Guest post by by Michael A. Lewis, Ph.D.
In my work as an archaeologist in Alaska, I spent a good swat of my time hiking through forests along the Yukon River, scrambling over piles of driftwood along the northwest coast and pulling roof beams and house posts out of 2,000 year-old dwelling sites on St. Lawrence Island.
The object of my quest? Tree rings.
From hundreds of core samples and cross-section “cookies,” I developed a regional tree ring climate chronology that I compared with archaeological records of human population movements across the Bering Strait over the past 2,500 years. One thing stood out clearly in both independent data sets:
About a thousand years ago, a remarkable change occurred among all Arctic peoples from Siberia to Greenland in a period of less than 200 years. People moved long distances. New technologies supplanted old. Ground slate harpoon blades replaced chipped stone. The sea mammal hunting Thule people of Northern Canada completely replaced the land based Dorset culture that had been in place for thousands of years. The Inuit language spread from Northwestern Alaska to Greenland, the greatest areal extent of any language on earth. Whale hunters migrated across northern Canada, following whales across the ice-free Arctic Ocean.
The tree ring record reflected these cultural changes. Across the Bering Strait and into Interior Alaska, increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns were recorded in tree rings from Siberia to Fort Yukon around 1,000 BP.
Something was afoot and my further research revealed the Alaskan signature of the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) that had been experienced across North America, Iceland, Greenland and Europe.
So you can imagine my surprise to see the infamous Hockey Stick graph appear in the 2001 IPCC Report, completely missing the MWP that I knew from multiple independent data sets, as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Greenland. Later IPCC reports and subsequent media hype increased my discomfort with the concepts of Anthropogenic Global Warming and the insistence that presently observed climate change is driven primarily by human greenhouse gas emissions.
Archaeologists are “hard” scientists, driven by data, uniformitarianism, and a deep time perspective on human and natural history. My research demonstrated that humans had reacted to complex climate variation from Lake Baikal to Greenland over the past 100,000 years, climate variations that occurred in the complete absence of human greenhouse gas emissions. I see no reason to accept the automatic assumption that observed rising CO2 levels are solely the result of human emissions, or that the observed increase is significant with respect to the geological record of CO2 and temperature fluctuations.
It makes much more sense to me to view the present dynamic climatic situation in light of historical and geological records, particularly those of the past 2,000 years, for which we have independent data sets to confirm our findings. Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu has presented this perspective with remarkable clarity in his paper, On the recovery from the Little Ice Age, Natural Science, Vol.2, No.11, 1211-1224 (2010) http://www.scirp.org/journal/NS/
From this perspective, observed climate fluctuation is viewed as a continuation of natural geological and physical processes, in this case, recovery from the Little Ice Age.
This is not to say that human emissions do not contribute to climate fluctuation. However, we cannot understand the extent of human contributions until we fully understand the ongoing natural forces that have shaped the Earth’s climate for millennia before humans appeared on the scene.
Oh, and about smoking… in those days of yore in the wilds of Alaska, I used to smoke a pipe to wile away the lonely hours in tents and log cabins across the Arctic landscape. As my work shifted from field to laboratory, I gradually eschewed the fragrant clouds of tobacco smoke, until the day I realized I no longer enjoyed smoking.
I’m still working on the Global Warming part.
In the above article, you say, ” Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland. ” I think that should read Greenland instead of Iceland.
I really like that graph, I’m going to add it to http://wermenh.com/climate/6000.html , my look at the glacial retreat 5000-7000 years ago. Is there an English variant of the site or paper it’s from?
Piers Corbyn was on FoxNews this morning. Seems like Fox will be covering Climate Change more in the coming year or 2. 🙂
Did you mean to say “brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland” or “brought to an end the European occupation of [Greenland]”?
Welcome. Your perspectives on the Arctic cultures are very interesting.
“…….the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland.” I think you mean Greenland. Iceland has remained European since the Vikings first arrived there, pretty well at the begining of the Medieaval Warm Period.
