Either Will Steffen thinks humans didn’t exist five thousand years ago, or he hasn’t heard of the Holocene. The Herald Sun tells us the extraordinary news that:
“Humans are living in the hottest temperatures they have ever lived and I can guarantee this will only get worse.”
Will Steffen also says the climate is “complex”, and “impossible to entirely predict”. I guess that means his guarantee that it will get worse comes direct from God, since it’s not possible through science. I don’t know why Matthew Dunn, technology editor of the Herald Sun, didn’t ask more about that — obviously that would be big news.
Otherwise, nearly every proxy that’s ever been proxied suggests there were a lot of warmer times in the period 5,000 – 8,000 years ago. Ice cores say it was hotter in Greenland, barnacles, corals, sea worms, and “swash” tell us sea levels were something like 2 meters higher in stable West Australia* and nearly 1m higher in Hawaii and Polynesia, oceans were 2 degrees warmer around in Indonesia, and 6,000 boreholes sunk in the oceans all over the world show it was a global deal. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year mega drought about 6,000 year ago (see McGowan). CO2 Science lists references from South-East Asia to the Sahara, from Antarctica to America. I am barely skimming the surface.
It was even warmer 120,000 years ago when Antarctica was over 2 degrees hotter, and seas were 3 -5 m higher and even more in some places. I’m pretty sure that homo sapiens was around then, and somehow they survived the heat without electricity, cars, hospitals or four-bedroom houses.
Here’s a few graphs of the scores I could use. Greenland has been warmer many times over the last 10,000 years*. The Roman warming of the European region was also fairly significant. Those Romans didn’t get by with togas for nothing.
…
In Western Australia — one of the oldest, most stable pieces of land in the world — sea levels have been falling for 7,000 years.
Source: Lewis et al
Sea levels rise when the world warms, but crustal plate and local changes make it difficult to calculate the global sea level of the Holocene. But in many places where humans lived it’s been higher during the Holocene that what it is today. See also Nils Axel Morner on European sea levels in the last 7,000 years, and the case of Pevensey Castle in the UK. It just makes a mockery of the claim that humans haven’t had to deal with climate change before.
Thousands of boreholes, which are pretty useless for most climate details, put paid to the idea that the world was not, on average, warmer during the holocene optimum. With 6,000 of them drilled in sediments around the world, the one thing they are useful for is a very big broad ultra low resolution estimate of whether it was all-over-hotter or all-over-colder (see Huang and Pollack, 2008).
Huang and Pollack 2008
For anyone who still says that the warming was local and not global, as far as I can tell, there is no human who lives at the global average temperature, instead we all live locally, and the hotter zones in these graphs cover hundreds of years. What scientist would declare that Humans are living in the hottest temperatures they have ever lived?
REFERENCES
Christiansen, B. and Ljungqvist F. C. (2012). The extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperature in the last two millennia: reconstructions of low-frequency variability. Climate of the Past, 8(2):765–786, 2012. [abstract] [PDF] [NASA copy] [Discussion on CA noted a lack of complete archives and code]
Hamish McGowan,Samuel Marx, Patrick Moss, Andrew Hammond (2012): Evidence of ENSO mega-drought triggered collapse of prehistory Aboriginal society in northwest Australia, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 39, Issue 22. DOI: 10.1029/2012GL053916 [Abstract]
Holmgren, K., Tyson, P.D., Moberg, A. and Svanered, O. 2001. A preliminary 3000-year regional temperature reconstruction for South Africa. South African Journal of Science 97: 49-51.
Huang, S. P., H. N. Pollack, and P.-Y. Shen (2008), A late Quaternary climate reconstruction based on borehole heat
flux data, borehole temperature data, and the instrumental record, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L13703, doi:10.1029/2008GL034187 [PDF]
Lewis, S.E., et al., Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian margin: a review, Quaternary Science
Reviews (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006 [abstract] (paywalled).
Ljungqvist, F. C., Krusic, P. J., Brattström, G., and Sundqvist, H. S (2012).: Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries, Clim. Past, 8, 227-249, doi:10.5194/cp-8-227-2012, 2012. [abstract] [PDF] or try this [PDF] [CO2science discussion]
Yair Rosenthal1,*, Braddock K. Linsley2, Delia W. Oppo3 (2013) Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years, Science 1 November,Vol. 342 no. 6158 pp. 617-621 DOI: 10.1126/science.1240837 [Sciencemag.org ]
* Edited for accuracy — Greenland has been warmer “for a lot of” changed to “many times”. Thanks to Craig Thomas #42 – Jo
All those proxies saying he’s wrong… Is this what they mean by “the science is settled”?
Ad Hominen alert ! Will Steffan, Professor of Wrongology.
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it’s a nonsensus
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KenW
Another in a long line though
http://www.economist.com/node/455855
From a comment at http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2015/1/19/a-lukewarmers-history.html
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His work needs to be seen in the context of what the Stockholm Resilience Center is pushing as reasons to control human development. http://www.futureearth.org/news/updated-planetary-boundaries-framework-shows-four-nine-boundaries-now-crossed
I actually started my blog several years ago in alarm at what was quietly intended via the Belmont Challenge documents and the Future Earth Alliance that replaced the Earth System Science Partnership. It’s not hard science modelling. It’s social science modeling.
It’s also heavily tied into the global K-12 education vision UNESCO calls “quality education” in the great Orwellian tradition.
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Will Steffen, David Karoly, Joelle Gergis, Chris Turley, Allie Gallant et al, they’re all just useless, I really believe, based on their own ‘work’. Academe is the only place that will have them. The day they step out into actual applied science, into the private sector, is the day they get sued for negligence, misleading and deceptive conduct etc.
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Well said WB – what these “AGW Alarmists” are engaging in is DECEPTION, DECEPTION & MORE DECEPTION. And this will continue until the impending “LIA”, which is not far off, makes its inevitable impact on planet Earth. The Sun will soon have its way and poor “cold water” over their – to quote you WB in part – “misleading and deceptive conduct” promoting non-existent “AGW Doctrine”. And mark my words the “Warmists” will get a very cool reception both from the MSM and the public at large when JUDGEMENT DAY arrives. I for one am looking forward to this day.
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I agree those on your list should be made to face the ultimate indignity, popular ridicule until the day they leave this earthly kingdom.
Joelle Gergis done bad (heavied by Klimatariat bullies into the southern hemisphere hockey stick) but her work on early Australian weather is commendable. For Joelle I recommend a simple recant.
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I thought you might be interested in my experience with weather bureau forecasting.
It was 1985 or 6, & I was running the marine division for South Mole Island in the Whitsundays. It was stores day, when our 90Ft barge loaded fuel, our freezer truck & our major order of stores for the week.
We had been watching a cyclone out in the Coral Sea for a few days, but at 5.00 AM the forecast was it would not affect us in the next 48 hours. The island powerhouse was getting low on diesel so at 6.00 AM I confirmed with the MacKay fuel supplier to send 15,000 gallons of diesel, 5,000 of petrol, & 1,000 of two stroke mix up on the tanker.
I sent the two large boats 29 & 24 metre International catamarans, off to our cyclone bolt hole on the mainland, & arranged for their families to go to a large high safe home that night. I kept the 60Ft island ferry out, as the resort requested 3 departures at 8.00 AM, midday & 4.00 PM for any guests who wanted off the island. It would take its chances at Shute harbour, as would the barge, after getting the supplies to the island.
9 AM the ferry is back, & the barge is at the jetty, pumping diesel ashore, & unloading stores. The wind is up, & it’s getting a bit rough at the jetty. The bureau correct their forecast, we have only 24 hours before the cyclone reaches us.
10 AM it is getting quite rough at the jetty, I tell the island the last ferry will leave at 11.00AM, confirm the power house has enough fuel, & send the barge off for Shute harbour. It’s square bow is not good for pushing into the growing seas.
11.00 AM I get on the ferry, with the departing island guests, & head for Shute harbor. The weather bureau corrects its forecast, the cyclone will be over us at 7.00 PM. I arrange our courtesy bus to pick up the big boats crews families & get them to the safe house, before meeting the ferry at Shute.
We hear a call from Whitsunday Rent a Yacht. 2 of their 35 footers are to the west of North Molle Island & in trouble. They cannot make headway in the rising seas. Can anyone help?
I don’t like this. Amateur sailors, with ropes, near propellers in rough conditions is asking for disaster, but what can you do. We are the only boat near, & just a couple of miles away. The 2 amateur skippers are very competent luckily, & we have them both in tow in just 45 minutes.
That’s when we get a call from the barge, it is losing power on the starboard engine, & can’t make headway towards Shute in the now moderate seaway. I can’t help him with these yachts out back, so tell the skipper to head to Airlie Beach, it’s mostly down wind, & out of the rough stuff. He is to shove the thing up into the mangroves, drop all the anchor gear, & get home. His family were not taken to the safe house, as he should have been home.
1.00 PM we finally get into Shute Harbour after a fair battle with increasing seas. As we do, the whole bay starts smoking. Spray is rising up from the water, first at the far end of the harbour, coming to meet us as we get near the jetty. This indicates about 70 knots of wind usually, but it only lasts for a couple of minutes.
We get the yachts as close to their facility as possible, & get them to drop their tow. The company has their staff there to help now.
We get our thing tied up about 2.30 PM, & head for Airlie Beach, to look after our own families. Strangely it is not that bad at Airlie. In fact by 4.00 PM it is a quite nice afternoon. That smoking water was the switch to north west wind as the eye passed not too far south of us.
It is fortunate the folk of the weather bureau were many miles away from the Whitsundays. If I could have got to them just then, I might have done something very nasty to them, with the sharp end of a pineapple.
How they expect to be takes seriously with their predictions I really don’t know. Talking about 100 years, when they can’t even get a few hours right is really too much.
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Is Steffen our first Young Earth Climate Alarmist?
By Blair’s Law, they were bound to get together eventually.
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I think Will Steffen is actually referring to the era of Noah’s Ark.
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Was that vessel caught in ice too?
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Was that vessel caught in ice too?
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Still, you can’t expect such a storied career (from chemical engineer to climate expert to personal tax advisor to the Prime Minister) to have left him with much time to learn the nitty-gritty of geo- (or any other kind of) history.
5 thousand, 4.3 billion, who cares.
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Be careful what you say about qualifications. Some skeptics have similar backgrounds so do we disregard them also? His background is not relevent to the correctness of his claim.
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Correctness of his claim?
What correctness?
He is hand waving/scare mongering about a manufactured/homogenized global average of a fraction of a degree & using his BACKGROUND to gain media attention.
As Jo points out, his claim in the SMH is NOT correct.
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I think what Sheri meant was that his background is not relevant to whether or not his claim is correct. Based on her other comments here I would find it hard to believe she thinks he is correct in his claims.
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Thanks Robert. You are correct. I am saying his background has no relevence to the correctness of his claim. I look at the claim and evaluate it—and it leaves me believing his claim is without merit. He can use his background to attract media attention if he wants, although it certainly takes him outside of science when he does it. That’s why skeptics and other keep trying to drive home the importance of looking at the claim, not the person. We can only reverse this by educating people about how science works and how the media works. That’s what I was trying to say.
