in the late ’60s to early ’70s, then recovered into the ’80s. The ’90s were a small blip up, but NOT as warm as the ’30s. And right now it is significantly colder than in the ’80s.
Realize I’m in California, not in the “cold blob” area of Boston. Hot drought ridden California. It is almost exactly like it was in the 1950s. A bit colder, but not too much.
I see you also have taken to a “Attack The Messenger” argument via a “oil money slander”. Please stop. Failure to do so will get you onto the moderation list. WHERE money comes from is not relevant, frankly, and Willie got his from The Smithsonian (who got it in some part from oil companies). What matter is only the quality of the science, and his is very very good. Furthermore, you ignore that various Green Blob actors spew $BILLIONS into the Warmer side and think that is fine. (Not to mention the $Billions via parasitized government agencies). If “oil money” is tainted, then so too is Green Blob and Government money, and there is far far more of that.
Think that harsh?
I’ve been painted with the same “oil money” brush. The truth is that I’m almost 100% self funded. I did get one $1,000 payment for some data analysis work (not surprising since I do contract data processing work for a living) that I *think* might have had an oil connection. (In fact, I don’t really know. I know the person, and I think he had some oil income. Maybe.) But what I did was a simple math processing. All code shown. All data sourced from government agencies.
So now you want to do the same Saul Alinsky style “attack the messenger” and smear. Nope, no go. (Maybe you didn’t realize it. Maybe you are just parroting something you heard. If so, you really need to learn to lift the covers and dig into things.) This is NOT a muse. Saul Alinsky pontificated “how to do it” and his book is used to train radicals and used in classes in universities and elsewhere for just that purpose. If you don’t know that, you need to look into it.
So any “impugn the character” or insult “to the person” and any “innuendo” about funding sources (and especially “oil money” slur attacks) is a giant red flag that either you are a “useful idiot” who is just parroting things heard, or are doing it “for effect”. It is a clear signature of the Radical Left. Sorry, that’s just the reality of the world today. If you don’t want to be in that box, learn how to avoid doing those things.
You then go on to the “quantity not quality” argument. Again, either clueless that real science does not care if 99.99999% agree. If just ONE person shows they are wrong, they are wrong. See the quotes from Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman on that. Science ALWAYS advances at that moment when almost everyone is certain it is something that it isn’t, and the new guy shows the new trick. Learn that, or look the fool in the presence of science. (Sorry, again, to be harsh about it; but it really is that way and if you are ‘just an innocent’, you need to know that.)
It bothers me a bit that much of what you posted is “standard talking points from the noob guide”. I strongly suggest looking deeper if you really believe these things. They have been discussed in great depth for a couple of decades now that I know of, and generally found very wanting.
@E.M.Smith
I am just a couple years older than you and have spent my life in Colorado and exactly concur with your observations about historical weather. My family has lived in Colorado for 98 years now (that I can prove) and possibly 150 years. All the folk lore weather from my grandmother says the same. I remember the 1950’s very well and the current weather is indistinguishable from what I experienced in grade school.
Interesting to note that there was a noticeable turn to the cold in the early 1960’s, and this springs wet cold spring is very very similar to 1965 when we had the June 1965 floods which nearly cut the city of Denver in half taking out almost all the bridges over the Platte river.
Like the last week, that first part of June was so wet the grass squished when you walked on it and all the streams were running bank full when we got stationary thunderstorms south of Denver.
(very similar to the situation which happened during the 1976 when we had the Big Thompson flood)
For my living memory more of the same, alternating periods of hard drought for a few years followed by soaking wet years. In Dec 1913 we got 45.7″ of snow from Dec 1-5, 1913. In 2002 we had a winter a very dry year but it was beaten by 1977 and the years of the 1930’s (one of the classic dust bowl pictures of a wall of dust approaching is from south east Colorado)
Click to access 2002DroughtHistory.pdf
Thanks for the feedback EM and Larry, and I don’t doubt your memories are good and your temperature recollections mostly correct for the states you’ve lived in. But those are still small sampling points in comparison to the totality of climate data on the planet, and don’t provide any useful correlation to the bigger picture. Could you make the same argument about any location I pitch your way? How about Manitoba? What about Nigeria? Unless you can say your regional example, or set of regional examples from around the world, is truly reflective of the big picture, it’s just an anecdote.