We represent Sue Grabbit & Runne, special litigation attorneys to Michael Mann and the Team.
We wish to inform you that all historical climate data, not previously approved by the Team, are deemed false and may not be publicly stated without incurring severe legal and financial penalties.
We require you to make an immediate public statement retracting the contents of the above article, as well as confirming in writing you had misinterpreted your data and that you now accept the so called Medieval Warming Period did not exist.
Please advise us by return of your complete and unreserved acceptance of our clients’ demands.
Excellent post. Glad you quit smoking, and also glad you enjoyed it while you did smoke. One correction: Europeans still occupy Iceland, but left Greenland after the MWP, as you certainly know.
Your description of walking through the Alaskan landscape brings to mind exactly why, as I get older, I am moving further and further away from concrete.
Many thanks for a good article Michael.
I noted one typo: “as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland”. Should be “…an end the European occupation of Greenland”.
Regards
Agust
Iceland
The Hantemirov graph indicates the MWP was a fairly modest warm spell, compared to that around 1000BC for example. Any ideas why the knowledge diffusion you document took place then, rather than in earlier cycles?
Great article!
typo:
“… as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland. ”
That should be Greenland.
Shouldn’t the sentence: “as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland” read “bla bla bla …. European occupation of Greenland”?
“The tree ring record reflected these cultural changes. ”
Those must be some tree rings, Doctor Lewis.
Great post! Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences with all of us.
I can still recall the day some fool claimed that the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age did not really happen! It was as if someone walked up and claimed the sun really rises in the south!
Re: “European occupation of Iceland”. Should be ‘Greenland’
You mean “the European occupation of GREENLAND” Iceland is still occupied.
There you go, bringing in “hard” science again. We all know the “real” science is being done by the computer models that show for a fact that mankind is to blame for the runaway temperatures that we are now experiencing.
/sarc off
Simple and to the point. I wonder how the MWP has been erased in so many peoples minds? Thank you for this post. We need to ask why has Hansen, Gore and others pushed an agenda so hard that they have fabricated a new history.
Typo: it was the European settlements in Greenland that perished in the LIA. The icelanders survived the LIA, but only just.
The scary thing about that graph is how quickly it can swing from warm to cold.
This word you keep using, consensus. I do not think it means what you think it means.
However, we cannot understand the extent of human contributions until we fully understand the ongoing natural forces that have shaped the Earth’s climate for millennia before humans appeared on the scene.
Truer words were never spoken…
Thank you for this post Michael A. Lewis. It gave me great satisfaction to read it and hope you “hard” scientists can get together and publish a paper that discredits the ‘hockey stick’.
You certainly have all the ammunition you need. Where you will find a publisher I cannot say and what does that say about the world we live in today?
Fantastic article. This demonstrates why we should always insist upon an interdisciplinary perspective on human questions and avoid taking for granted the untested methodologies of such “new sciences” as those practiced by “climate scientists.” Anthropologists in the Boasian tradition are taught the “four field” approach – we need archaeology, cultural anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and physical anthropology working in concert to make reliable reconstructions of past human societies. Likewise, those studying the earth’s climate history would be well advised to at least occasionally remove their heads from their computer models and consult with colleagues, such as Professor Lewis, who can bring a different, and possible corrective, perspective to bear on some of the more dubious warrants of their arguments.
Thank you, Dr. Lewis!
One minor quibble Doctor Lewis.
The LIA brought an end to European occupation of Greenland NOT Iceland.
Excellent post with a nice touch of wry humour as an ending.
Having read some (translated) first-hand accounts of the Viking occupation of Greenland and realised the parallel of the epic voyages of discovery carried out in the same period by Polynesian explorers of the Pacific Ocean, which could only have occurred during an extended period of warmish weather, the infamous Hockey Stick graph which attempted to deny the existence of the MWP as a global event irritated me intensely when I became aware of it.
