Geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt found a Japanese tree-ring temperature reconstruction from 1995, one that should have been heeded by the IPCC and Michael Mann before they took the world on a 10-year joyride in the stolen car of “climate science”.
Here’s the Google translation of their article, with some fixes of my own to help it along written in [brackets]. I don’t vouch for total accuracy in the translation, but it is the best I can do.
UPDATE: 2:45PM PST Pierre Gosselin has graciously agreed to allow his translation to be posted here, so I’m eliminating the Google translate version – Anthony
By Sebastian Lüning & Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated and reposted here at WUWT with permission, copyright English text NoTricksZone)
Leading representatives of the IPCC tried for years to have policymakers and citizens believe the pre-industrial temperature history was more or less uneventful and was the ideal climate ondition that we should all strive to maintain. The warming of the 20th century, on the other hand, was completely unusual, something dangerous. However, as we now know, the page turned a few years ago and the notorious Hockey Stick chapter ended. The flawed curve was taken off the market and the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age reappeared.
As is often the case in history, it is in retrospect difficult to comprehend how this historical joyride could have happened to begin with. It started at the end of the 1990s with a doctoral thesis by Michael Mann, and did not end until about 10 years later – thanks to the discovery of the scientific scandal by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (see the book The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford). Today it is difficult to fathom how the main players and proponents of the Hockey Sticks are still able to act as experts and public opinion shapers.
One of the main excuses used back then was that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in Europe and North America were local phenomena. At other locations on the planet the temperature anomalies were more than evened out (e.g. Stefan Rahmstorf, Gerald Haug). For years we had to listen to their tales and we had to trust these “specialists” for better or for worse. Moreover, we paid them with our tax money so that they could deal exclusively with the climate and carry out the tedious work all this entails.
However, anyone who knew a little something about the scientific literature soon began to wonder. The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age as a local North Atlantic phenomenon? A nutty claim. Naturally these characteristic temperature fluctuations had been described for other parts of the world. Here we report on a case study from Japan which had appeared in the Geophysical Research Letters already in 1995, in other words, in the years before the Hockey Stick episode.
In the early 1990s, Japanese scientists Hiroyuki Kitagawa and Eiji Matsumoto extracted eleven tree ring cores from cedars on the South Pacific southern Japanese island of Yakushima. The cores contained tree-rings going back some 2000 years. The researchers determined the carbon 13 isotope values and found the delta-13-C values fluctuated in a characteristic manner (see Figure 1).
What did these fluctuations mean? Carbon-13 amount is influenced by a number of factors, among them temperature. The Japanese scientists calibrated the isotope development on trees of different elevations (and thereby temperature level) above sea level. Using this method they were able to come up with a formula that could be used for computing the temperature value using the isotope change. The results showed that temperatures over the previous 2000 years in South Japan fluctuated over a range of 5°C. The course of the temperature fluctuations takes on a shape that is very well known to us (see Figure 2). A clear millennium cycle is depicted. The cold period of the Migration Period, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Modern Warm Period are clearly recognisable. Moreover, this climate development is well documented in Japanese historical records.
Therefore, it is incomprehensible that with the clear Japanese data from the year 1995, the talk of a “local North Atlantic phenomenon” would go on for years after the data’s publication.
The two Japanese scientists even took it a step further. They carried out a detailed frequency analysis of their data and found characteristic cycles with periods in the range of several decades and centuries. Among others, they discovered a period of 187 years, which coincides with the known Suess/de Vries solar activity cycle. In a similar manner the 70 and 89-year Gleissberg-cycle was identified. In their results the authors saw a clear sign that the climate of the last 2000 years in southern Japan was predominantly influenced by solar activity fluctuations. The IPCC appears not to have been at all interested in the study. Indeed it did not fit with their climate catastrophe picture.
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NOTE: Commenter Peter Gulutzam made this observation in comments. The original Google translation correctly noted “…the southern Japanese island of Yakushima…” but Gosselin’s version incorrectly identifies it as a South Pacific Island. I’ve made the correction and notified Mr. Gosselin – Anthony
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I made a point of linking to this, as soon as I saw it at P. Gosselin’s page. Expect the usual drivel from stokes, connolley et al. They’re most lazyteenagers, after all.
It’s a shame this is still “paywalled”.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1995/95GL02066.shtml
The desire for a global social, economic, and political transformation relied first on freezing, then on warming, and now on biodiversity. Whatever argument is plausible until thoroughly refuted. Plus now the schemers are hard charging on using education to change human nature to induce desired behavioral change.
Look at page 8 of this link:http://www.stakeholderforum.org/fileadmin/files/PAPER%202_BEYOND_GDP_Final_vj%20%282%29.pdf
This New Economics Foundation is still transitioning but nef is certainly causing plenty of trouble in the UK.
Plus no good will come out of Ford Foundation backing for this. They will have their social change whatever theory they have to use.
Why am I not surprised?
Thank you for this. MWP is critical to a reasoned, non-alarmist approach to climate. Leaving it out, straightening the handle, is, in many ways, more important than finding a big 20th century blade. “Unprecedented” warming is the only thing which will provoke a policy response. Mann delivered and, sadly, we have wasted many billions of dollars on lame policy responses to what increasingly appears to be a non-problem.
More studies like this one will, I hope, make the lunacy of carbon taxes and windmills more and more difficult to sell to an increasingly skeptical public.
There is relatively good agreement with Loehle’s global temperature (green line) as well as with mine Northern Hemisphere geomagnetic (blue line) reconstructions
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/JLMrecon.htm
I was about to poo poo this as another tree ring study, but then I noticed they didn’t use tree ring width they used C13 to correlate to temperature. OK, suddenly the study has credibility in my eyes. But doesn’t this beg an additional question?