I’ve been following the science behind climate change for about 15 years, and am a good decade removed from the time you might call me a noob, when perhaps I wa guilty of getting plays from the playbook on character assasination. I used to be left but try hard these days not to place myself anywhere on the political spectrum.
I trust in the IPCCs assessments because you would think at least one of the scientists involved would be protective of their credibility if they thought data was being cooked. I would have much more cause to question the IPCCs process and impartiality if we had such a defector, but they don’t seem to exist.
I earned a B.Sc. in Geography from UBC about a decade ago, but have little scientific understanding of climate change. I cannot take a dataset and arrive at any conclusions. That said, I’m more informed than the average person. Within my department, there was even some debate amongst my profs about the causality of climate change. See here:
http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=ca6d4c59-3878-4641-a6f2-0928fdd924ea
Here’s what I think we agree on: the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has shot up. The fact we’re now above 400 ppm of CO2 is, I think, something you agree with. Those numbers, taken over the last 300 years or so, do show a hockey stick shape, or if you don’t like that phrase, lets call it a sharp upwards trend. Am I right? If you disagree with that, we’ll have to stop talking.
So what does all this extra greenhouse gas in the atmosphere do? Hang around inertly? That appears to be what you believe. I don’t buy it.
I’m sure you’re a lot more intelligent than Sen. James Inhofe, and I respect the fact you’re having a reasoned debate with me. But your regional temperature recollections arguments come across like this:
@Greg
Yes you would think that is true, but you are making a few unsupported assumptions.
You are assuming:
a. They are in fact competent scientists.
b. That they actually care about their credibility
c. That there are in fact no participants in the IPCC review process who have protested.
You also have to keep in mind that they control the debate via an interesting manner. They “invented” a professional specialty ie climatologist but there is no accepted definition of what that professional specialty is, as there has been no accepted training regimen that makes you a “climatologist”. The title is applied willy nilly to a select few who have a multitude of professional technical degrees, none of which are specifically aimed at climatology.
The operative definition appears to be:
Someone who has a Phd in some technical specialty, who works at an institution of higher learning or under government control which is primarily dependent on funding from grants offered to prove the “theory” of global warming is true, and that have copious publications which advocate for that theory which are dependent on data that they themselves have selected, and manipulated to demonstrate their “belief”, and which willfully ignores centuries of historical data, and millennia of geophysical data which runs counter to their “theory”.
They must have a demonstrated capacity for belittling anyone who questions their “theory” and to never actually contest the data or technical challenges which show that their theory is highly questionable. They must also have questionable computer programing skills, and first year level of understanding of statistics, be incapable of differentiating between accuracy and precision of measurements, and confuse the output of models (scientific wild ass guesses implemented via computer code) with data.
Fact is, there are a large number of highly skilled technical professionals who have questioned critical aspects of their “theory” which are systematically ignored by the media and blacklisted from the professional journals for the crime of taking a contrary position.
Professional statisticians have repeatedly shown that their statistical treatment of the original source data is highly suspect or out right in violation of standard statistical principles.
The surface data is horribly corrupt due to their constantly trying to “fix it” through such highly questionable methods as infilling data. They take temperatures at two widely separated points and mathematically “guess” (ie interpolation) at what the temperature is at the points in between or nearby which have no actual data. They use source data not fit for purpose (temperatures taken at airport for aeronautical safety purposes) and improperly presume it is far more accurate that it can possibly be. (ignoring all sorts of bias and instrumental issues along with horrible quality control and retroactive modification of the “data” as they repeatedly fix it resulting in the data from past years constantly changing in the data files, and consistently failing to document the how and why of their changes [just trust me] )
Professionals in control theory have repeatedly demonstrated that their “Theory” and underlying assumptions (ie tipping points and runaway warming) violate well known principles of control theory and feed back which are well understood and ubiquitous in our technological world.
Geographers and historians have repeatedly shown that their “Theory” is repeatedly violated by the historical facts as we know them, and hundreds of years of historical records. There are numerous occasions where CO2 levels were much higher than today while the global temperatures (as documented by fossil plants, ice cores, oxygen isotope analysis etc.) were similar to today or even much colder.