“…completely missing the MWP that I knew from multiple independent data sets, as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland.”
Dr. Lewis, did you mean Greenland instead of Iceland?
Eyeing the chart, it looks to me like the trend is down.
amazing doesnt begin to describe the way some so called scientists have managed to ignore or smooth out… so much past historical proof that its a Cycle! and co2 isnt the cause of much if anything.
as I sit shivering in an Aussie summer cold wave.. the only warmth I am generating is Rage! at the liars and idiots pushing the warmist agenda.
Did you mean end of occupation of Greenland in stead of Iceland?
Typo alert!
“that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland.” — Do you mean Greenland?
Tallbloke – Not only that , but notice how much longer the cold periods last , at least for the last five thousand years or so .
Shouldn’t that be “European occupation of Greenland.” not Iceland?
Just eye-balling the graph, I’d say there’s a distinct warm period from 5,000 BC to 2,600 BC, an intermediate period between 2,600 BC to 400 AD, followed by a cooler period from 400 AD to 2,000 AD. It appears the area from which the tree rings have been gathered has experienced a distinct cooling trend over the past 7,000 years. I’ve seen this same trend in other interglacials until the temperature drop-off into another ice age.
An interesting piece of info which slots in well with the Viking Greenlander complaints of an influx of Inuit competing for resources.
Anomalies from what?
The only problem with doing this sort of analysis is that it deals with only a single place. The Roman Warming Period shows up on this graph as a highly negative anomaly. I will assume that the area he measured was quite cool. However, archeological evidence in Europe shows a much warmer summer at the same period.
Greenland surely?
“So you can imagine my surprise to see the infamous Hockey Stick graph appear in the 2001 IPCC Report, completely missing the MWP that I knew from multiple independent data sets, as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland. “
typo ‘aerial’ should be ‘areal’?
And how often!
I had the same reaction to Gore’s presentation of the “hockey-Stick’ graph. After seeing temperature reconstructions since 1960, in archeological contexts, it was as if someone was rewriting history. Even the IPCC’s AR1 graph looked ‘normal’ in the context of history, see here: http://i39.tinypic.com/bgemm9.jpg
tallbloke says:
December 27, 2010 at 6:19 am
The scary thing about that graph is how quickly it can swing from warm to cold.
=========================================================
and how close it matches what little we know about the PDO
A pipe is also good at keeping mosquitos away, but you don’t need to worry about that in the lab.
I would guess too that through a century or two of warmer weather in the north, Scandinavian populations expand dramatically. And when climate gets cold and stays cold, they head south looking for plunder and eventually new places to live.
Paragraph 6: “..Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Iceland.”
Should be Greenland.
“My research demonstrated that humans had reacted to complex climate variation from Lake Baikal to Greenland over the past 100,000 years, climate variations that occurred in the complete absence of human greenhouse gas emissions. ”
Where have you published your results? I would enjoy reading more about your research.
Natural Science, Vol.2, No.11, 1211-1224 (2010) http://www.scirp.org/journal/NS/“
A quick googling of “Scientific Research Publishing” who publish this journal suggests that this journal is suspect — that they republish articles without permission and list people on the editorial boards without getting their permission. It would be nice to have an additional reference to a more established journal.
Another source suggests:
This is different from your conclusion “my further research revealed the Alaskan signature of the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) that had been experienced across North America, Iceland, Greenland and Europe.”
What specifically in your research shows that these published papers are wrong and your conclusions are right?
Also, what region is covered by the graph you show? Where were those tree rings collected and how was proxy tree ring data converted to temperatures? Furthermore, I don’t see much of a MWP in the graph. There is a slight warming around 1000, but a larger warming around 1500 at the start of the Little Ice Age.
And, of course, a much larger warming in modern times.
Variation on Greenland vs Iceland. I’ve read a few papers regarding the climate effects on Greenland, but can anyone recommend reading regarding population pressures or changes on Iceland during the same interval? I imagine it must have been quite a harsh place during the LIA. Strange how humanity seems to thrive during warm climate intervals, and suffers during cold ones.
