Earth: The Climate Wars

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by forfi

So if the Little Ice Age did not happen,is there another explaination for this ?

where does it say that the little ice age didnt happen ? - what it says is that the meadival warm period wasnt as warm as some climate sceptics say.

Anyway I'm not going to be dragged into yet another fruitless debate - we have at least three threads running for this argument and it would be a shame to hijack this one into being a fourth.

[forfi]

Originally Posted by eeyore

from bbc news earlier this month (probably a bit more credible a source than "a bloke in the cayman islands")

This" bloke" is a retired power engineer,a useful qualification and a credible source.As he is retired he most likely earned his degree in times when such things were earned and not handed out like sweeties.

[forfi]

Originally Posted by eeyore

where does it say that the little ice age didnt happen ?.

In Mann's hockey stick and lots of other contrived sources.I am merely pointing out that it is a bit silly for people to bemoan the loss of glaciers while being in denial of the event that formed them.I use that report to illustrate the point.

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by forfi

This" bloke" is a retired power engineer,a useful qualification and a credible source.As he is retired he most likely earned his degree in times when such things were earned and not handed out like sweeties.

that may be so i'm not questiong his qualification in his field but he clearly doesnt understand even the basic concepts on which the global warming argument is based.

for example one cold winter (or more accurately a winter that is cold in some areas - i dont recall it being outstandinly cold here) doesnt "set global warming back 10 years" as GW is about the mean average global temperature increasing

[RobSutton]

Originally Posted by eeyore

where does it say that the little ice age didnt happen ? - what it says is that the meadival warm period wasnt as warm as some climate sceptics say.

Anyway I'm not going to be dragged into yet another fruitless debate - we have at least three threads running for this argument and it would be a shame to hijack this one into being a fourth.

I quite agree - shame that someone has hijacked the thread with the same old reiteration of arguments with little or no new insights. I'm sure lots of you have found it already but there is quite a nice website that gives a very useful refutation of the supposed problems of the little ice age and medieval warm period and many other discussions of climate change:

RealClimate

To summarise the ideas very simplistically I think this is what they say - the little ice age and medieval warm periods were local or regional phenomena and were not reflected in the overall global temperatures as determined by many of the proxy temperature records (data from sea bed cores and the like).

[forfi]

Solar modulation of Little Ice Age climate in the tropical Andes — PNAS

[forfi]

Also working with lake sediment data were Zhang et al. (2004), who developed a salinity history of Qinghai Lake (the largest inland saline lake in China) for the period AD 1100-2000 using ostracod shell-length information derived from a 114-cm sediment core and a relationship between ostracod shell-length and salinity that was developed by Yin et al. (2001) from data gathered from fifty lakes of different salinities scattered across the Tibetan Plateau. They report that "low salinity during 1160-1290 AD showed the humid climate condition [of] the Medieval Warm Period in this area, while the high salinity during 1410-1540 AD, 1610-1670 AD and 1770-1850 AD [corresponded with] the three cold pulses of the Little Ice Age with a dry climate condition," where the evidence for the occurrence of these warm and cold intervals comes from the climate change studies of Yao et al. (1990) and Wang (2001).

China,all the papers quoted are on line..somewhere.

[RobSutton]

These are old and well rehearsed arguments that simply cherry-pick sets of data for regions of the world that happen to fit in with the views of the climate sceptics. For each of these periods whether warm (mediaeval warm period) or cold (little ice age) there are other data sets for other regions that show the opposite pattern. They all need to be averaged out to give a global temperature or at the very least a hemispheric temperature. Manns "hockey stick" graph is based on such global averages and are not simply figures for odd regions of the world unlike the studies you higlight. Yes bits of Western Europe or China might have been warmer in the mediaeval warm period - others bits of the world were not and on average neither was the world.

I get the feeling that there really is no further point in me continuing in this discussion the overwhelming body of evidence collected by climate scientist points in one direction, you can select odd little bits of data to support your own agenda or indeed any hypothesis and that is all you are doing.

[forfi]

Originally Posted by RobSutton

These are old and well rehearsed arguments that simply cherry-pick sets of data for regions of the world that happen to fit in with the views of the climate sceptics. For each of these periods whether warm (mediaeval warm period) or cold (little ice age) there are other data sets for other regions that show the opposite pattern. They all need to be averaged out to give a global temperature or at the very least a hemispheric temperature. Manns "hockey stick" graph is based on such global averages and are not simply figures for odd regions of the world unlike the studies you higlight. Yes bits of Western Europe or China might have been warmer in the mediaeval warm period - others bits of the world were not and on average neither was the world.

I get the feeling that there really is no further point in me continuing in this discussion the overwhelming body of evidence collected by climate scientist points in one direction, you can select odd little bits of data to support your own agenda or indeed any hypothesis and that is all you are doing.

Cherry picking? The papers from China are just 2 of the 33 that I have to hand. Similar research is available globally.
Manns hockey stick is based on data collected from car-parks and roof tops and ohter dubious places.Have you ever heard of the ice fairs held on the Thames ? Is that an odd bit of data?

I don't have an agenda,but I do have an aversion to politically inspired numpties trying to scare the hell out of people with bad science.

the overwhelming body of evidence collected by climate scientist points in one direction

Do you mean the scientists allied to the IPCC? All 2500 of them? There are some 400,000 science grads. in India each year,just to put a perspective on the numbers game. And make no mistake about it, not all of those attached to the IPCC are climate specialists either.You are no doubt aware that there is satillite data in the public realm showing that the global temperatures have been dropping?
I will consider Manns output again when I recieve a satisfactory explaination of the missing series from his latest efforts.
Which fairy tale is correct,Dickens and the ice fairs or Mann and the hockey stick ? Dickens is by far the better writer,maybe I am biased.

[StuartDH]

forfi, have you watched the BBC's "Earth: The Climate Wars" series? Especially episode 2:

BBC iPlayer - Earth: The Climate Wars: Fightback

Take 1 hour to view it and I think it'll answer many of the issues you have