They misuse models by thinking if they run a broken model enough times and average the results that they will come up with a valid plot of expected behavior when the real world data is falling out the bottom of even their best case model plots and they are pretending that is unimportant.
Some participants in the IPCC processes have actually gone to court to get their names removed from IPCC reports because the conclusions of the reports did not conform to the body of evidence the reviewers evaluated and totally ignored their recommendations regarding conclusions.
The prevailing procedure in the pro-global warming community is to try to prove the theory is right and ridicule anyone who finds any fault with it, when a real scientist would be looking for tests to prove it is wrong. The scientific method demands and requires that the only valid test of a theory is for it to repeatedly pass attempts to falsify it.
There are literally so many problems with the theory and data that it is impossible to find a good starting point. The fact that the major media systematically ignores the problems and the journals systematically black ball authors who do not toe the line on global warming dogma is the reason you incorrectly believe there is not intelligent opposition. In fact there is a lot of intelligent opposition but you have to go looking for it in forums which do not actively discriminate against folks who are willing to examine the theory of catastrophic global warming in detail.
Yes global warming is happening, (as it has been for the last 10,000-11,000 years)
Yes CO2 is an IR active gas (so called global warming gas), there is however no experimental data. that actually demonstrates that their theory of "back radiation" actually works as described.
No there is little or no proof that the current heating is due to the actions of man (that is a "we can't think of anything else to blame so it must be us" conclusion)
It is a "trust me" theory
A lot of us Really! do not trust them, as they have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of good judgement and ethics, and some would suggest bad intent.
@Greg:
Temperatures can NOT be averaged and have any meaning as a temperature:
All the “global averages” do is make an average of “anecdotes” and have even LESS utility.
You will also find that I paid attention to far more than my home town, and the locals there were from all over the place, so the “collective memory” included England, Ireland, “Back East”, Iowa, and a swath of The Midwest (along with Texas and more). Oh, and a bit of Mexico.
Now in a Farm Town, weather is THE #1 Topic. So folks talked about it A Lot. I grew up in a restaurant listening to it. I learned to ‘read the weather’ in the sky early.
Simply put, your “put down” of personal experiential knowledge as “anecdotal” is flat out useless.
I know the official temperature data records are cooked. I’ve got the old and new copies. I’ve done the comparisons. I’ve read the codes. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in what they do to torture the data and it is nearly criminal.
“I trust in the IPCCs assessments ”
Do realize that the IPCC is first, and only, a political organization, not a scientific one. The “summary for policymakers” has been specifically rewritten a couple of times to say things in opposition to the “supporting science”. If you do not know that, you are a noob, no matter how many years you have been in attendance…
FWIW, Marble Bar Australia is an example of the “math problem” the temp records have. The particular station set the record, ever, and has never been that hot again; yet post processing it is shown as “hottest ever now” in the data-food-products. I look at the nearby stations and show how spicing them together is the source of the “rise”.
Basically, it’s a lousy splice artifact on a ‘average of temperatures’ and is meaningless. So all we DO have is the historical record (pre- data fiddling) along with “anecdotes” from places like newspapers and personal memory. Oh, and the Satellites, that have a short but basically flat record while the other data-food-products continue to show rises… Think about it…
Yes, we’ve added CO2. To well below geologic historical norms. That it was way low during the Ice Age Glacials and L.I.A. is kind of meaningless, other than that it made the place a dead desert:
But what does it do? It does nothing in the troposphere. Here it is a convective / evaporative regime. In the stratosphere, it radiates to space…
Per a “sound bite” on Inhofe:
A couple of things:
Do Not Tell Me What I am, nor What I Think. Tell me what YOU think.
It isn’t about me.
Science is NEVER about the person. As soon as you resort to an argument “to the person”, you are in the land of politics and propaganda.
Inhofe is a very smart man. I’m probably smarter simply because I score out at a few sigma from the norm, but he’s no dummy. Using a “prop” in a presentation is a normal part of politics.
Now, per “anecdotes”: A collection of anecdotes is called history. Historically, the world was warmer than now. Sometimes much warmer. The 1930s set hot record more than any other time. Records still not exceeded… Then the Roman Optimum and the MWP and the Holocene Optimum (and a few others) are all shown warmer in various proxy data AND in historical records.