(that last bit is /sarc btw)
Is the most recent warm spike dendro or instrumental? Given the well documented “divergence” – dendro decline vs instrumental rise since 1960, I would guess it is instrumental. Should the last spike be corrected?
tallbloke says:
December 27, 2010 at 6:19 am
The scary thing about that graph is how quickly it can swing from warm to cold.
More scary: How sea waves could freeze in less than the blink of an eye. The following images are from Antarctica:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32858301/Frozen-Wave
Thanks all for the Greenland typo catch. While folks in Iceland did suffer during the MWP, they were able to hang on by concentrating on available resources such as cod.
As always, WUWT is the home of intelligent, thinking readers. It’s a pleasure to be here.
The tree ring graphic doesn’t appear to support the MWP that lead to the “remarkable change” discussed in the article.
The 4th paragraph makes quite an assertion “The tree ring record reflected these cultural changes. Across the Bering Strait and into Interior Alaska, increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns were recorded in tree rings from Siberia to Fort Yukon around 1,000 BP.”
A really good article.
PS ..all those Greenland/Iceland comments reveal the sad truth that most posters do not read the posts of others.
TallBloke I noted also the apparent downward trend from BC but then the noticeable RED spike at the 2000 mark.
What is interesting is that if you look at the LAMB papers his past temperature trend through most of the recent ice ages shows a ‘sharp’ rise in temperature from a long plateau and then a ‘sudden’ drop into the following ice age.
Interesting article. But I still don’t think that trees are very good thermometers.
CAGW is an end-of-world cult with no set date for the worlds destruction. In this way it’s a much harder Sasquatch to kill than your average doomsday cult scenario, such as Y2K. Those that have already accepted the premise as being true are faced with a choice every time the data goes against them, “Do I accept that I may have been wrong all of these years with my alarmism, or do I accept that man’s influence is more complicated than I thought?” You can’t fault them for finding ways to not face the music, anyone would. You also can’t fault them for finding the second part of the choice plausible, as certainly it is an easily acceptable statement that man’s influence on the world is complicated. You can fault them for trying to convert you, which they do just as quickly as any Jehovah’s Witness at your door.
In some ways, I think we’re witnessing a wave of human cognitive disruption the size of which we’ve never before seen. I remember the build up to Y2K, I remember all the doomsday predictions. I remember famous people publicly declaring they were moving to their well-stocked wind-powered burm-homes in the middle of the U.S. What’s hilarious is that with each passing day I find myself realizing that Y2K was a bigger threat than AGW ever was.
More interestingly in contrast: the worlds businesses responded to Y2K. They realized there was a real threat to business and they didn’t want to be the one major company who was unable to do make money after the calendar shift. There was an entire industry of people who worked at fixing the issues and resolving the real problems. Most of this happened (to their shame) outside of the media’s vision, so that when Y2K went off without a single major hitch… they were all left with nothing to say. By comparison, I see no real old-world business response to CAGW. One has to note this, as it should make you stop and think if you believe CAGW to be the truth.
Now the world’s fears (without a world fear, it seems the world will invent one) are directed towards the burning of fuel and the warming of climate that will supposedly come from it. I grew up in a cult. I’ve seen adults deliberately living in fear of an “end time” because they felt they simply knew the truth of existence when their heathen neighbors did not. These adults desperately clung to their belief because they had rationalized themselves into believing that everyone else was just ignorant. These people quit their jobs and put their families of in turmoil because of their beliefs. They subjected their children to ridicule at public school due to their beliefs. They divorced because of their beliefs. They even disowned their own blood, all because it was easier to accept that someone else is stupid than all the years of self-righteous preaching was vanity. It was just too big of an earthquake in thinking to go back and eat crow.