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My suggestion is that it is not educational achievement that determines whether one is an an alarmist with respect to the effect of post IR human activities on the climate system but rather one’s world view.
Will Steffen and all his fellow alarmists hold what is essentially a classical Pagan world view even though disguised with scientific terminology.
What are the essential elements of that world view?
1. The Earth’s systems are fragile and in fine balance.
2. Humans are interlopers and their post IR desire to improve their lifestyle through technology will be destructive of that fine balance.
Steffen gives his and the Green movement’s anti human world view away in his formulation of the “anthropocene”.
Those of us who have qualifications in mathematics and science but generally hold an alternate world view which sees the Earth and its natural systems, including climate, as very robust and unlikely to be affected by a scientifically legitimate use of Earth’s resources where those uses are proscribed only by scientific objections with respect to safety.
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Llew Jones, I think you are correct that qualifications have much to do being an alarmist. Fewer engineers, geologists, and other hard scientist believe in global warming than those in the softer sciences.
But, I think you should also include source and type of employment. If government, or academic, or NGOs; all educational/career types of people may be living off the taxpayers through the global warming scam. And of course, the far leftists radicals see it as a road to totalitarian government with themselves as the elites in control. Add in those who believe that there are too many people on the planet (this may be mostly overlapping with the far left radicals and the elitists) and you can see it has as much to do with living off other peoples’ taxes as it does with qualifications (in my opinion).
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That seems like the opposite of the classical pagan view to me. As far as I can tell, the pagan view was that the earth followed its own robust natural order, under the control of the most powerful Gods. Human efforts to achieve anything would fail if the Gods opposed them, and humans were certainly not powerful enough to defeat nature.
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Agreed unreservedly Sheri, except our “side” is not the one that played the credentialism card in the first place. Just fun to brandish it back in their faces, that’s all.
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Must be grants submission time again. Send more moolah so Will and Co can all enjoy a knees-up in Davos.
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That’s what I Thought. Steffen pays lip-service to the scientific method but he reveals his true intentions with outlandish claims like these. I mean, come one, modern humans have been around for 200,000 years (or longer) so to claim that the planet has not been hotter for as long as humans have existed is to claim that we knew what the global temperature was with accuracy stretching back 200,000 years, which of course, we don’t. Various paleoclimate measurements would need to be done comprehensively for every transitional epoch for 200,000 and as far as I am aware that gargantuan work has not yet been done. They can call us ‘deniers’ all they want, but denial is simply a natural human-response when confronted with their outlandish claims.
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Will Steffen is math challenged, at the Ipswich climate conversation thingy that I attended he variously said that temperature would rise 5 degrees this century and 3 degrees per doubling. Since the doubling (3 degrees) takes longer than a century, it can’t be both Will Steffen. I stopped listening to Steffen right then, he has zero credibility when he changes the number he uses to suit his moment.
At that moment I became a sceptic, thanks Will.
PS, I have a lovely video archive with the blatant inconsistencies and unproven propaganda spurted from that meeting. The meeting had green plants all through the audience to ask the dorothy dixers, it was so fake, almost no sceptics were heard. There were lots of angry citizens there. Soon after Ipswich, they stopped doing them. Audience got the better of them I suppose.
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If you were able to visit the site of Ipswich, England about 80,000 years ago (or anywhere in the current Thames Valley through to Oxford) you would have encountered hyenas, hippos and elephants. 20,000 years ago it was the southern limit of a vast ice sheet. At no point in the Holocene has it been remotely as hot as then, although in recent years there have been resurgence of hyenas in the region, especially around Westminster.
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Well, I meant Ipswich in Queensland, but your point is good anyway. Yes, its been plenty hotter before, seems pretty obvious when trees and human artifacts are being recovered from under retreating glaciers. The audacity gets me though, there is a reason Greenland is called that, and it isn’t the ice cover.
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There is plenty of evidence of warmer periods before, as I show in the comment below for Britain. The name “Grunland” was partly due to a Viking sense of humour. It was probably never warmer than the Shetland Islands of today – though maybe marginally less windy. That is you could grow the most hardiest of crops – like turnips – and maybe cattle and sheep could survive as long as they were kept in barns in the winter.
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You may be interested in this site – it’s about historic salt production, especially seasalt around Britain, Europe, and the Middle East.
It’s a bit of a cut and paste site, but it does have some splendid references pre-Roman production and later to sea-level changes flooding the salt flats around the late Roman period.
http://www.salt.org.il/sealevel.html
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Sorry moderators, can you delete that last post of mine? Someone on the internet told me it was true, but I’ve belatedly exercised some skepticism and can find no evidence. Steffen seems to have evaded—not agreed to—a community member’s challenge that he stake his liberty on not “misleading” anyone. Doh!
—-
Done – :- ) Jo
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No TRUE scientist would ever make such a claim; as you have pointed out, there are so many variables involved, it is an utterly ridiculous claim to make.
However, academics might make such a claim, as would politicians and journalists (well, modern journalists, anyway), as none of them have any need to back such a claim up with facts; but making such a claim will get them noticed, which is, really, all that some of them want.
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I’m always skeptical of scientists who are funded by government grants, their findings are likely to support government agenda. I take what they say on board with the knowledge that it will be shot to pieces in the near future when their findings are mauled by real scientists
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Years ago in the UK there was a sitcom called The Rag Trade, its main catchphrase when trying to sell cloth to customers was “Never mind the quality, feel the width.”
In other words, spinning the subject in an attempt to push the listener away from the facts towards those concepts that are irrelevant, but which might hopefully seduce the gullible and unwary.
Having read Will Steffen’s official biography – link provided by Jo – the motivation for his comments is clear: career bureaucrat with comfortable lifestyle and fame issues. I would like to think that any private sector geologist would shred his bogus claims.
Jo’s article here yet again illustrates one of the alarmist cult’s many Achilles Heels, namely that I) there is no indication of CAGW anywhere in the geological record, and ii) if forcings caused by temperature rises (for whatever reason) were strongly positive (official IPCC mantra), then life on Earth would have died out long ago.
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Joanne with her parlour tricks again showing a single ice core temperature record (http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png) which absolutely does not represent the world as a whole. And then you have a real scientist who doesn’t misguide her readers as can be seen with Judith Curry (http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-fig-1b-annotated.jpg)
Doesn’t any of you feel even a little betrayed? How can you be expected to discuss climate change if you are all been given false information..
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Sure Michael, Judith doesn’t misguide her readers, so let’s look at what Judith Curry said exactly when she posted that graph. Lost those quotes and that link have you?
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/11/lets-play-hockey-again/
“There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.”
Give me a proxy that goes from 12,000 BC right through to the present. None of those inane party tricks where spikes in modern instrumentation are compared to low resolution “smoothed” proxies.
More Judith Curry: “We’re not screwed (?)”
“Are there still no checks and balances in the paleoclimate community “
Michael, you are trying too hard. Your dishonest commenting style is too obvious. The Marcott paper was so fundamentally flawed and over hyped Judith felt sorry for the young researchers and gave them friendly career advice.
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That Greenland temperature proxy graph is just like all the other proxies used to determine the temperature during the Holocene. When they say 2014 was the hottest year on record they don’t mean Greenland or Rome, they mean the entire planet. You picking some random proxy record that helps you push your point is completely misguided and you continue to do it. We all talk about global temperatures yet you feel picking one place on Earth validates your point.. Well it doesn’t.
Its also completely obvious that someone using that graph knows readers will assume it could be some what of a global representation and that the last bit of the graph is the modern day temperature record.
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Michael, next time read the post before you comment OK? See Greenland, Antarctica, Polynesia, Western Australia, UK, Europe, America, Sahara, SE Asia, Indonesia, Hawaii… and 6000 points in all the worlds oceans.
Then follow the links. Check the refs.
your apology for missing 90% of the post is accepted.
PS: … and for falsely implying that Judith Curry endorses the Marcott graph.
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But I did read your links, more single proxy temperature graphs that conveniently show a warming minus all the proxies that don’t show a warming. Science simply does not work like that.
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I only suggested that Judith Curry in my opinion doesn’t misguide her readers. She’s very smart in the way she approaches these science issues.
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No Michael, you implied she endorsed Marcott. You are now officially moderated for being dishonest and timewasting.
PS: All multiproxy studies are made of “single proxies”. I linked to scores. You linked to one graph with a crippling flaw.
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I was just looking for a Holocene graph and hers was the first one I found that was referenced. She clearly states “There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene.” which is what I was going for. Most mutliproxy temperature reconstructions of the Holocene look nothing like your single Greenland proxy.
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Another cherrypicked quote. And I even gave you the proper full quote:
There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.””
You have nothing. Can’t you just be honest and admit it?
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Another dissenting voice censored by Jo Nova.
Remove your faux blog awards and put up the one for Biggest Hypocrite.
Jo is such a great scientist, she can’t handle a few little people questioning her “work”.
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I published all of his inane, inaccurate comments. Every one. Right now I’m just slowing them down and fixing them as they come in. – Jo
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I have to admit the short modern record is difficult to compare to a long time span moving averaged mulitproxy like the one I referenced, which Judith points out in your quote. In light of our discussion I have looked for papers that could shed some light on the possibility that during the Holocene or after it, if there could have been a time that “globally” the Earth was warmer then today. This link (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png) shows some of the proxies with the average of them shown as an overlay.
Its very possible that short time span moving averages as used in the modern record if used in a proxy reconstruction could give a answer to this blog post.
After thinking about it I feel that I did use Juidths graph in a way that it could look like she was talking about the same issue as u but was actually using the right graph unlike yourself. Which is misleading in a way, I more simply justed need a good graph to show you. But I did not think she endorsed Marcotts paper as you suggest, thats going a little to far, I just found the graph and wanted to use it. Just been truthful.
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Michael,
weasel words. This is what you said:
Find me the proxies that go right through the holocene to the present. The documentary evidence from Greenland shows the MWP was warmer than now. Hence the GISP graph shows it was hotter there many many times during the holocene. All the other links and sources I provided show the warmth occurred all over the world. the boreholes also show the warming was global. You have nothing but a deeply flawed, highly smoothed graph that relies on a modern spike from different equipment. I showed that graph in full to my readers and discussed the flaws at length already on this site.
PS: There are no proxies “after the holocene”.
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I’m not sure what you are going on about when you say “There are no proxies after the Holocene”? If we can get a proxy of the Holocene it should mean we can get temperature proxies up until the last couple of centuries. Case in point is your Greenland Proxy which was recently produced in a higher resolution. (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eCzSpicX6Z0/UVS3wzhpOvI/AAAAAAAAAZo/ktv0f9e6kbk/s1600/Kobashietal2011Fig1.jpg)
But of cause I’m Whittlemore that talks like a Weasel..
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Michael, it was a joke about your ignorance. The holocene has not ended. There are no proxies from the future.
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No Joanne, calling me a Weasel and belittling my name to Whittlemore had nothing to do with my mistakenly not calling it the Holocene Optimum it was just you being disgusting.
