XDA

Rich Lowery, whom I read as often as I can, has this piece today at the NRO about 'Climate Alarmism.' He seems glad that at last they are admitting the science is not settled about what is causing recent climate change and whether the rate and magnitude of the recent change is unprecedented and alarming. It is a good article but he goes a little soft on the Climate Alarmists. He writes:

Jones discussed the highly contentious “medieval warming period.” If global temperatures were warmer than today back in 800–1300 A.D. — about a thousand years before Henry Ford’s assembly lines began spitting out automobiles — it suggests that natural factors have a large hand in climate change, a concession that climate alarmists are loath to make. Jones said we don’t know if the warming in this period was global in extent since paleoclimatic records are sketchy. If it was, and if temperatures were higher than now, “then obviously the late-20th-century warmth would not be unprecedented.”(Emphasis added)

The reason I write so often about what I, and now many others, call the Global Warming Hoax is because I wrote a paper in graduate school at UVA around 1977 about the climate of Iceland between 950 and 1350 AD. I read all the scientific literature I could about that period, including a journal called Paleoclimatology, and I can assure Rich Lowery that back then, when the alarmist scientific consensus still concerned global cooling, there was nothing contentious about the Medieval Warm Period, although back then it was called the Little Optimum. To the extent that science can be settled, it was well settled that the MWP existed, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

As further proof, I present this graph which appeared in a 1990 IPCC report.

But it didn't take a genius to realize that if it was warmer for nearly 5 centuries before there was any fossil fuel burning, it would be a harder sell to theorize that the relatively mild 20th C. warming was unprecedented, alarming and could only have been caused by man. One Warmie true believer, David Deming, spilled the beans and said: "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

So the climate alarmists tried. The worst of the lot, Michael Mann, et al., made the totally fraudulent "hockey stick" graph (the Piltdown Man of climatology) in 1998 which indeed erased the MWP. Other fellow travelers merely began doubting something which three decades before was not doubted. They emphasized that nearly all the data supporting very warm temperatures 950 to 1350 AD were from the Northern Hemisphere, as if that mattered. It was just local, they said, we don't know if it was world wide. That is proper scientific skepticism but, as in law, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That there are more Northern Hemisphere studies than Southern Hemisphere studies does nothing to refute the Northern Hemisphere results. The MWP was well known to science throughout the 1980s, was wide spread if not global, and was indeed warmer than it is now. We have the sagas (which I was reading and writing about at UVA) to support the scientific studies. They talk about a near complete lack of sea ice during the Winters around 1100 AD, and farming in several places in Greenland. You can see the abandoned farmhouses and churches there today.

The MWP is only "highly contentious" now because of the desire of the WTB to rewrite history to make today look more alarming. It is only contentious because they are willing to perpetrate a fraud to support the greater good, in their eyes, of slowing CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, even if they have to send everyone back to a standard of living circa 1901. But it is a fraud, as certainly as the Hockey Stick graph is, to say the MWP didn't exist or was colder than now or was just a local phenomenon. Fraud, not an honest mistake--Fraud.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Medieval Warm Period; Rich Lowery