Supposing a sudden event forces a re-think of their position (fast glaciation?), it will still take years before any significant number of these cultish believers sing a different tune. We’re not even seeing the beginnings of such an event as far as I can see. Climategate, as disgusting as it was to read those e-mails, was more like the first firecracker of the 4th of July; it was a small bang that let you know what was coming but not enough to make you jump. Many of these people tied to CAGW will cling to their belief in cataclysm to their last breath on some normal partly-cloudy day decades in the future. They’ll be waving the flags of impending doom well after the next world food crisis is solved.
I look at all of that, having come out of a childhood where critical thinking was denied me, and I literally tear up at the silent human suffering in all of it. It is such a waste. Humanity has in the past challenged itself. Now with the world fully explored and everyone rejecting the push for a frontier existence, we invent ways to fear our own shadow. Pioneers 200 years ago had plenty to fear, from disease, malnutrition, a harsh winter, etc… those people had real fears in their lives and they suffered daily. In their efforts they also laid the foundation for a modern world so comfortable no one would have predicted it.
My fear is that humanity will continue to artificially construct its own next challenges. My fear is that the trap of intelligent life in the universe is quite literally being too capable of imagination for their own good. It may not be some weird and as-yet unknown fact of physics that makes interstellar travel impossible that keeps aliens from visiting. It may not be some planet-wide war that kills intelligent life off. It could instead be the inevitable plunge into our own mental fancies that keeps us from realizing the challenges we could be accepting. There seems to be a real reason humans sometimes accomplish more while under the influence of alcohol, their imagined and cherished fears are removed.
With that said, I fear I may be out of beer.
Yep, warmer is better. Ask the vikings who disappeared from Greenland as a result of the the Little Ice Age.
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Tony
What a great name! You are right-people seem to read the article but then go straight to the Leave A reply section. That is a shame as on a long thread the comments can add a great deal to the article.
Incidentally Michael A Lewis, that was a very nice article. Your very first graphic shows summer anomalies. Is this for Alaska? The Arctic generally? A world View?
Tonyb
Pederson et al studied drought variability of the Rocky Mountain region, especially Glacier National Park, during 1540-2000, found definite decadal and multidecadal swings, and noted a pronounced wet period in the later stages of the Little Ice Age.
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/cirmount/wkgrps/ecosys_resp/postings/pdf/pederson_etal2006.pdf
Tony said :
PS ..all those Greenland/Iceland comments reveal the sad truth that most posters do not read the posts of others.
I’d be inclined to put the blame on comments waiting in a moderation queue, so no-one sees anyone else commenting, and then all the comments turn up at once.
(I haven’t seen anyone else making this comment yet!)
tonyb and Tony,
Methinks we also need to be aware that comments do not appear instantaneously. For example, when I made my comment about Greenland, there was only one visible comment — that by tallbloke. Now revisiting several hours later, there are tweny comments above tallbloke’s comment that were not there when I read the post initially. It isn’t always a matter of people just jumping to comment without reading, although I’m sure that also happens.
You are jumping to a wrong conclusion. The many similar comments resulted from not yet being able to see the prior comments still awaiting approval by the moderators.
What will future historians tell? …..Americans then migrated to…..
Many may be wondering about the strange association, made by the author, between non smoking and global warming. Well: both were invented by the same people.
Actually – the Vikings enjoyed nothing more than perilous voyages to bury timber under permafrost, in order to annoy the archeologists of the future.
How do we know this? Global Circulation Models, of course. These are able to faithfully reproduce their input data and show that current warming is caused by human produced CO2. Hence, it was significantly colder in medieval times, and hence the Viking (etc.) remains on Greenland must have been placed there when it was colder than it is now.
All assertions to the contrary are churlish.
(I’m voting for swath in the first line)
The temperature graph doesn’t seem right. There must have been greater temperature differences between the hot periods and the cold periods.
A few days ago, Canadian media published an article about scientists finding 2 million years old fossilized remnants of a forest on the Baffin Island. The spin was that it will help scientists determine how plants adapt to warmer climate. They missed the whole forest !!! The question should be what caused this warm climate so far up North.