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The spelling mistake was a genuine typo. Sorry. I have not repeated it. My point still stands – spelling aside.
Your comment in #10 was emotionally loaded, abjectly wrong, and misleading. I didn’t call you a weasel. Misquote again? I said “You are transparently changing the topic – a weasel tactic.” Still true. You said “JoNovas parlour ticks.” Go ride your high horse eh? I’ve allowed you to take the thread very off topic and answered all your comments. You acknowledge almost nothing and repeat mistakes.
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Can there be any doubt that Jamez was correct in spotting the old traveling coeliac himself? Is there anyone else who could be that dense?
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I was just thinking the same thing Rod. It certainly sounds like Mr Fab himself… If it is, I think he may need some serious assistance with his obsession issues.
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In light of our discussion Joanne I have to admit I overreacted regarding you using the Greenland Proxy in this blog post. My point still stands that people like Will Steffen and others are referring to a global temperature not a regional one, but your point about “there is no human who lives at the global average temperature” warrants the use of single regional proxies to explain your point. So I apologise for my snide remark.
[Thank you for this Michael. —.]ED
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I very much appreciate the sincerity. Thank you.
As for the global nature of it — I provided a lot more than one proxy from one location (as I keep saying). I pointed out the flaws in the multiproxy and the broad coverage of boreholes. Hm?
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Mr Whittemore. What a bitter, twisted little man you appear to be. Who do you think you’re convincing? Not anyone who can think for themselves, and the more you bluster, the greater the number are those who see you for what you are.
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Don’t stop him it’s fun looking at his mind spilled all over the screen!
KK
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Actually, it was hoped that no one would ever read that the last part was instrumental and NOT statistically robust. You had to read the paper for that—which some of us actually did read. In a way, I agree with Judith. I don’t think Marcott had any intention of producing a hockey stick graph and was unhappy when that was what the journal seemed to claim he had done. It was not Marcott who made a huge presentation of the graph. Even in some interviews I read, he made this clear.
“Global temperature” is a statistical construct. It exists NOWHERE on earth. It’s not a real temperature. It’s a an average or integration of temperatures from various locations around the globe. Many of the values are estimated. Using this to make claims about the actual temperatures on earth is very tenuous indeed. As I have noted elsewhere, if the poles melt and the equator freezes, but the distribution of the thermometers gives the same average, can anyone seriously say this is okay? A frozen equator and melted poles can very easily yield the same average as exists now, depending on the placement of thermometers. An average over such hugely varying values tells us absolutely nothing. It’s like taking the height of humans and declaring an average and refusing to make clothing based on anything but the average. Nonsense.
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Michael, let us analyse what you are saying:
”…hottest year on record”: well, as the records began in the middle of the Little Ice Age, and no-one is contesting that temperatures have not risen since then (thankfully), quite what is the hype? Should we expect the end of a rising trend to be anything other than higher than what preceded it? Look at a flight of stairs; notice how everywhere at the top of the stairs is higher than what is at the bottom? Remarkable, I am sure you would agree. Not only that, but everywhere at the top is also higher than whatever it might be on any of the intermediate stairs – step back in amazement!
“…the entire planet”: and how is that achieved? Are there temperature measurements over every square kilometre of the Earth’s surface? No, there are not. What they do is to take those measurements they do have, and in-fill for those (vast) areas where they have none – i.e., they are making a whole load of (hopefully educated) suppositions based upon limited observations. How the “scare” of 2014 being the “hottest” on record (by a whopping 0.02°C, ignoring the 0.1°C error bar – now, see if you can find a thermometer where you can get a reading of 0.02°C, with no error bars. Hint: the accuracy of most modern thermometers is accepted to be up to 0.2°C) has been achieved has been helped by adjustment, “consolidation”, “homogenisation” – call it what you will but it is still fiddling with historical data, with no properly scientific justification. Quite why you seem happy to accept that as gospel, yet cry out at anyone who might question it, does make others wonder what your rationale is.
Do some homework, Michael; approach ALL data with a sceptical-yet-open mind, and you might be astonished by the results.
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The AGW story is as flexible as a rubber ball. Here is what they said about “global temperature” eight years ago.
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Thanks for the link.
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Another link, Sheri. Nothing to do with the topic. Just stumbled across it and thought it might be of interest to a photographer.
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Yes, it’s a great link. It will take me while to go through all the photos. Such a beautiful place! Thanks.
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If an “average global temperature” is a useless metric with no meaning, as the article states quite clearly, then a whole lot of climatologists at NASA, NOAA, Met Office, BOM, Uni of East Anglia etc are wasting their own time and our money trying to calculate it.
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Yes, Peter C, you get it.
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Michael
Keep up with the play. NASA has come out and said that their data only indicates a 38% chance that 2014 was the hottest year. So I presume there is a 62% chance it was not.
Their data also includes a lot of adjustments done around the 16th Jan 2015.
140
Who do you mean when you blithely state, “we all…?”
I quote from an old post at Science Daily, which demonstrated quite nicely that there is simply no “all” any more than the existence (other than notional) of a global mean temperature. Furthermore, the absence of a range or standard deviation from a statement of this notional mean could be taken to imply that those who regularly use it would prefer not to draw attention to the nonsense of using it, namely, that an approximate change (give or take error and the annual round of ‘adjustments’) of +1.5°C at a global mean temperature of “+15C” (range: −89.2 °C – 54.5°C) appears, in the context of the range, really quite irrelevant and certainly not catastrophic, except when the ubiquitous doom-peddling word is used in a political sense (UNEP, IPCC et al.) or by the hapless daily victims…the tax and power price payers.
‘Discussions on global warming often refer to ‘global temperature.’ Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility, says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, who has analyzed this topic in collaboration with professors Christopher Essex from University of Western Ontario and Ross McKitrick from University of Guelph, Canada’.
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So, Michael,
How come someone claimed a couple of bristlecone pine trees on one mountainside is a proxy for global temperatures?
I’m sure you tore strips off that charlatan, you not being a hypocrite or anything.
I didn’t realise you really could actually have your cake and eat it too. Be careful, don’t scoff it down too quick- you might choke there, lad.
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“have your cake and eat it too”
If I had some cake, I’d eat it ! 🙂
The fact that I don’t have any cake, means that I can’t eat it. ! 🙁
10
It’s Shakespeare’s reference to Albert “the cut an’ come-again puddin’ ”, The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay – although he didn’t realise it at the time.
00
Don’t be ridiculous. The Greenland ice core has little, if anything to do with the palaeoclimate where it was sampled in Greenland. Ice cores preserve compacted snow. The oxygen isotope ratios in the snow are used as a temperture proxy that indicate the ocean temperature from which it evaporated. Where does the water evaporate that forms snow in Greenland? Over a very large ocean expanse I imagine. The ice core thus represents a huge ocean area that nature has sampled, mixed in the atmosphere and deposited as a temperature record. Not the entire earth, granted, but a large area of it.
50
Note that CO2 samples are collected from only one or two points on Earth.
Doesn’t seem to worry them! 😉
The atmosphere is assumed to be is “well-mixed” in these gases.
There is no reason that the GISP ice core shouldn’t be as representative of gases and thus temperature fluctuations back in history as Mauna Loa is now for CO2.
The fact that Gisp and Vostok (Antarctica) match rather well, shows this
50
[Richard the Great] I think You need to read up on ice cores. The d18O is mostly determined by the temperature at which the snow crystals condensed out of the air, not by the temperature at which the water originally evaporated.
00
Dear boy, did you not know the whole planet has not warmed by the same extent? The warming since 1850 has been very uneven. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed by about 0.5 – 0.7 C and everybody, and that possibly includes you, assumes it applies to the whole planet.
Wrong. It doesn’t.
Down here in the Southern Hemisphere, all that global warming has only warmed us by 0.28degrees C. Any variations in annual temperatures down here are going to be buried in the noise (look up “measurement resolution,” “statistical error ranges” etc) and unnoticeable.
So what if it was the hottest year evah!. That only applies to the northern half of the planet. It’s not noticeable in the Southern Half. So why should we care?
20
Michael,
Were I Australian I’d feel betrayed by the likes of Will Steffen, not by JoNova. Steffen has made contradictory statements almost in the same breath. Embarrassing is the only word for him. On the other hand, Jo has been consistent over all the years she’s run this blog.
Then comes you with an attack not substantiated by anything but your opinion.
You’ll have to forgive me Michael but I am really tired of your foolishness and the foolishness of the cause you push. You’ve nothing to offer but wasted time to read your comments.
It’s cliche but it applies — get a life! You’re in way over your head.
431
Messrs Steffen and Flannery are partners in a business venture creating a method of ridding Earth of unwanted excess CO2. The business was located in New Zealand and I wonder why they chose to hide it away from Australia.
60
What and where?
10
If memory serves me correctly, that business was “invented” by Chris Turney of the ship of fools infamy.
There was a big announcement when Flannery invested in it a few years ago.
Hows it go, birds of a feather stick together. ….
Here.
http://www.rexresearch.com/carbonscape/carbonscape.htm
30
And here.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0902/S00037/climate-campaigner-tim-flannery-joins-nz-company.htm
10
And I would better look at what a specialist in statistics says about Marrott’s results, methods, and comparisons to other studies.
http://climateaudit.org/2015/01/08/ground-truthing-marcott/
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Michael is right when he says, “how can you be expected to discuss climate change if you all (have) been given false information.”
In all the interglacial periods to date (including ours the circa 10,000 years long Holocene Period) over the past 2.65 million years of the Pleistocene Ice Age, the following have occurred:
1. The initial few thousand years are much warmer than the final few thousand years,
2. Temperature changes lead the way, followed by movements in carbon dioxide levels,
3. Temperature fluctuations during the period can often be extreme – the idea that climate can be ‘fixed’ as proposed and demanded by the alarmist cult is ludicrous beyond belief.
These interglacial periods are usually 10-25,000 years long and occur every 75-125,000 years – the only difference between our Holocene and the previous interglacials is that it appears to be slightly cooler.
As I said in a previous post,the geological record clearly demonstrates the grand falsehood of CAGW theory.
Anyhow, to get beck to your comment, the truth is simple: alarmists by word and action always refuse to debate sceptics in public for the simple reason they know their ‘science’ will be shredded – the alarmist faithful are terrified of being told “The emperor has no clothes” and having no plausible argument with which to refute this statement.
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http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/weekend-unthreaded-63/#comment-1668670
023
Exactly. You misquoted me, can’t back up your fantasy, aren’t accurate and don’t read carefully. When you are exposed for implying an endorsement from Judith Curry, the exact opposite of what she said, you don’t apologize or acknowledge it.
I think we’ve got a measure of “whittlemore”. Go on prove me wrong. Show some, any, integrity…
401
I just like Judith Curry and have never felt like she was misguiding her readers in a way that I saw your use of that Greenland temperature proxy graph and suggesting that Lovejoy was looking “at 4500 years of a very squiggly line (the last 5% of this graph)”
06
You are transparently changing the topic – a weasel tactic.