I’ll happily give more credence to well recorded history than to the known cooked, adjusted, fiddled, homogenized data-food-products produced (for pay via grants) for the political organization that is the IPCC. I say that having actually looked at the data, and the processing, and the codes. BTW, others have done that too. The Turkish Met Office looked at their data and found that Turkey was cooling, not warming. The warming in the GHCN was all due to station selection bias. The warming stations were selectively included. I have it in a write up here somewhere but can’t find the link at the moment.
So once you have Climategate Emails, showing collusion and coercion, a published Agenda-21 stating the goal is $Billions, clear funding trails from Maurice Strong and friends via granting agencies to ‘true believers’ at the CRU and NOAA, their email showing intent, a data set that keeps changing to make the past colder with no good reason, and local met offices finding selection bias and no real cooling; at that point a set of “anecdotes” from folks all over the globe saying “not warmer here” puts it in the interesting spot of realizing that the books are cooked.
Now, as my final note on this, I’m on the high function side of Aspe, per the spouse who does this for a living. That means I’m “normal”, but with a tendency to be a bit obsessive / detail oriented ( I’m sure you could never tell ;-) and have a tendency to very deep memory. (Also ‘difficulty’ accepting things that “don’t fit” which is very helpful when doing investigations and forensics – I’ve taught computer forensics, BTW…) This means that a “sound bite” video clip no-doubt carefully selected for effect has exactly ZERO effect on me. It is just about useless. Especially compared to my internal record of about 60 years (one normal climate cycle, BTW) saying it’s a simple round trip and not a darned thing is different now. (It WAS different in the ’80s and ’90s as the winds had dropped off rather a lot. I posted here when they picked back up and the ‘blustery’ returned. We also had a lot more airplane crashes due to winds in the ’70s (I was in ground school…) and then a nearly zero level during the calm times. Last few years have had more crashes again…
Also note that my “internal record” includes all those discussions with folks in my old Farm Town. (Yes, I still remember them). That includes “out of area”. I also have 2nd hand similar patterns from a lot of folks on at least 4 continents. This stops being “local anecdote” and starts being “collective history”. Further, you can go into the written records of many places (and that has been done on other blogs) and look up the recorded weather patterns. The history is very clear: The 1930s were warmer than now. The ’60s and ’70s were abnormally cold. (Snowed in my home town twice in the 60s and also in the ’70s near Sacramento – both very rare events in living memory or records. Lately it snowed again there…) We are now headed back into a cold half cycle of the PDO.
It also just a week or so back snowed again in southern California… Very unusual this late in the season.
Finally, about the “cause of climate change”:
It is a metastable system and will always change. Right now we are on the cusp of the minimum W/m^2 to NOT be in a glacial. Any “tipping point” is entirely to the downside. Yet the moon still stirs the oceans and does it cyclically. So we have 60 year, and 1500 ish year cycles inside a general slide back into the next glacial. That someone doesn’t know that, so “debates” it, is their loss.
Speculative: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/lunar-resonance-and-taurid-storms/
And with that, I’ll leave you to your reading…. Yes, I’ve been down this road a lot, and a very long distance…
A quick summary of some of the major questions regarding the theory of catastrophic global warming due to CO2 are summarized in this article. All of these issues have been under discussion for over a decade so it is very difficult to assert that there is no basis for opposition to the “consensus” position regarding CO2 and global warming. (as if consensus has anything at all to do with science). Science is not a popularity contest.
Take specific note of the chart at :
Which shows there is literally zero correlation between global CO2 concentrations and temperatures. As shown by the chart plot there have been very large excursions of global temperature that go completely opposite of the implied correlation of the theory. CO2 concentrations several times today’s supposedly elevated levels which experienced sharp drops with no corresponding sharp drop in CO2. It clearly is not the primary factor in global temperatures. The flat line tops of the peaks are a clear signature of some sort of negative feedback which limits max heating and shows that it has no relationship at all with CO2 concentrations. This is one of those things that your professor in college would put the graph up on the screen and show that temperatures were much higher world wide for most of the last 250 million years and those were also some of the most prolific periods in the worlds biosphere. Heat is good, cold is bad.
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