The Hockey Stick and the Disappearing Medieval Warm Period

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Why are you accusing me of dishonesty? I've made it crystal clear from my first post that I had a problem with the tone of this debate. If you thought it was tangential, you could have avoided replying repeatedly.


If you're trying to say you don't sling mud and pointing to your first post as evidence, you should reread the part where you say your opponents have "viewpoints that can only be explained by malice or willful ignorance".


Do you think this will impress people who are undecided on the issue, to see you deliberately disrespect your opponents? I think it's more likely to make them lose respect for your position than for theirs.

Its unfortunate that the concept of denialism and why it is unworthy of respect is apparently alien to your mind, because I doubt there is any way I will explain it to you that will be satisfactory

And I should add, calling a position denialist is disrespecting the position, not the person. Though conveniently the most public denialists waste no time painting ad hominems ad nauseum. Instead of actually putting some science on the table

There is no debate in the scientific community, the vast majority have reached a consensus and now the question is what caused the change. The lobbies maintaining this debate on whether it is changing at all in the public forum (aka, people who care about their bottom line, and not about science that they believe intrudes upon it) pattern their approach almost to the letter after the tobacco companies campaigns of disinformation. They have only their business interests in mind

Ruveyn earns the label denialist because he repeats the exact same criticisms that I already spend a great deal of time explaining and addressed a long time ago.

Yea, any climate scientist who doesn't take the skeptic position is accused not just of being mistaken but of being a liar, conspirator, environmental radical, etc... which has absolutely nothing to do with the science itself. Attacking the messenger of a theory because you don't like the potential policy implications of that theory is blatant intellectual dishonesty.

Cough-cough...ruveyn...cough-cough.

Well, to be fair he attacks the theory itself (often inconsistently) more so than the scientists.

A good article. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There is truth in all positions, but none excludes the others.

Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, and there can be no doubt that it will cause a warming, and is caused by humans, in the form of farts.

Three years ago it snowed in Dec., Two years ago we got 27" of rain. This Dec was dry, and warm. Based on this science, within ten years it will be raining fire on a desert.

Over a longer baseline, ice ages are 5 degrees cooler, warm periods three degrees warmer. The greatest divergence from the baseline happened long before humans passed significant gas.

If CO2 was the cause, the unchecked burning of Austrailia, man made, and other forests, should have lead to warm periods, but the era is marked by two ice ages. Humans were few, but Mammoth farts were mammoth.

Between the last two ice ages was the warmest period in recent time, Several degrees above the baseline, sea level seven meters higher, which means an ice free Anartica, Greenland, and Arctic Ocean.

This runaway climate ended when with a drop of eight degrees we plunged into a deep ice age.

This points to some major influance outside the Earth System.

Even our largest local events, Krakatoa, caused a one degree drop that lasted a couple of years. Maybe the Yellowstone Caldera could produce the sudden eight degree cooling we see in records, but it would leave a large record of it's own.

Humans do change the weather, and doing it for long enough the climate. The Middle East was green, the breadbasket, till farmed to sand and irrigated with saline water. But that seems a local event within the sudden drying event that formed the Sahara from the Atlantic and reached the Gobi Grassland, forming deserts where there were farms and pasture.

Humans do affect climate, but in a way minor compared to the change seen from a non human outside source.

Human caused climate change comes in somewhat lower than Termite caused climate change.

It boggles my mind how anyone can reasonably argue that this is insignificant.



Carbon dioxide levels have been higher in the past, but only when the earth had a much warmer climate with a much greater land biomass. What we've been doing for the past 200 years is putting all the carbon from that 60 million year old biomass that was buried deep in the bedrock for millions of years back into the atmosphere. It will take millenia for all we've put into the air settle out again.

On the upside we probably won't fall into another major ice age for some time now.

Some more interesting graphs...

The linked article you provided was written by Daly in November of 2000.

Statistical failings, regarding that original "hockey stick graph" research by Mann were found by the National Research council in 2006, but it was concluded that those failings did not significantly effect the results of the initial research.

Since that time the real science of replication has provided evidence to support those original findings by Mann.

The criticism by Daly and others was warranted and has been answered by the scientific method.

Criticism of a theory doesn't put a stake in the heart of a theory; that requires the scientific method and replication that either supports or refutes the results.



Per the last post, the potential unwitting avoidance of another iceage is a positive way of looking at the situation. The carbon emission train appears to be moving steady, full speed ahead, unless the world is successful in implementing effective alternative sources of energy.

The greatest potential for global calamity, or more immediate climate change, may be the "fallout", from politics, determined by world dependence on foreign sources of oil.

If climate change science can significantly influence changes to mitigate the oil habit, those scientists might deserve a part of the nobel peace prize.

The last thing should do is politicize scientific research and application. If the scientists want to do our planet a good turn, they ought to figure out cheap enough energy technologies to replace the burning of hydrocarbons.

ruveyn

It doesn't seem likely that there will be anything as cheap as bio/fossil fuels (besides fission-reactors and hydro-electric) in the near future. Other energy sources will become cheaper only when the current bio/fossil sources become more expensive due to depletion of easily accessible reserves and/or conflicts.