But let’s take your dodge and run with it. Let’s cite the caption I wrote on that post for that graph:
Lovejoy stated his case. I published his comments and linked to his PDF at the very top of the post.
In what way was I “misguiding” readers here? Do elaborate. (But read that whole post first).
Good luck.
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Yes you did use fine print to explain the graph but contradict it in the post when you say “LoveJoy looked at 4500 years of a very squiggly line (the last 5% of this graph)”
You even go on! “and pronounced his magic tool could tell whether the last wiggle was …. ahem, unnatural.”.. I was not impressed.
In this graph (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png) you can see the Greenland ice core proxy as light blue.. The one with the highest warming during the Holocene.. Perfect single proxy for you Joanne.
00
Michael, still weaseling in the hope we won’t notice you’ve shifted topics away from one you can’t defend.
Almost any proxy from your favourite flawed holocene graph shows large swings in temperature which was my point. The climate is always changing and Lovejoy is pretending that the last minor upturn was “different” when it is obviously within natural variation. If I wanted too I could have used graphs going back a million years to show wild variations and make the current warm blip even less significant. His maths was a joke. His responses were weak. You endorse a namecalling un-skeptical scientist who uses models that are proven to be invalid, abuses statistical significance tests, and claims measurement error is an unbelieveable +/- 0.03 degrees.
Only a fool or someone hoping to deceive would compare the rate of rise in 100 years of instrumental records with the highly smoothed poor resolution of proxies from thousands of years ago. As usual, it is the scare mongerers who mislead, the skeptics who fear no data, no graph and hide nothing.
30
The “wiggle” you highlighted in RED!
00
And said was probably 1C more (which is probably an overestimate) more in the caption right below it.
I could mark up the modern 1C of warming against Vostoks 12C natural range. Would that make you feel better?
I could add the modern 1C range to the 500 million year graph of Berner and Scotese 15C range?
Still can’t apologise for your cheap shot and misleading comment?
20
You asked me a question Joanne “In what way was I “misguiding” readers” and I answered! Yet you keep on spitting “Michael, still weaseling in the hope we won’t notice you’ve shifted topics away from one you can’t defend.” This is becoming a joke talking to you.
[I answered your accusation. The point of the GISP graph in the Lovejoy post was that our climate has varied a lot and his technique was useless. No one was misled. If I could find a good global proxy of the holocene to use, I would use it. I keep showing you the boreholes measurements, which shows it was warmer and global (but doesn’t show the variability). You ignore it like all the other proxies I used (and in this very post). – Jo]
I was not quoting your fine print at the bottom of your graph when you said “LoveJoy looked at 4500 years of a very squiggly line (the last 5% of this graph) and pronounced his magic tool could tell whether the last wiggle was …. ahem, unnatural. If that looks like tea-leaf reading to you, join the club.” it was from the body of your post where you intentionally misguided your readers…
[I should have said “like the last 5% of this graph”. That’s a good proofreading point. But that makes no material difference to the topic of that post or the truth of ideas I put forward. The readers here were not “misguided”. The GISP graph underestimates the true global variation in temps in the longer term (15C – globally). But I already made that point. You ignored it. The climate models Lovejoy used can’t correctly hindcast any of the spikes, either globally or locally, of any paleo-proxy beyond the last 130 years. The modern temperature change pales to nothing on almost every paleo graph.]
Lovejoy used 500 years worth of multiproxy records to get a global temperature and proved statistically that the resent rise is unnatural. I have never seen a comment published against the paper, you expect anyone to listen to you on the subject, with your one site proxy record! which ended in 1855! Even if you added on the resent local temperatures to your one site proxies its still one proxy. We are talking about CO2 a global gas, something you show you know very little about.
[You remain obsessed with “one proxy” but blind to all the other proxies I keep referring too. There is little point continuing.) – Jo]
And lets just get to the facts! You show me a Holocene global temperature record! This is what this is all about, you want to talk about misguiding your readers, then own up and show a global temperature! You pick and choose random proxies from around the world and you expect people to agree with you, grow up.
[I provide facts – you ignore them. I’ve dedicated a whole post to your favourite holocene record and its failures, and told you so. You ignore that. You don’t defend it, or Lovejoys and Steffens arguments, but (improbably) claim I should do what all your favourite climate scientists don’t seem to have done – a global multiproxy study that accurately compares global temps in 7000BC with 2000AD. This is timewasting. – Jo ]
01
“The climate models Lovejoy used can’t correctly hindcast any of the spikes” You need to actually read Lovejoys paper. He was in no way trying to model the temperature! He was measuring the rate at which climate changed over the last 500 years and compared it to the rate of the modern temperature rate. And of cause he found that it was impossible with the current rate of temperature rise to be natural when compared to the last 500 years.
Its very simple Jo, CO2 is a global gas and its expected that globally we should see a temperature change. A single proxy is like measuring global climate change from your backyard. Good for Amateurs.
02
Michael,
I wasn’t referring to Lovejoys personal model — the foundation of Lovejoys work “uses” or assumes an anthropogenic contribution and forcing which is essentially built from the GCMs. If feedbacks are negative (the empirical evidence suggests they are) and CO2 produces minor or insignificant warming, it is not possible that Lovejoy could have discovered that. His study was flawed from the ground up.
Statistician Matt Briggs says:
If the big GCMS can’t hindcast any of those past climate changes (they can’t) then we – the human race – don’t understand what drives our climate. To pretend that we can look at the last short tiny segment of variation and figure out how much was anthropogenic vs natural is ridiculous. I discussed this with Lovejoy himself in the comments. He rules out all cycles longer than 125 years — they are “irrelevant”. He is effectively declaring they can’t be at work in the modern era.
PS: Are you obsessed with “one proxy” and in denial that I cite scores of them?
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Michael Whittmore,
“Doesn’t any of you feel even a little betrayed?”
No, but you should.
The same education system that bought you the global warming furphy failed to instill an enquiring mindset as well as a lack of independant thought.
The modern osmosis causing fluid movement from a low concentration of alarmism group think to a high concentration of sceptical independant thought seems well underway, but is causing some extereme increases of localised Scare Level Rise among alarmists.
211
Magic.
51
Jo, it’s MtR again isn’t it? Did you coax “The Realist” into giving his real name? I’m 75% sure.
There’s just one more thing MW would have to say that would bring the MtR similarity to 100%.
20
Not to mention an education system that taught someone to write:
“Doesn’t any of you” instead of “Don’t any of you”
40
I think clothes are overrated. Even the Europeans are waking up.
Details over at ntz
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Here’s some more links.
Go and do some research on the HUGE number of papers and studies showing that the MWP and RWP existed GLOBALLY and were warmer than current.
(follow the links for different areas, then try looking for Roman Warm period)
I don’t think for one second that you actually bothered following any of the links Jo posted.
All you saw was the Gisp graph and went monkey on it… because its all you are capable of.
Then you are disingenuous and basically a bald faced liar for trying to suggest that Judith Curry supported the Marcott paper, when in fact she went on to totally eviscerate it.
231
No-one seems to have noticed that the graph which is supposed be showing the GISP2 data from the Alley 2000 paper, is completely false. The Alley (2000) GISP2 data only goes to 1855.
Seer, Not remotely. Not only have we discussed 1855, but I was the one who first mentioned it in comments here. – Jo
A Note on Timescales NCDC
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/document/notetime.htm
“For both GRIP and GISP2, these timescales are in years before present (yr BP) where year 0 refers to northern hemisphere summer of the year 1950 A.D.”
95 years before 1950 is 1855 – when the GISP2 top of Greenland ice-core data set ends in Alley’s 2000 study.
Link to data set for Alley 2000:
NOAA Paleoclimatology Program – Alley 2000 Greenland Ice Core Data
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/alley2000/alley2000.html
Is it a standard practice here to misrepresent the data by using faked graphs?
Is it your standard practice to toss inflammatory and incorrect allegations without doing the 2 second search first? – Jo.
10
An interesting comment by Will Steffen. I was reading a book on the history of Norse exploration in the Atlantic. They had colony in Iceland and ventured further west to Greenland sometime around the 11th. Century (and even as far west as N. America), but were unable to return due to the large extent of sea ice around Greenland until several hundred years later, and found the colony had perished. So the medieval period was warm enough in Greenland to farm for a few years for the benefit of former climate advisor.
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“Either Will Steffen thinks humans didn’t exist five thousand years ago, or he hasn’t heard of the Holocene. ”
Mr. Steffen expand your knowledge of human existance by entering “earliest Homo sapiens” into an internet search engine (or even Google Scholar).
The results you’ll find tend to indicate that modern humans have been about for only a little under 200,000 years. Still, during that short time and according to science, the climate of this planet has varied much. (spend US$40 on some easy reading at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X02005162 )
Of course you may believe in a strict O.T. Biblical age of the planet and humans, in which case you stick with your ordained start date and disregard all the above comments.
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If you can’t afford the $40 read Jo’s reference above and Climate Dynamics (2005) 25: 285–297, DOI 10.1007/s00382-005-0024-5, H. Seppa D. Hammarlund, K. Antonsson.
Low-frequency and high-frequency changes in temperature and effective humidity during the Holocene in south-central Sweden: implications for atmospheric and oceanic forcings of climate
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Those who claim that the Greenland ice cores only represent local temperatures and do not relate to global climate fluctuations ignore the fact that the ice core temperature records can be accurately correlated with glacier advances and retreats and many other temperature proxies in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The magnitude of Greenland temperature fluctuations are greater than those at lower latitudes (which makes them more useful), but the changes in temperatures match the global glacier record beautifully.
201
That fact and the huge amounts of other studies, many listed on CO2 Science, clearly show that the MWP and RWP were in fact pretty much GLOBAL in nature and were warmer than the current slightly warm period that we are fortunate enough to be experiencing at the moment.
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Apparently Climate Science is so politicised now you can tell an outright lie and have it repeated in headlines around the country without a single left wing MSM science editor or journalist questioning it.
Apparently no matter how high your academic qualifications, or how important your taxpayer position, if what you say suits your ideological position it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t reflect the scientific truth. Evidently the normal rules of ethics and scientific integrity do not apply when it comes to climate science.
Professor Will Steffen’s statement has now been repeated uncritically ad naseum in MSM and by climate alarmists in the blogosphere.
Steffen is the director of Australia’s top ranked University’s (the ANU) Climate Change Institute. He served as science adviser to the Australian Government Department of Climate Change. He is currently a Climate Commissioner with the Australian Government Climate Commission; Chair of the Antarctic Science Advisory Committee, Co-Director of the Canberra Urban and Regional Futures (CURF) initiative and Member of the ACT Climate Change Council.
In other words he is a committed climate alarmist and his entire career and credibility depends on his belief that humans are causing dangerous global warming. It seems the more the empirical evidence proves this not to be the case, the more shrill his alarmism becomes. Has he no shame? Has the science community no guts to call him on his outrageous statement?
I guess if he can keep this three decades long scare going for a few more years he will be able to retire on very healthy retirement benefits thanks to all his years in the limelight. The fact that most people in an economy which has been ravaged by the wasteful climate scare do not have the outrageously generous employer contributions that members of UniSuper have, and they don’t have the generous super benefits from the Commonwealth Government super will be of no consequence to Steffen.