I bet it was not CO2.
One correction to the correction:
No. The Europeans (in this case Vikings) were decimated by the rapidly deteriorating climate as the globe ran downhill towards the Little Ice Age. They were trapped by lack of timber to make ships, or open harbours which became blocked by advancing glaciers so that their relatives in Iceland and Scandinavia could no longer reach them. Iceland and Scandinavia had extremely harsh climatic conditions as well and suffered large population losses.
The Vikings became extinct in Greenland. And their entire culture was buried by ice and permafrost that has recently begun to melt and reveal what was there.
When people glibly talk of geoengineering to cool the planet, I find myself wondering about the pathetic deaths of the Vikings of Greenland, and shudder.
It’s normal for forests to grow on Baffin Island, until the most glaciations in the most recent 6 million years. The real question is to ask why it has been so extraordinarily cold compared to the last 550 million years?
Your very first graphic shows summer anomalies. Is this for Alaska? The Arctic generally? A world View?
tonyb
tonyb, the file name for the graphic is ‘yamal503.gif’, so I’d guess it’s data derived from the Yamal tree ring series. The Yamal peninsula lies about 130deg west of Alaska, and about 3 or 4deg higher. I don’t know where on the Yamal the series was taken from but I would guess the souther end of the peninsula. In general I’d think the climate is similar to the North Slope of Alaska- really cold in the winter, really short summer.
The name on the file is Yamal. This might provide a clue as to where the data originated (also the cited author is Hantemirov, a Russian who has studied Yamal).
Doug
Yamal eh? Mmmm
Tonyb
All
Fair comments about many people commenting on the greenland/iceland mistake as the comments had not yet appeared on the screen. How many times have I thought I was the very first to comment on a new thread ony to find I turn out to be 20th 🙂
tonyb
Warm is undoubtedly good: When the climate has been benign countries and civilizations flourished, “social justice” reached all the people just because of nature not because somebody decided it so. During cold periods things were, also obviously, bad, and people became hungry and poor, and not because some bad people decided it so too.
It is the Sun…..!:
http://personal.inet.fi/tiede/tilmari/sunspot7.html
A lot of commenters are trying to correct Dr Lewis about the alleged “European occupation of Greenland/Iceland” which should have ended around the LIA. Neither the commenters nor Dr Lewis seem to be quite right about this. Greenland is still Danish territory but with autonomy.
See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland
Tree ring temp graph, again! Sorry, very bad proxy for that. All tree rings show is ideal conditions for the species of tree. Temp is only a piece of that puzzle. Much better proxy for precip with temps being anywhere from above to below normal, yet still within the trees ideal range.
What’s normal? Nature surfing the sine waves of climate. One minute the ride is sweet, the next, its a body slam to the ocean floor.
But what is abnormal is the human variable that has been introduced. With 6+ billion people on the planet and the artificial changes that have been made to the landscape, and air, has this variable truly got teeth in the unfinished equation of climate we are trying to figure out? Some say yes, some no, but who will really have the last word?
Re John A says:
I guess there are other lessons to be learned wrt sustainability, centralisation and distribution. Greenland’s position always seemed precarious given cost/benefit of trading with them. One paper I read suggested the Portuguese traded there during the MWP but then stopped. With limited trade goods being produced and higher risks from changing climate, I guess that accelerated their collapse.
Other natural events have shown challenges caused by natural events, so Iceland’s volcano grounding air travel and freight and more recently the snow. Airports ran out of de-icer and couldn’t get replacements because of roads becoming blocked. Supermarkets running out of some foods because of the same problem. Lots of business lost because people typically commute further now, and couldn’t get to work so a modern society facing some of the same pressures. Don’t we ever learn from history?
Unfortunately its not enough to be a good scientist anymore. Good scientists need to protect and defend the integrity of science against the fascists like Al Gore; who seek to destroy science and truth. Remember Hitler tried to distort genetics to justify his genocide of the Jews and other races. Dont for one minute think this time is different; the only thing that will be different will be the larger scale of the crime.