Would this technique not be valid for other tree ring studies?
Not that Mann or Briffa or Jones would actually make their cores available for study….
Note to Nick Stokes — before you say anything, the positive numbers are *below* the line in Figure 1…
Have a look at the wiki entry for the Migration period for a laugh about the absurdist use of “global warming” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
Ah so. those inscrutable Japanese have one up on Mann.
Thanks Pierre, Anthony – great stuff. Elsewhere,the Law of Unintended Consequences: Gergis et al seem to have everyone producing hockey sticks from statistical thin air: Lucia is having fun over at the BlackBoard, and RomanM at Climate Audit. It seems a game for all the family. Sadly I lack enough stats to contribute, but following the arguments is good fun.
Stamp ‘Rosebud’ on a hockey stick, and burn it.
Without the hockey stick, of course, the whole AGW proposition, that we’re in a state of abnormal runaway warming, is a joke. Current temperatures are normal. The climate is fine.
The two central necessary non-elective foundations of AGW theory have been debunked: the hockey stick, and on CO2. Yes, the greenhouse theory on CO2 as presented by the ipcc has also been refuted. Totally refuted, and the ipcc has not gone back to the drawing board and presented any alternative. Before 2000, the ipcc tried to make the case that CO2 affecting climate temps is “settled science” by positing a causal correlation between CO2 and temps… but this is a specious false correlation (not causal). So, the very foundation of the ipcc’s claim for CO2 driven climate warming has been repudiated. Yet, see algor repeat this monstrous deception in this must view and share 3 minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&feature=player_embedded
Anthony, Pierre Gosselin has a text version that I find both clearer, more legible, less ambiguous, and richer. Can you replace the one here with his?
Excellent article. Thank you very much. Hope Steve reposts it. Good to see trees used reliably, sensitively, and productively at last:
(a) isotopes not treerings
(b) calibration with trees at different altitudes
(c) search reveals the presence of solar cycles – Suess and Gleissberg cycles.
REPLY: No, I can’t as he has prominently placed a copyright to his translation right at the top of his article. He doesn’t allow reposts without explicit written permission, so Google translate is the best I can do. – Anthony
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
So, the IPCC probably knew about this research, but chose to ignore it because it didn’t fit the preferred alarmist narrative. The dishonesty of the global-warming crowd is astonishing.
The MWP and LIA have been well established throughout the world. http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
We really should just start laughing at these people. I mean, sure, it’s good to trip back down memory lane from time to time, but we should use this for ridicule and scorn.
Its always been an oddity that although the alarmists will tell us the MWP does not have enough evidenced to support the idea it was ‘world wide’. There more than happy for a far more restricted range of evidenced, indeed down to ‘one tree’ at times , to be more than enough to support the claim of climate doom. As with such much of climate science that cannot meet their own low standard , but then its ‘different ‘ when they fail , like a good politician is a strong belief in do what I say not do what I do .
STOP THE PRESSES! STOP THE PRESSES! Hockey Stick proves we will all die.
Buried somewhere between ads for tinea and the death notices. Hockey stick wrong!
why is this site listed as lukewarmer here?
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/climatechange/Science
Its obviously 100% warmist. I think that by giving it a lukewarming status you are assigning it a respect it does not deserve. Please consider putting it in the same category as RC or like.
Also matches the Chinese study quite well: http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/china/liu-2011-predictions-web.gif
This isn’t the only evidence re Japan; the Emperor’s gardener kept careful records of the cherry blossom’s blooming day — going back for a millennium. They also confirm the MWP.
d13C doesn’t necessarily have the same problems as TR width, so this may be a useful new class of proxies.
I could go up into the Cascades or the Blue Mountains, core a dozen or so trees, some near water, and some up on the hill just yonder, some spaced apart, and some crowded together, some on the East slope and some on the West slope of that draw, and prove any kind of temperature graph you want me to prove. The true stories of tree cores are best left to private foresters, who know quite well how to read them. These are folks climate scientists have no knowledge of. They grow trees for profit. That is if they are any good at it. If they aren’t, the President of the University will not be coming round to bail them out of the mess they will find themselves in.
Bearing in mind that we pour scorn on Manns tree rings as being an unreliable proxy for temperature for a myriad of reasons (limited growing season, susceptibility to local micro climates etc) we shouldn’t rush in to praise this study just because it tells us what we want to hear.
IF the methodology of using C13 to correlate to temperature is considered so accurate, as others say above, why don’t we apply it to other tree ring studies-such as Manns? Sorry, tree rings might be just about acceptable at dating or demonstrating moisture levels in the summer, but a global thermometer accurate to fractions of a degree? I don’t think so.
tonyb
omnologos says:
June 17, 2012 at 11:33 am
You must be referring to “The causes of this cold [migration] period are debated, but are generally attributed to the lack of global warming.”
You’re right; hard to wrap your mind around something that profound.
One of the important reasons they had to do away with the idea of a global MWP is the “tipping point” concept, The concept that we are near some magic global temperature that will tip us into positive feedback and disaster.
If the earth has previously exceeded the “tipping point” temperature without going into positive feedback much of the scary argument is weakened.
tonyb says:
June 17, 2012 at 1:56 pm
tonyb, very well-stated cautions. The point of the article, though, was that there existed a study that looks to be at least as robust as Mann’s (arguably more robust since there doesn’t appear to me to have a decline requiring hiding) that was pointedly excluded from consideration by the IPCC and their warmist supporters.