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We know that to be true. Look at Gavin Schmidt and hottest year ever. No one asked. They just hung a banner and shoved the statement into people’s face while doing a victory dance. I have come to believe the media is without any ethics and hates most of humanity.
220
Yep.
The underlying mindset is most definitely misanthropic.
100
This is just one field, climate science, where Will Steffen has made a career in Canberra. Just think of the other fields of endeavour replete with these folk and all the dubious advise upon which the government operates.
100
You mean they actually have science editors and journalists who check facts? Which MSM outlet would that be because I haven’t seen or heard anything from that one.
20
Because the theory of human induced dangerous global warming is so poorly defined, apart from their failed climate models, it is virtually impossible to disprove. I’m not talking about normal standards of science, I am talking about the way man made global warming or climate change has been framed over the last three decades.
When their climate models fail, they have any number of excuses for that; heat hiding in the oceans, natural climate variables keeping the climate cooler for a short time, we aren’t measuring temperature properly and so on. The clever way the climate alarmists have positioned themselves means they can never actually be proven wrong. If temperatures rise dramatically and dangerously, they will claim they were correct all along. This applies given science is a very long way from solving the complexities of the entire climate system to prove how little industrial greenhouse gas emissions actually have to do with global temperatures.
If temperatures flat line as they are currently, or even if we have significant global cooling, alarmists will simply claim that ‘natural’ climate variables have overwhelmed the human induced warming, and as soon as the natural cooling variables ease we will return to a dangerous warming scenario.
They can keep that caper up for years well past their retirement dates. As we have already seen, the fact that no one graduating high school this year has actually experienced global warming, hasn’t reduce the number of young people who are convinced their parent’s generation have wrecked the world and we are all going to fry, and the Great Barrier Reef will crumble etc etc.
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I’m more hopeful than you are. They’re running on hype, and i think the tank is getting low.
110
I agree it’s not just the older generation quasi-academia with a certain political bent that have fervently joined the church of climatology, this automated groupthink has been ingrained within many demographics of the younger generation, the attraction of this cult for many young people is they don’t have to know much about the subject matter or indeed the known sciences, all they need do is reiterate false statements by false prophets and instantly they’re accepted and deemed scientifically literate or intellectual.
Everyone has met the young smarta$$ after their fist year of Uni who has been enlightened and can see the flaws of everyone else, well be prepared for a generation with this attitude who have never set foot inside an institute of higher learning.
140
PhDs are awarded with intense work in one narrow peer reviewed subject, in this case chemistry. However it does not make them clever and many are not. Tim Flannery did not qualify for a university Science course.
The reason they switch fields is that they cannot make a living or even an impact in their chosen specialization. The Australian Climate Commissioners were all field switchers or bureaucrats, none qualified in meteorology.
The interesting bit is where long term climate experts like geologists are decried as not ‘climate scientists’
Steffen’s pronouncements are particularly absurd, like his favorite that Victoria receives twice as much solar power annually as it needs. He is actually right if you do the calculation, but only true if you cover the entire state with solar panels at a cost of hundreds of trillions and all life is destroyed. In one statement Steffen actually explained why solar does not work.
I wrote to him as a chemist about Henry’s law, a physical chemistry law which connects the 98% of all gaseous CO2 in the oceans with the tiny 2% of all CO2 in the air and the fact that gases are in constant and rapid exchange with the oceans, the origin of all life on earth. Will should be expert in chemical equilibrium and Henry’s Law. I thought maybe there was some simple explanation I had missed? While he responded, his zero content response referred me vaguely to the unquestioned authority of the IPCC.
260
After a graduate degree in Chemical Engineering, an MSc, Will Steffen’s PhD thesis from 1975 at the University of Florida was possibly “The role of steric factors in the mode of thiocyanate bonding in palladium (II) complexes”.
Now would that qualify anyone in temperature profiles for early human history?
200
You don’t have to be qualified as long as you preach the gospel. It is only those who question the gospel, no matter how qualified they are to do so, that will be vilified.
30
Hottest year ever?
(the Age) Melbourne changes monitoring site from city to park, new max temperature averages 1.2C cooler
Mr Trewin also noted that the Bureau had recently changed its Melbourne monitoring site from the Royal Society of Victoria on La Trobe Street in the city to Olympic Park, near Rod Laver Arena.
Maximum temperatures recorded at the new site were on average 1.2 degrees cooler, particularly on cool days, because air coming from the south and west was travelling over parklands rather than the through the city.
120
I awoke from a dream thinking, Where can one live comfortably without clothes,or nighttime coverings, year-round. In my very limited personal experience I found Fiji and Hawaii to fill the bill: oceanic islands, higher-latitude tropical.
I lived in San Diego, where you could live in short-sleeved shirt and shorts most of the time, but need a sweater (sustainable wool) on winter nights. Perth reportedly has a similar climate according to a Perth-to-SD ex-pat I talked to.
I would hazard a guess that if Will Steffen were to move back to his college town, Columbia, Missouri, and be forced to live without winter heating, without wearing fossil-fuel-enabled nylon-sheathed, fossil-fuel-enabled Polarguard or down (shipped from somewhere else using fossil fuel) jackets, he’d probably be very unhappy, shiveringly miserable, I should surmise.
He earned graduate degrees from the University of Florida, Gainesville. Very comfy Dec-April, oppressively hot and humid June-October.
If we ask, What is the world’s best temperature to maintain, if we can control the mean global temperature? I don’t know. No one does. Despite AGW’s screamers, more retirees in the U.S. are still moving from New York, Illinois and Minnesota (cold winter states) to Florida, Texas, Arizona and Mississippi than the converse. If we shut down fossil-fuel-enabled air conditioning, would we see a reverse migration? I don’t know. If we simultaneously shut down fossil-fuel winter home heating, I should guess that the southern ward migration would continue.
At any rate, the issue is global human energy management. I recommend that the world-government czars require Will Steffen to move back to Missouri, and live sustainably without any fossil-fuel-enabled home and personal warming for 5 years, and see what he recommends. He could conceivably find himself hunting down bears for bear-skin winter warming. And then have to answer to PETA.
90
Wouldn’t happen, it would require effort and sacrifice on his part and as should be apparent by now the sacrifices are supposed to be shouldered by the masses not the self proclaimed elite.
30
How this climate quack is still allowed to wander around unsupervised will be one of the great mysteries …
“Prof Steffen said that this period of climate change caused by humans, known as the ‘anthropocene era’, could ultimately cause the whole system of ice ages followed by warm periods, that has allowed life on Earth to flourish, to be over.”
(telegraph UK, 2012)
~ ~ ~
Now, I aint a climate scientist but aren’t glacial & inter-glacial periods caused by the motions of the planets?
Off to interwebs … NOAA to be precise:
What is the cause of glacial-interglacial cycles?
Variations in the Earth’s orbit through time have changed the amount of solar radiation received by the Earth in each season (Figure 3). Interglacial periods, shown as the periods of higher temperature (shaded in yellow) in the Dome Fuji ice core from Antarctica, tend to happen during times of more intense summer solar radiation in the Northern Hemisphere.
These glacial-interglacial cycles have waxed and waned throughout the Quaternary Period (the past 1.8 million years).
Since the middle Quaternary, glacial-interglacial cycles have had a frequency of about 100,000 years. In the solar radiation time-series, cycles of this length (known as “eccentricity”) are present but are weaker than cycles lasting about 23,000 years, (which are called “precession of the equinoxes.”)
. . .
Conclusion: Steffen is a climate quack.
181
Steffan’s credibility was established (for me and others) back in 2010 when he was running some sort of indoctrination programme at ANU.
One of the participants was recognised by a bureaucrat of the Canberra variety as candidate for ‘roo culling within the ACT.
The individual had in fact recently passed the rigorous testing required to cull kangaroos int eh national capital.
He then pulled out his wallet to reveal his recently acquired ‘roo cullers’ license.
Not long after the Faifax press was chocker block with various baloney about “death threats” made to members of the climate commission. There was reference to a session in which a participant at one of Steffan’s seminars that had proudly displayed a firearms license. I can’t find all the ridiculous stories that surrounded this incident, but the then climate commission which was Falnery, Steffan, and two other blokes named ‘Andy’ and of those Steffan was the only one present. Years later the truth started to emerge about the real story, prompted by investigation by Simon Turnhill of Australian Climate Madness.
130
I’d like to say something about Michael Mann. Five years to get a Berkeley bachelor’s with only honors (one level above nondescript) then 9 years to earn a PhD. As a high honors (just 0.04 GPA to get highest honors, also double-degree-earning, in 4 years) Berkeley graduate, MD degree in 5 years–I wanted to explore rather than graduate in 4 years-I have some thoughts.
First, Michael Mann could have had cancer,and received chemotherapy, which took him out of commission for 4 years. If so, that would explain his slow degrees progress. But has he talked about this?
Without this explanation, a 5-year Berkeley A.B. and 9-year Yale phD does not equal a first-rate scientific mind, or even a second-rate scientific mind. Those of you who don’t know about “the system” need to know a few things:
1. First-rate minds got through Berkeley with high and highest honors in 3-4 years for their A.B.’s, B.S.s. The creme-de-la-creme entered at 15-16 years of age, and graduated at 19-20. Then they earned their PhD’s at 20-21.
2. The very good to good students entered at age 18, graduated at 22, and earned their PhD’s at 26-27.
3. I never heard of any good student who entered grad school at the Berkeley-Yale level who didn’t earn a PhD until age 32, except for people who worked for a few years and then entered grad school, which was not Dr. Mann’s pathway.
So, the only question is, did Dr. Mann get taken out of his education for cancer treatment, or did he have a leaning disability, and was coddled?
We know that he devised boggled principle component analysis. We know he took data from Sheep Mountain tree rings, without examining other Eastern California bristlecone tree rings or dozens of high-altitude Nevada or Utah ancient bristlecone tree rings, which would have generated invaluable information about low-precipitation Great Basin climate conditions.
Was Dr. Mann a scientist? No. If he were, he would have gone to high-altitude peaks in the rest of the White Mountains, other places in Nevada and Utah, to drill into the tree-ring record. Just to find out what the ancient-bristlecone ree-ring record actually showed for the Great Basin.
Did he actually go to the ancient bristlecone forests? Did he climb to 3500+ meters? I did. to look at these marvelous trees. I don’t believe he did. I don’t believe his hockey stick graph.
100
My degree is taking me forever, undergrad, half time student working full time and I’m okay with that. Graduate studies? At the rate things are going I’d be dead before I finished.
Was Mikey holding down a full time 40+ hour a week job during his academic pursuits? I could see it taking some time then. As for me I turned 50 this past summer and am doing the degree more because I started working on it and want to finish it someday than because I expect it to put me into some high paying career.
I couldn’t tell you what Mikey’s troubles were, though it doesn’t look like he’s ever missed a meal.