“(I’m voting for swath in the first line)”
Actually, no. It’s “swat.” It’s an expression I picked up from across the pond.
Atomic Hairdryer says:
December 27, 2010 at 11:52 am
You are right!…then, it is also obvious, that only those countries running on real and trustful sources of energy will manage to survive in a cold climate scenario.
@Jeremy; Good points and what you said about this cult affirms what I think about all of this, though, thankfully, I don’t have personal experience with living within one. It’s good to read you emerged from what ever it was, but your larger point about Y2K and Climate Warming/Change/* clear.
I see it as obviously a continuation of the human to make connections and draw meaning from life and about meaning. This is as old as time itself. The climate change cult is human-based and human-centric.
And you’re right about the beer.
“Archaeologists are “hard” scientists”
“Hardly”
The hard sciences are mathematics, then physics, then chemistry; all others are applied sciences with varying degrees of “softness”.
Just a li’l nit to pick…
Enneagram says: “More scary: How sea waves could freeze in less than the blink of an eye. The following images are from Antarctica
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32858301/Frozen-Wave”
Not true. Those ice structures are formed by glaciation and then weather to create the wave-like shape. See Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/antarcticwave.asp
Tony says: ” ..all those Greenland/Iceland comments reveal the sad truth that most posters do not read the posts of others.”
Yeah, rude, isn’t it? Not to mention obnoxious–having to plow past 17 comments that all say the same thing. It’s easy to do a webpage search for, say, Iceland, and see if the error has been caught below. But noooooooooooooo.
The smoking and bug repellent comment by Håkan B reminded me of the same effect I noticed while working in the Canadian Taiga in the 1970’s and 80’s.
Worst bugs of any place I’ve ever been was central Labrador. When there I wished for another ice age as they always start in central Labrador. The only days when bugs weren’t a problem were after the first frosts in September. Mid July was hellish.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/antarcticwave.asp
I enjoyed and admired this post. In particular the initial graphic appealed to me, but I have one very heartfelt request for Dr Lewis. This is “Are the data that lie behind the graphic available for download? If so, would it be possible to provide an access to the unsmoothed data? ” I would be most grateful if this were so. If they are unpublished or you are going to write more papers based on them of course I would not expect you to release it! I live in hope!
Peter Miller says:
We represent Sue Grabbit & Runne, special litigation attorneys to Michael Mann and the Team.
You really represent Dewy, Cheatem and Howe, don’t you?
jorgekafkazar says:
December 27, 2010 at 1:54 pm…
jorgekafkazar, obviously, you did not read all the posts either 😉
If you had taken your own advice, you would have known that due to comments being stuck in moderation que, only Tallbloke’s first post was visible on screen while the 30-40 or so first posts were submitted.
Rude? I think not.
Best lawyer’s name of all-time? Suetching Elizabeth Yu. She “goes by” Sue. She’s an attorney in California.
the 4C age of the methane in the Siberian permafrost is 7-5 thousand years ago and about 1 thousand years ago. I can see the 5-3000 BC heat, but not much around about 1000AD.
The modern portion of the Yamal tree ring series has been discussed at length at Climate Audit.
Your tree ring graph gives me great hope.
If you run your eye along looking at the top red excursions, they dwindle toward bare little pips, until the present. Then we recover to about the same as the optimum in 5000 bc. Run your eye along the blue bottoms and you can see our slow decent into an ice age as the blues become more frequent with more “visual mass”… up until we climb out of the Little Ice Age into the present. And recover to the Modern Optimum.
I’m fairly certain that there is a strong negative feedback at about our present temperatures (as clouds carry heat to the top of the troposphere for radiation off to space). The Ice Age Glacials show there is no such limit to the downside.
Your graph gives me hope that we well might have managed to prevent our demise as the LIA headed into the Next Ice Age Glacial… and instead have managed to hold it all off, at least for a while.
