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18 comments on It's not going to be cold enough in Siberia to...

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Nick Rouse on March 5, 2007 - 8:58pm

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.

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sf on March 6, 2007 - 1:46am

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.

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Cid Yama on March 6, 2007 - 2:38am

"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.

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Heading Out on March 6, 2007 - 2:02am

At the risk of appearing more controversial I would insert this comment from the NRC report that you quote

Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.

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.