40
One of the Andy’s decided to debate Joanne Nova about AGW. She crucified him and hung him out to dry.
141
Who says global warming is a bad thing? People living in 35th + parallel saying, “My ewnter home heating costs are to low.” “I used to wear down, but I’m wearing North Face and Patagonia fleece today. Most people are saying, “I like it.”
Which is the AGW’s main problem: the proles are saying, “I like warmer temps.” Stupid proles, they need to suffer more.
70
A post from “No tricks” showing the ever “adjusted” GHCN data.
NO WONDER they can keep creating “hottest ever” years !!!
ps, right click and open figures in new tab to see it clearly
70
Please note the final comment on that page..
“All the changes in the first six months of 2014 were sufficient to make 2014 the warmest calendar year.”
101
Griss
Here’s my Gavin prediction for 2015…
The 2014 will be adjusted down sometime during the year thereby becoming the new 2014 record. Meanwhile historical records will continue to be adjusted down as 2015 are moved up.
Thus 2015 will be the hottest year ever!! (no matter what the actual temperatures are)
70
Here’s Josh’s
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2015/1/17/look-back-in-wonder-josh-309.html
40
The rebuttal of the Global Warming – Climate Change via man made CO2 hysteria can be made through several avenues but this post is one of the best.
The detail is irrefutable and the only way the likes of Steffen and England can deal with it is to pretend it’s not there.
Don’t laugh, it works for them!
In looking at the qualifications of those from the US it must be kept in mind that while there are many outstanding Universities in many lesser scrutinized places the term BSc can easily relate more to the level of NSW TAFE courses.
That the purpose of the Global Warming hysteria is political is beyond doubt and that “science” has been damaged by it is also beyond doubt.
KK
81
“Will Steffen also says the climate is “complex”, and “impossible to entirely predict”.
Well, that’s interesting! These AGW alarmists are so often predicting climatic doom and gloom 80 or 90 years from now if we don’t do anything to halt our “carbon” emissions – out of one side of their mouth, but out of the other they tell us of uncertainties in prediction. Surely they can’t have it both ways!
Late last November there were solemn predictions in the media that here in Victoria at least we were in for “a long, hot, and dry summer”. Well, it’s now more than half over, and apart from a couple of hot days in the Christmas-New Year period, the max temperature has struggled to get into the 30s, and meanwhile we have had a lot of rain – in early December, plus some more in late December, and then another deluge during January. And the weather has been persistently humid! I well expect that we may have the usual par-for-the-course bouts of hot weather during February, but stone the crows! If these boffins can’t get the next three months right, how can they expect us to take them seriously with their dire predictions for 2100, or thereabouts?? Give me a break!
100
I remember swimming in a white pointer shark area in NZ. ActuallyI I was body surfing with Southern Fur Seals. They were frolicking, so I joined them The nurse that drove me to the beach said, “They’re much better than you are.”
Of course they were. I only went out because they were. It was safe. I also caught some abalone. Delish. If it gets too warm, I’ll haul up Tridacna, like I did in Fiji, which caused the natives of a small island to treat me like royalty, for giving them one of their delicacies.
Then they returned the favor, by letting me into the men’s-only kava ceremony, where I had to drink women-chewed-and-expecotrated kava root. I didn’t think “Ewe”, I thought, “Wow, unbelievable, fazoook, they’ve invited me into their rites.” Then they gave me rock-roasted sea turtle, and gave me the shell, which I got through customs in Hawaii, as it was not then on the CITES treaty, and I still have.
Have you ever been divingat 100 ft, and felt a “whoosh” and looked down, and it was a giant clam, then you grabbed it, filled your buoyancy compensator full, and then had to kick all your night to get to the surface, I made it, but I was close to dropping my weight belt.
50
Steffen, who is a chemistry graduate and PhD, probably relies on Wikipedia for his palaeoclimate information. Incidentally that graph is a masterpiece in chartmanship; it would be just as relevant to show the temperature in Alice Springs at 3pm on January, 21 2004.
Temperature proxy series can at best be greatly smoothed approximations IMO.
When a proxy series suggests the temperature over hundreds of years was, say, 2C high than ‘now’ I assume that’s an average, that at times it was higher (maybe 3C) and at times lower.
Treeline studies indicate that “… conifers have not yet recolonized many areas where trees were present during the Medieval Warm period (ca AD 800–1300) or the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM; ca 10000–3000 years ago) …”.
50
“Steffen, who is a
chemistrychemical engineering graduate and PhD …”.30
Mr Steffen knows Jack-Sh-t about climate science. He is a second rate academic who started life as service crystallographer, namely he did X-ray crystal structures that were brought to him by others (basically a technician). He worked for a friend of mine. He is now retooled as the ANU’s expert on climate change. Surprise?
80
Bruce,
In the early sixties I had a friend who left Australia with a very average Leaving Certificate pass(as was mine) and went to the US.
He returned two and a half years later with a Master of Science degree from a high profile US University.
In Australia at that time the same qualification would have taken a minimum of 5 or 6 years of full time effort.
This does not mean that Will Steffen’s qualifications are worthless, who knows, but his attitude towards real science is obvious and no self respecting scientist would compromise themselves for political or personal financial gain as he does.
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/will-steffen-in-denial-of-entire-holocene/#comment-1669251
KK
30
It is hard not to love Steffen’s ‘guarantee’ of global warming. It has not happened in 20 years of rapid CO2 rise, so you would think this was disproven. However we are told the underlying warming is overwhelmed by (unknown and certainly unpredicted) natural factors? If the natural factors in Steffen’s “complex” system are bigger than the alleged CO2 effect, why are we worried anyway?
How can Steffen in good faith issue a personal guarantee for something which is clearly not happening for reasons he cannot explain?
If we are to presume he knows something which comes from his unique understanding as executive (salaried) Director of the Climate Council, why doesn’t he stop guaranteeing Global Warming and start explaining? In what way is the change which is not happening ‘irreversible’. Or is it just his job to say stuff? At least he is doing his job, probably his last job a 68.
60
The Klimatariat take comfort in the ‘precautionary principle’, which they imagine is a Get Out Of Gaol free card.
30
Of course this silly precautionary principle is a principle at all or even sensible idea given nothing is actually happening. At this rate, nothing will have happened by the time the coal and oil run out anyway.
What does the precautionary principle say about nuclear weapons, Islamic terrorism, world poverty, overpopulation and the next pandemic? Nothing.
20
Sorry, is NOT.
00
In China they imprison people who spread false rumor likely to cause alarm. Rough justice yet entirely appropriate for some of our leading AGW advocates, but this is unlikely to happen.
10
The Climate Institute was parodied by Monty Python as the Institute for putting things on top of other things. It would be hilarious if the world was not paying a billion dollars a day for this fantasy. Steffen is being paid, presumably by Big Wind and Subsidized Solar.
20
Based on the precautionary principle it is far more likely that some catastrophe will befall me if I leave the house, so I should therefore stay home.
Unfortunately my employer does not agree that my assessment that I should remain home due to the precautionary principle means they should pay me for staying home.
Pity.
20
I live in Britain, which is a temperate climate. That means small changes in average temperatures can have very noticeable impacts. For instance
1. In the winter it is not normally cold enough for snow. A small rise in average December to January temperatures would make snow virtually a thing of the past. A small fall (like in the Little Ice Age) could mean lakes frozen for weeks. During the LIA the wealthy had ice houses (inverted bell-shaped and brick-lined pits such as at Dunham Massey, Cheshire) with ice from frozen lakes.
2. Similarly in my area, an average winter will have frost on 20 nights, a mild winter 2-3 nights.
3. Marginal crops, such as grapes, are limited by temperature. The most Northerly commercial vineyard is in Cheshire. The Romans (with more primitive growing techniques) managed to grow grapes by Hadrian’s Wall, 150km further North. Few people manage to grow grapes outside of greenhouses.
4. The only thing warm about the current Orkney Islands is the welcome you get from the local people. The highest temperature recorded in Kirkwall since 1951 is 25.6°C. Yet the islands (and the mainland just to the south) are littered with the remains of ancient monuments, including stone circles and burial chambers. Most prominent is the stone village of Skara Brae, built before the Pyramids in Egypt and abandoned at about the end of the Bronze Age Warm Period in around 2200BC.
70
That explains the wave based erosion of caves on small cliffs on Bigge island off Western Australia, currently over 2 metres above the beach’s high tide mark’, where cave paintings leave a date trail of more than a thousand years. The first of two parts of photos.
60
The second part of photos from Bigge Island, showing cave paintings where early explorers are pictured on the cave walls.
40
The ski hills on the north shore mountains above Vancouver British Columbia are having a somewhat poor season because of the mild winter so far. Well the news caster on Global BC news, Global is very into warming by the way, when announcing the warmest ever recorded used the poor local skiing as proof positive. The meteorologist standing there did not say a word but looked rather uncomfortable. I thought it was hilarious. Also a climate scientist from the University of British Columbia also used the poor ski season as an example of the so called record.
The newscaster left out the warm PDO BC has experienced for years, the unusual disturbance in the gulf of Alaska for the last two years and El Nino though weak.
British Columbia home of Andrew Weaver, David Suzuki, think California, need I say more.
40
Conversely, if the short rise of world temperature at the end of the 20th century was due to steadily rising and exclusively man made CO2, the plateau is a balance with substantial natural forces pushing temperatures down.
Either it is not true or we should be thankful that our CO2 has prevented a collapse of world temperatures. What will happen when we run out of coal and oil?
Then if natural forces can make things go down, why couldn’t they be responsible for things going up in the first place? Will we freeze, Will?
Without experts like Steffen and his clear private understanding of the complex world of weather, we would not understand anything about why nothing is happening. So no change then.
70
Will Steffen in denial of entire Holocene?
Steffen denies Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum? (PETM)
“He (Will Steffen, a global change expert from the Australian National University, telegraph,UK) said that there is evidence of a ‘compost bomb’ around 55 million years ago that caused a huge amount of carbon to be released into the atmosphere all at once.”
Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong
During the PETM, for reasons that are still unknown, the amount of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere rose rapidly.
For this reason, the PETM, which has been identified in hundreds of sediment core samples worldwide, is probably the best ancient climate analogue for present-day Earth.
http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/news2009-07-14-globalwarming.shtml
To see the complete study, visit http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo578.html.
realclimate, August 2009:
To summarise, there is still a great deal of mystery about the PETM – the trigger, where the carbon came from and what happened to it – and the latest research hasn’t tied up all the many loose ends.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/petm-weirdness/
Mystery mechanism drove global warming 55 million years ago
July 13, 2009
http://www.physorg.com/news166715232.html
10
The ANU previously advised us to ignore the facts when it comes to Climate Change.
I guess they’re just following their own advice.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/15/australian-national-university-forget-the-climate-facts-we-need-opinions/
70
Sorry for somewhat OT but had to share this. Wattsupwithat shared this on Facebook.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/19/bigger-problems-than-global-warming-nasa-discovers-8-new-dangerous-near-earth-asteroids/
So I thought I would play the alarmist for a change and posted..