To the extent there is any real AGW it looks to me like it has been a real life saver. I could learn to like that… 😉
The graph originates from Yamal larch tree ring studies.
These trees were collected on floodplains in the valleys of five local rivers cut in the tundra. The trees grow there because they find shelter against polar winters – no trees grow in the tundra . Often the rivers undermine tree roots and the trees that fell down, are covered by river alluvium and remain conserved for thousands of years.
The trees are able to grow only in June and July, peaking about 26-30th July (as calibrated using modern trees and the local meteo-station at Salekhard), and even then are some tree rings marked by hard frosts. The only growth-limiting factor differing between the years is therefore summer temperature, as water is available from the rivers.
The Shiyatov laboratory now collected tree rings 7000 years back and made chronologies of several other tree species, but their data bank is not accessible. They also don’t publish much in the international journals. Here’s the translated webpage of the laboratory:
http://tinyurl.com/34a3qub
Michael says
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So you can imagine my surprise to see the infamous Hockey Stick graph appear in the 2001 IPCC Report, completely missing the MWP that I knew from multiple independent data sets, as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Greenland.
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Michael it’s interesting that you quote the Akasofu paper as the basis for your beliefs.
I read the paper. That paper presents many, many lines of evidence that global warming is happening.
Take home points are:
A. Mann’s hockey stick is not that different from a lot of other people’s hockey sticks, despite the missing dip in his curve which would delineate a MWP. Looks like proof the fraud allegations are all lies.
B. The tree ring data in the paper which do show the MWP also show that current temperatures match the temperatures of the MWP.
C. The Akasofu paper also extrapolates the linear trend they attribute to LIA recovery, with superimposed MDO, from which it might be inferred that temperatures are going to keep on rising well above the MWP values.
So this paper belongs to the “it is warming but it’s not our fault” species.
The irony of course is that this paper is at odds with the currently popular “it’s snowing in my backyard so that proves there is global cooling”.
“bubbagyro says:
The hard sciences are mathematics, then physics, then chemistry; all others are applied sciences with varying degrees of “softness”.”
IMO close, but not quite right. I agree with the Hard Science label and examples, but Applied Science takes the Laws of hard science, combines them with properties of matter and creates a practical application. (This is also known as Engineering). Soft Sciences are those that gather historical trend data and evidence and make postulations about their relationships, such as Archeology, Anthroplogy, etc. What makes these Soft is that the postulations, no matter how obvious, cannot be proved as absolute.
My recollection of the recent article out of Edmonton AB on expansion of the Inuit was a theory that the Arctic ocean was open enough that they could easily find food along their travel route eastward, following the coastline. (Regrets, I can’t find the article again in Canwest papers.)
The theory was put forth by researcher Robert McGhee from the Ottawa ON area, in the essay collection “The Northern World: AD 900 to 1400”.
McGhee says they had dogsleds and skin boats as travel aids.
McGhee suggested that the Inuit had heard of iron from a meteorite that people in the eastern Arctic had access to and were trading with Norsemen. McGhee suggests the Inuit were motivated to travel by economic opportunities as were the European explorers, contrary to a common view of aboriginal peoples as stay-at-home unless pushed by food supply problems or attacks.
Keith Sketchley says “Hey, they were humans – creative and interactive as usual, making use of what was available, varying with the specific society, just not nearly as far advanced in capability as the European/Mediterranean type of society fostered.”
(Trade routes existed around the world, long and arduous in olden days. For example, down eastern Africa, long distances by boat out of Mediterranean societies, overland from Manchuria, and through mountainous terrain from central B.C. to the coast near Bella Bella B.C.)
(I presume the boats were like the individual “kyak” and the much larger open “umiak”.
The lightweight boat itself would have been a major advancement, requiring figuring out structural continuity to keep the shape stable to maintain displacement volume thus flotation capacity, but with light weight to carry.)