18 comments on It's not going to be cold enough in Siberia to...
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Some of the information on this post serves to call into question the hypothesis of man-made global warming. It clearly establishes that the midieval climatic optimum was substantially warmer than present conditions in the arctic. It shows the recent warming trend beginning before CO2 began to rise, and then being interrupted by the sunspot cycle. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the world is still emerging from the little ice age, and that variations in solar radiation play a much larger role in climate change than is indicated in the IPCC report.
Be careful of strawman arguments.
I.e., if the Global Warming hypothesis (and we are talking here about the scientists, not necessarily the MSM) was: The reason the Earth warms is due to mankind's behavior --- then you would be correct to point out that the Middle century warming era would disprove that.
However, the real hypothesis is: Man's activities are perturbations ontop of the existing natural phenomenon, and that will lead to the Earth being warmer (or the climate somehow being different) than it otherwise would have been. Thus all the work on complex models, and fitting those models to measurements of Earth's past, and then playing out those models with different scenarios for future CO2 additions.
As I understand it, the IPCC attributes 80% of the current warming to increases in greenhouse gases, and 20% to variations in solar radiation.
You are correct that the theory is based upon the combined effects of anthropogenic and non-antrhopogenic factors. This was illustrated in the IPCC TAR (2001) and has been reinforcend in the AR4, WG1 document to be published online in May 2007.
Depending upon exactly how you do the math, with all the growth in Asia and India, half of ALL anthropogenic emissions of CO2 have occurred since about 1989-1990. Half of all GHG emissions (as CO2 equivalent) have occurred since 1985.
It is also important to remember that we are talking about global warming. There are at present, and doubtless were in he past, regional variations in warming. Just as Michael Crichton in State of Fear deceitfully uses the lack of recent warming in Punta Arenas to imply that global warming is not real whereas the the global average is most certainly climbing, contrarians are using Greenland to exaggerate the Medieval warming as a global event to imply that natural variation is the major cause of present warming and we do not have to worry about carbon dioxide. Here are some graphs from
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
The warm period in Greenland a thousand years ago is clear but not in West Africa.
I would also caution against using single references to extraordinary human feats in sagas that are full of them to reconstruct medieval temperatures.
Heading Out, I beg of you to consider the moral implications of continuing to throw doubt on the huge volume of scientific work that has gone into climate science. You are not a climate scientist and you have now put forward several items that imply doubt of these scientific findings that on examination reveal your faulty grasp of the facts. Upon our collective will to act on climate change depend the lives of millions of people. There are only too many people ready to grasp comforting untruths as a excuse for inaction. Please check your facts and the relevance of these facts to the overall picture with those that qualified to judge them.
Nick,
Don't blame heading out. I was the one who read that into the data. Thanks for the link. I have been wanting to read that paper. The NAS report actually delivers a gentle rebuke to Mann and the hockey stick crowd, since it says that it is only plausible (i.e. possible) that the late 20th century was warmer than the medieval warming, but the data are too weak to reach a firm conclusion.
There are a couple of reasons why Greenland data might show more warming than other regions. One is that climatologists generally assert that warming trends are magnified in extreme latitudes. (I forget the reference, but it was in a discussion of the likelihood of melting ice caps.) The second is that the best data is from Greenland with the ice cores.
As an old forester, the one thing I actually know a little about is dendrochronology. I am very skeptical about tree rings as a temperature proxy because there are too many other variables. When you are trying to construct a record more than 500 years old, the number of specimens is so small that efforts to filter out noise inevitably become very subjective.
You lost me with the last paragraph. Anyone who is even a little bit skeptical will start to become paranoid if you try to shut off the discussion. The politicians deciding what to do about these issues are typically people with a bachelor's degree and an IQ of 120-130. You won't make any points if you belittle their ability to understand the science.
"The politicians deciding what to do about these issues are typically people with a bachelor's degree and an IQ of 120-130. You won't make any points if you belittle their ability to understand the science."
Many of them do have a bachelor's degree IN POLITICAL SCIENCE. Which does not give them a clue about scientific inquiry or statistical analysis(except for polls). Assuming they have a slightly higher than average intelligence because they have a college degree is facitious. Most of those you will find on this site have advanced degrees in the hard sciences(engineering, mathematics, physics, etc.) and actually do have higher than average I.Q.'s. Politicians have demonstrated time and again their unwillingness to recognized scientific conclusions contrary to their political positions. I doubt from lack of understanding but more from the fact that the conclusions are politically inconvienient.
At the risk of appearing more controversial I would insert this comment from the NRC report that you quote
Since I was writing about the permafrost in Siberia it seemed germaine to look at the conditions in Greenland, and to quote contemporary reports of what the conditions were back in the period of the Medieval Warming, as opposed to what they are now. The lack of ice and permafrost then, and the transition to likely similar conditions in the future will probably significantly increase the costs of access to the oil and gas of Siberia. And I gave the basis for venturing that opinion (the costs of access to the mines of Northern Canada). I am not sure what particular fact you are saying that I have wrong.