ME:
“As usual Tony you are cherry picking your information. Its is well established by the modeling that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere increases the mass of the planet, thus increasing our gravitational field, which in turn draws in more asteroids. When will people realise we are killing this planet with our emissions. Deniers like you should be locked up!!!”
And talk about come in spinner….
FB Poster:
“So by burning coal/oil/wood(which have mass) the gases which emit from this process add to the planets mass? what has happened to the burnt oil/coal/wood itself? Its a form of energy transference so therefore no mass can possibly be added.
How does an increase in mass increase the planets gravitational field? Considering the greatest minds have been unable to quantify what the mechanisms of gravity actually are or even its source can you please explain your theory?
‘Deniers like you should be locked up!!!’,
typical response from a cult member of the church of AGW hysteria. Youre concerned about CO2 killing this planet while major military conflicts are brewing around the world, pesticide and dioxin residue exist in your food and water and you breathe dust and dangerous gas particulates?
Does anyone in your family have Cancer? Is anyone in your family dying from AGW?
Get a grip on yourself man.”
ME:
“Im pleased at least one person thought I was serious. Shows I havnt lost my ability to spin a good yarn. Have a cup of tea and a giggle on me Bxxxx.”
Made my morning.
80
He he – some of the nonsense alarmists spout is so scientifically illiterate that I probably would have been sucked in by your comment… 🙂
30
It’s true if it’s at least 38% possible.
10
Interesting. Sea level has been falling for nearly 7,000 years? That confuses me because it’s also true that sea level has risen ~130 meters since ~15-18K yrs ago. I suppose both could be true. I did not know that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#mediaviewer/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
10
The 130m rise came from 18k-10k years ago. Then the scale of the graph needs to change as 1 -2 m changes don’t register. When I searched I was surprised there was no cohesive sea level estimate over the last 10k in this small range of 1 – 2m. But if you follow Nils link from Europe in the post you’ll see that it’s a complicated history. I quite like the West Aust study because we do have pretty much the oldest tectonic plate and it is very stable. Nils shows that in Europe sea levels were higher a couple of times in the last 5000 but otherwise were not (I wish his graph showed 8000-5000 years). The Beenstock study shows that even estimating sea level now is very difficult as coastal zones next to each other can move in opposite directions. The land is more mobile than we used to think.
110
Hi DWP
At the end of the great melt about 10,000 years ago there was a bit of an overshoot in terms of sea level.
There have been several oscillations initially down from the 130m level and then back up by 3 or 4 metres then down and finally a 1.2 m drop over the last 2000 years.
Sea levels have fallen over the past 8,000 years but in an oscillating pattern that is almost spent; very little ice remains to be melted and current ocean fluctuations are minimal in terms of past history.
Only Climate Scientists and politicians could make a drama out of this.
Considering that New York Central Park area was under a 1500 metre deep ice field 20,000 years ago and that polar ice fields would be unable to provide more melt even under a considerable temperature rise, things right now are as stable as they ever will be.
KK
20
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/australian-sea-levels-have-been-falling-for-7000-years/#comment-1133940
00
You may find this of interest for more recent variations in sea levels –
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-7939.2000.tb00559.x/abstract
“This paper focuses on the climatic transition between the Little Climatic Optimum (approximately AD 750–1300 or 1200-650 cal yr BP) and the Little Ice Age (approximately AD 1300–1800 or 650-150 cal yr BP) in the Pacific Islands. This transition was marked by rapid temperature and sea-level fall, and perhaps by sharply-increased precipitation associated with an increase in El Nino frequency.”
20
Interesting.
Pacific Island which can incorporate coral markers for sea level would probably be able to register smaller changes than mainland coasts.
Cooler areas like NSW coast does have marine growth but mostly I suspect that variations in sea level would need longer periods to make a visible mark.
The sea level variations observed in in Pacific corral would also have occurred here but don’t register on the geological landscape.
Seems that the seas have more life in them than we thought.
KK
20
What’s this got to do with Will Steffen:
Cold and wet weather from 2013 is likely to reduce wine grape yields throughout the Grampians this year. (ABC 20/01/14)
“Leigh Clarnette, the chairman of Grampians Winemakers, said later than usual frosts in November 2013 will contribute to low yields for this season.
It told the plant there was really no need to produce bunches for the following season, so that means in 2014, the appearance of bunches on the young canes, the young shoots in September, October, we could see this season that we were very short of bunches, which is an extraordinary event,” he said.
~ ~ ~
Warming climate brings earliest vintage on record (ABC 19/10/14)
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Wine grapes will be harvested earlier than ever in parts of Australia this year.
Scientists blame rising temperatures.
LEANNE WEBB: So we’ve attributed at least a third of the response driving this early ripening is due to the warming and drying climate that we’ve been experiencing in southern Australia.
Given that projections are that climate will be warming further, we expect that this pattern will continue.
(March 4, 2013 the Age)
“A few years ago, talking about weather and climate change in the same breath was a cardinal sin for scientists.
Now it has become impossible to have a conversation about the weather without discussing wider climate trends, according to Will Steffen, the report’s lead author and director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute.
The report, The Angry Summer, says behind the litany of broken heat and rainfall records this year, a clear pattern has now emerged.”
. . .
Fortuitously for Will Steffen, he refuses to have a “conversation” with anyone who questions him.
40
alexwade in comments at WUWT:
April 1990 — NASA says the satellite data is more accurate.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/122096963
the report’s authors said that their satellite analysis of the upper atmosphere is more accurate, and should be adopted as the standard way to monitor global temperature change.
So … what does the satellite record say? Not even close to the hottest year ever.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/19/giss-ncdc-need-to-be-more-open-with-the-public-when-making-proclamations-about-global-warming-records/
40
“Greenland has been warmer for a lot of the last 10,000 years. ”
Your graph ends 95 years ago. You will need to add in the last 95 years’-worth of data before making that assertion.
So what happens when you add in the last 95 years, huh?
115
Craig,
Why not add the data yourself and let us know what the result is?
80
“All they have shown is that melting of the ice caps on Baffin Island wasn’t complete during the Holocene and recent warming has continued the melting … “ (Dr. Don Easterbrook).
This simple error in reasoning was pointed out at the time by many blog commenters.
It’s interesting as with Gergis et al. the authors seem so anxious to demonstrate their pet theory viz. that the current conditions are unprecedented and ‘abnormal’ (due to fossil fuel use) that they commit simple errors of reasoning which non-scientists can see immediately but which go over their heads.
60
Good question Craig. I dislike adding modern temps to proxies. I would like it if there was, say, a century of data where icecores and a thermometer station were overlapped and measured temperature. There is some of that, but none of it simple, and the calibration of the two different methods is far from obvious. Often the thermometers are adjusted up too, as well as probably subject to UHI effects, so they overestimate the warming.
I would prefer it if one proxy went all the way to modern times. Those magical proxies seem suspiciously rare. Proxies which “smooth” past temperatures to some degree are hard to connect to modern thermometers which don’t.
Box 2009 Fig 14 appears to suggest a 1 – 1.5C warming since 1850 of the Greenland ice sheet. Though year 2000 temps seems to equal 1950 temps, which doesn’t fit the CO2 driven paradigm. If that’s the case the modern temp “might” be equivalent to -30C on the graph which means that the holocene was still hotter on many occasions and for literally hundreds of years. I’ve edited the sentence in the post that said “a lot of” to “many times” with credit to you for asking. Thanks. But given that there is empirical and actual documentary evidence that Greenland was hotter in the MWP, the -30C line probably overestimates “modern” equivalent.
I note the IPCC graph Box 6.4 fig 1 suggests Greenland was hotter in the MWP than in modern times. (blue line). They claim it was only local warming, but that aside, it suggests that the proper equivalent in the GISP graph is more like -31C or lower (in which case most of the time in the Holocene Greenland was hotter than now.) Even the IPCC concede the evidence or a warmer Greenland in the MWP is unarguable.
And is it 95 years BP from 2000 or from 1950. I think GISP2 may be back to 1855 – again, there’s no good overlap with thermometers if it is and the method of calibration becomes theoretical. It probably deserves not just a whole post but a PhD study.
Given that all the borehole studies, and many of the sea-level, icecore and other proxies show things were warmer for hundreds, if not thousands of years of the holocene the main point of this post stands as is — it is ridiculous to claim humans have not lived in hotter temperatures.
40
Here is the modern temperature record added to the Greenland ice core proxy. Its not a global modern record its a local record. (http://oi53.tinypic.com/sg2wav.jpg)
00
I’ve got an idea – let’s consult the science:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL057188/abstract
“we use 145 radiocarbon dates on rooted tundra plants revealed by receding cold-based ice caps in the eastern Canadian Arctic to show that 5000 years of regional summertime cooling has been reversed, with average summer temperatures of the last ~100 years now higher than during any century in more than 44,000 years, including the peak warmth of the early Holocene when high-latitude summer insolation was 9% greater than present. Reconstructed changes in snowline elevation suggest that summers cooled ~2.7°C over the past 5000 years, approximately twice the response predicted by Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 climate models. Our results indicate that anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases have led to unprecedented regional warmth.”
So….do we arrive at a convenient conclusion based on a graph that excludes the relevant data, or do we rely on professional, published science that includes the relevant data?
117
Craig,
That’s all based purely on the theory that “… anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases have led to unprecedented regional warmth.”
Thousands of your failed CO2 based climate models would tend to disprove that one, Craig.
100
So its as warm now as it was 5000 years ago..
Thank you for playing !!!! 🙂
Please provide the text in their paper that proves the current slight warming is due to anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases…
…. or is that just the obligatory added abstract text to get this paper, showing that it was as warm or warmer 5000 years ago, through the peer-review gatekeepers.
90
“I’ve got an idea – let’s consult the science:” – like that settles anything!
Coherent High-and Low-Latitude Climate Variability During the Holocene Warm Period
Peter deMenocal,1* Joseph Ortiz,1Tom Guilderson,2 Michael Sarnthein3
http://www.sciencemag.org SCIENCEVOL 28823 JUNE 2000 –
“Fig. 4. High-resolution records of the last millennial-scale climate cycle spanning the MWP (occurring between 800 and 1300 A.D.) and the LIA (which occurred between 1300 and 1870 A.D.) (23) from Greenland (24), the western North Atlantic (25), and the eastern subtropical North Atlantic (Hole 658C). The record of Greenland surface temperature variations was reconstructed from glacier borehole temperature data (24) and documents two discrete LIA cooling events centered at ;1500 and ;1870 A.D. Oxygen isotopic analyses of planktonic foraminifera in a well-dated, high-deposition-rate sediment core from the Bermuda Rise (25) also document a twin-event, 1°C cooling signature of the LIA (Fig. 4) that was preceded by the MWP, which was about 1°C warmer. At Hole 658C, the LIA cooling is also indicated by two distinct cooling events of 3° to 4°C amplitude between ;1300 and 1850 A.D.; the earlier MWP between ;800 and 1200 A.D. was only marginally warmer than present. These results suggest that the most recent LIA-MWP climatic cycle occurred synchronously at these three locations within the dating uncertainties.”
More geographically-inclusive, Huang and Pollack (1997)1 searched the large database of terrestrial heat flow measurements compiled by the International Heat Flow Commission of the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth’s Interior for measurements suitable for reconstructing an average ground surface temperature history of the planet over the prior 20,000 years. Working with a total of 6,144 qualifying sets of heat flow data obtained from every continent, they produced a global climate reconstruction, which they said was independent of other proxy interpretations and of any preconceptions or biases as to the nature of the actual climate history. And within this reconstruction of what they called “a global climate history from worldwide observations,” the two researchers found strong evidence that the MWP was indeed warmer than it had been during any prior portion of the 20th century by as much as 0.5°C.
There are many other studies that show similar results and some that don’t. If you want a contest over who has more reports one side or the other go ahead, someone may be interested, but it would prove nothing except that science, especially paleo-sciences are a moving target as techniques and methods are refined.
That said (IMO) we will never know exactly what the temperatures were during this time as we were not there measuring and recording then. So it is all left to honing our theories knowing that there is no definative version that can reveal everything about this era.
70
This is the one study which overturns the scores reconstructions that have indicated the Holocene Optimum, Atlantic Period, Minoan WP, Roman WP and Medieval WP.
Don Easterbrook: ‘The Miller et al. paper is so badly flawed with unwarranted assumptions, poorly thought out assertions, and astonishingly bad logic that their conclusion “temperatures of the past century must have exceeded those of any century in more than 44 ka” cannot be considered valid…Even if the conclusions in the paper were correct, they wouldn’t prove anything about CO2 as the cause of climatic warming….the real purpose of the paper was to push CO2 at the expense of objective science’.
80
Miller et al ….. EVISCERATED ! 🙂
Chewed up, and spat out !!! 🙂
40
“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
— Albert Einstein
40
The science also seems to indicate your assertion about sea level rise in WA is questionable:
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_decades.html
Do you base your assertion on WA on a similarly constructed graph, truncating the relevant data?
116
Nice photo, but the only thing that has been truncated is your capacity to relate to science.
80
“The science also seems to indicate your assertion about sea level rise in WA is questionable:”
No!
Science indicates that there may be doubts, but these have yet to be proved
50
Questionable alright, The Perth plain is sinking at up to 9mm a year due to the withdrawal of significant ground water over the decades,
00
Indeed, the Topex adjusted data is probably quite questionable.
It seems that the point they are using as a reference point may be actually sinking relative other points around it. Whoops !!
This rate has been determined as about 2.3mm/year, bringing Topex very much back in line with the approx. 1 to 1.5mm/yr that has been calculated using stable tide gauges.
Now.. hands up those who are scared by 1.5mm/year or even by 3mm/yr.
btw. Sydney will be flooded soon, by the breakneck sea level rise of 0.65mm/yr !! and probably decelerating !
60
Science is a process. The process is employed in an attempt to determine truths about the natural world we inhabit. It is not an AUTHORITY.
It is disheartening when people are sufficiently illiterate that they resort to reference to “The Science” as though it were some omniscient, omnipotent deity of the Church of Climatology.
80
Well said!
20
It is NOT “the science” will you twits get that through your head? I am so sick of “the science” being held up as though it says anything, “the science” doesn’t say crap.
It is “the data”, “the observations”, “the evidence”, and none of that supports what people like you claim “the science” is saying.
“the science”… You obviously have no clue how stupid you look when you write something like that.
60
Craig has shown time and again that he really has no idea whet “the science” is. !
He’s just parroting “the meme”, just like any good brain-wash alarmist believer.
60
Craig,
Again, CSIRO can statisize all the data they want, but the tide marks on the deep water jetties haven’t changed that much over the lest 100 years.
110
When it comes to sea level rises or not, can’t beat pier review!
90
Scaper,
I have nothing to follow that…
20
Now that is a classic.
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“Humans are living in the hottest temperatures they have ever lived and I can guarantee this will only get worse.” Will Steffen.
It’s like the 97% consensus, you have to first exclude the vast majority of the last 10,000 years+ in order to come up with the ‘hottest ever’.
It’s also a form of projection, which is a major problem within academia.
When he says ‘humans are living in the hottest temperatures they have ever lived’, what he is really referring to is only those humans that ‘matter’ (that is, western Europeans and northern Americans since the Industrial Revolution, once again excluding the vast majority of people who have lived since farming and civilisation), and his guarantee that it ‘will only get worse’ refers to only those academic studies which push an ideological stance on the issue.
Ideology has to feed itself, so those pushing an ideology will continue to make it look as if things are getting worse, even if they aren’t. This is his ‘guarantee’.
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While it is well known that Steffen is a fully paid-up member of the alarmists, we need to be a bit careful about the use of data. The first graph on this post has overlapping error bars for most of the data excluding a few around 6000+ years ago. Overlapping error bars = “difference NOT statistically significant” – much the same as the recent rant about 2014 being the ‘warmest year’!
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Sorry, I was actually referring to the second graph.
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If you look closely, yes the ‘swash’ has a large error, but the ‘coral’ and ‘tubeworm’ have far less error.
The shaded grey area seems reasonable.
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Will Steffen is doing what he’s payed to! And that is to create as much alarm and fear as he possibly can regarding the world’s climate. I feel genuine sympathy for all those gullible people out there who are taken in by his extraordinary claims. At best, I would say that he believes that he is just stretching the truth, but I fear it’s actually worse than that! In my opinion he is no scientist at all – just a charlatan!
Geoff Williams – Sydney
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‘Steffen is doing what he’s payed to’ correct ‘I feel genuine sympathy for all those gullible people out there’ please don’t!
The general population mostly aren’t gullible they’re lazy, people have gotten so complacent about the importance of their role in a good democracy and have essentially handed over their controlling interest to a subversive leftist power masquerading as an elected governments, and for what?
The extravagant pre election promises of handouts and gifts, the sincere pledges of inquests into hyped up terrible social matters that do nothing & go nowhere, the fantastic new technologies that have been sorely needed for years but emerge as costly F#$kups (NBN), tax breaks that simply move money from one area of the ledger to another, I could go on.
All of the above Bullshit system is apparently voted in by the public every 4 years or so with them actually knowing they will not be any better off no matter who you vote for, ask the average person and you’ll pretty much get that answer, so my attitude is if people know something is wrong with the democratic system but are happy enough to accept bribes with their money they have no right to complain as the system succeeds with their failure to confront the wrongs being done, worst is while they can function now the future generations won’t as any democracy will be long gone.
I’ve never felt sympathy for cowards and never will, you reap what you sow.
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19 Jan: Guardian: Larry Elliott: On the Davos agenda: from Al Gore on global
warming to fears over eurozone
Leaders and celebrities flock to Switzerland to discuss Ebola, oil and banks
at World Economic Forum
PHOTO CAPTION: Pop star Pharrell Williams will join former US vice-president
Al Gore at Davos to discuss climate change.
Snow on the roofs of the ski chalets at the upmarket ski resort may be one
of the defining images of Davos, but it will be the warming of the planet
that is at the top of the issues under discussion at the World Economic
Forum…
The energetic Gore is also participating in other events looking at how
business should respond to climate change, alongside Lord Stern, president
of the British Academy, and speakers from the insurance company Axa…
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/18/davos-agenda-al-gore-pharrell-williams-ebola-climate-change-oil
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more fuzzy CAGW figures!
18 Jan: RTCC: Will Evison/Jonathan Grant: Costing the climate: Four ways to price carbon
A recent study put the social cost of emitting a tonne of CO2 at US$220. An EU allowance costs $8. Why the gap?
Two Stanford academics caused a stir last week suggesting that the true social cost of carbon is $220. This is six times higher than the figure the US government uses to guide policymaking.
The contrast with the market price of carbon is even greater: an EU carbon allowance currently costs around $8…
The social cost of carbon is based on estimates of the total cost of climate impacts. Assessing these costs is challenging and subject to a range of
assumptions. The choice of discount rate is often critical but other factors are relevant, such as the climate model used, the approach to valuing
damages and the potential for impacts on economic growth. As a result, estimates range from below zero, implying that net climate impacts could be slightly positive, to over $1,000 per tonne, suggesting they could be catastrophic. Clearly, these are extreme outliers…
Rather than generate our own social cost from first principles, we analysed over 60 recent papers containing 350 different estimates to derive our
figure…READ ON IF U CARE…
(Will Evison is assistant director of environmental economics and Jonathan Grant is director of sustainability and climate change at PwC)
http://www.rtcc.org/2015/01/19/costing-the-climate-four-ways-to-price-carbon/
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“suggesting that the true social cost of carbon is $220/t”
I’m sure they meant..
“that the true social BENEFIT of carbon is $220/t”
Increasing the atmospheric CO2 level is totally beneficial to all life on Earth.
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There goes refrigeration for every human on Planet Earth with refrigerant gases costing an average (at this equivalent rate of CO2/$220 Tonne) $220,000/tonne. (starting at around $100,000/tonne up to $2.6 Million/tonne) That of itself prices refrigerators out of the market completely, and even could Coles and Woolies afford their fridges, the costs they would have to pass on would be horrendously huge, hence the economy goes out the window, eh!
Every building taller than 2 levels also becomes an empty shell as the owners could not afford to absorb the cost of running the units on the roofs of every one of them, hence no circulated breathing air into and out of those buildings rendering them uninhabitable, be it for living or working.
I guess ruminant animal farming and grazing also goes by the by with Methane costed at $4,620/Tonne, at this equivalent $220/tonne/CO2 rate.
Sometimes people who quote ridiculous figures like that $220 per Tonne really need to look at what the UN is demanding with its list of equivalent gases and their costings, a list now enshrined in Legislation of every Country with an ETS, and also now in Australian legislation, just waiting for Labor to re-introduce a price on Carbon
There are consequences of bumping up the price they place on CO2, and I’ll bet no one is aware of the wider ramifications.
Tony.
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I don’t understand the negative degree scale on the right hand side. It is listed as being in degrees centigrade.
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If I told a group of journalist that I had found a mountain that was higher than Mount Everest, they would probably ask a few questions.
So how come when a NOBODY says that 2014 was the hottest year on “record” (whatever a record might be), the journos do not ask a few questions?
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Apparent contradicting studies proving or disproving that the climate is or is not warming, which will or will not be a catastrophe…..To all of the AGW supporters: You would have us believe that we are facing an unmitigated disaster on the order of a nuclear holocaust. Yet when we look at your solutions it is clear that you are not at all serious; windmills, solar panels and, my favorite, CFLs, none of which reduce CO2 to any measurable extent. Here in the US they speak of CAP and TRADE, CAP not reduction. Your solutions are the ‘duck and cover’ suggestions we faced in the 60’s at the peak of the Cold War, hide under your desk when you see a nuclear fireball. Faced with cancer the recommendations are nearly as severe as the disease. Faced with a climactic Armageddon your recommendations only provide a source of revenue and a mechanism of control to government. ” A ten mile wide comet is heading for earth, put tape on your windows and stay inside!” The absurdity of your solution revealing the absurdity of your cause.
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