Research claim: dropping CO2 caused formation of Antarctic ice cap

Irregardless of how things work…

How about just “regardless…”

The peer reviewed papers are not random. There are quite a lot that span the entire period, which crossover in timescales, covering droubts, trends, specific data. A lot are 20th century papers, some more recent, although I agree we need to know more about specific spikes and trends to construct ever more precise proxies than amplitudes. I doubt the IPCC would take them into consideration however.
So imagine in 800 years if we still today had the technology that existed during the MWP. I’m sure we wouldn’t be able to construct a uniform proxy 800 years hence… Yet: the literature shows that it was a fairly uniform global phenomenon – the MWP that is

@ur momisugly Sandy (03:41:42) :
1940s were warmer than the 1990s
Certainly this is not true globally and we were using thermometers for all of this time and satellites for some.
What is your source for this information?

Smokey says:

But the deconstruction of Mann’s chart by McKitrick, McIntyre and Wegman forced the IPCC to stop using the Mann chart.

Really? You don’t say… http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf (see Fig. 6.10…Fig 1 in Box 6.4 and the accompanying text is also useful in the context of my post from last night regarding the MWP).

and it discredits Michael Mann, who still won’t come clean and provide all of his data and methodologies.

What part of the latest paper that Scott linked to ( http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.abstract ) are you having trouble finding data or methodologies for?

In the early 90s a large part of SE Asia caught fire with smog seen from satellites and parts of Borneo in a smogged twilight.
The CO2 from this must have many years of Man’s contribution worth.
Did the CO2 spike show in the Mauna Lao record (if not, why??) and how long did it take to decay?

Smokey,
“…thoroughly dishonest political appointees…”
“…someone who has been shown to be dishonest.”
You are remarkably willing to make claims dishonesty for one who shows no qualms about backing out of a deal.

Joel Shore
Mann tends to cite Mann in his studies. Then not surprisingly Real Climate backs them up. You make the link to Manns latest proxies as if they had entered the world with no comment 🙂
The letters in February this year of claim and counter claim are still reverberating. You also know that to your list of rebuttals can be added Joliffe who didn’t like his name being used in vain by RC as some sort of authority in favour of the studies. The link is to his comments
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3601
I have suggested before that you write an article on the Hockey stick for discussion here. Perhaps TomP would collaborate with you?
I do not have the sort of inherent dislike of Mann that some have-you have never heard me rubbishing him. Exploring the background of his original papers however it is my honest opinion they were undercooked and he was as surprised as anyone when they achieved world wide infamy through the IPCC.
It is very difficult to then admit they could have done with some more work but I suspect he would have been happy to have a few more years to develop his sticks and get some more input from statisticans before releasing it.
tonyb.

Tom P and Joel. I’d be rather cautious about dismissing proxy inferences referring to the MWP that show something other than what the IPCC or other biases show, and relying on Michael Mann as though he were some sort of Rasputin. In reply to Tom P, its rather difficult to trawl through old papers here in my library, so found this source online that serves as a pointer to sources of references to the MWP. Whether or not you accept the basis of c02 science approach overall, its still worth digging into the papers they reference.

Sorry, that should have been “MBH1999” in my last post.
P Wilson:

I’d be rather cautious about dismissing proxy inferences referring to the MWP that show something other than what the IPCC or other biases show, and relying on Michael Mann as though he were some sort of Rasputin.

I am not dismissing the proxy inferences but am just saying, for the reasons that I explained in my post of 20:31:06 on 18Sept2009, that individual data points that show warmth sometime during a broadly defined period that is referred to as the MWP don’t tell you very much. As for Mann, most of the studies out there now do not have Mann as a co-author. The basic results that he got have been reproduced by several other studies (except with some showing a deeper LIA as I noted previously).
TonyB says:

I have suggested before that you write an article on the Hockey stick for discussion here. Perhaps TomP would collaborate with you?

Well, thanks for the suggestion but, as I noted above, this whole Hockey stick thing is one of the least interesting issues for me in the whole AGW discussion and thus one that I have not spent very much time studying. While the argument about whether the current global (or Northern hemisphere) temperatures are or are not unprecedented over the last 1300 years or so is interesting, it represents the most circumstantial piece of evidence regarding AGW…and, in fact, AGW could be incorrect even if it were true and could be correct even if it were false.
I have also been leery of writing an article here on WUWT, partly because I think that I don’t really have a lot original to contribute (I am mainly just explaining science that has been worked out by others and that can be found better discussed elsewhere) and partly because it would involve increasing my time commitment here when I rationally think I should probably be doing the opposite. (I usually already have plenty of people to respond to after I post a comment on someone else’s blog article here; I can only imagine what it would be like for an article of my own!)

TomP said
“Soon and Baliunas 2003 is a discredited paper. The researchers whose results they used to create their proxies publicly protested that Soon and Baliunas had misinterpreted their findings. A repeat of their analysis with only validated sources could not reproduce their results.”
Correction, SOME protested;
Let’s turn the clock back to 2003 and consider the response by the Hockey Team to Soon and Baliunas 2003, much of which focussed on the alleged confusing of temperature and precipitation proxies (as if others weren’t guilty of that as well).
So other readers can know the background of the SandB paper, this from that well known fair minded arbiter of climate science wiki;
‘Shortly thereafter, 13 of the authors of papers cited by Baliunas and Soon refuted her interpretation of their work.[12] There were three main objections: Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric temperature anomalies; and they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends. More recently, Osborn and Briffa repeated the Baliunas and Soon study but restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies, and came to a different result
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Baliunas#Controversy_over_the_2003_Climate_Research_paper
This from former editor of magazine that published the original study
http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm
Mann and a big panel of the Hockey Team led off the assault against Soon and Baliunas in EOS, saying:
In drawing inferences regarding past regional temperature changes from proxy records, it is essential to assess proxy data for actual sensitivity to past temperature variability…The existence of possible underlying dynamical relationships between temperature and hydrological variability should not be confused with the patently invalid assumption that hydrological influences can literally be equated with temperature influences in assessing past climate (e.g.,during Medieval times). (much more here in link)
http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/mann2003a.pdf
This from CA; It was that the Hockey Team criticised Soon and Baliunas using criteria that should have been applied to Treydte’s paper, but weren’t. Who, after all, reviewed their paper prior to publication? And why wasn’t the EOS logic applied to it?
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=650
I don’t want to get into the McIntyre/Mann spat (other than to say it is good that someone is auditing Dr Mann) nor even that the Soon report was 100% perfect-very few are. The basic problem is that the SandB report was a direct contradiction of Mann’s hockey stick work and an assault on that strikes at the very heart of the AGW hypothesis (no matter that warmists would say the HS is but one strand of the evidence)
We saw some very unpleasant smear tactics take place to belittle the report and its authors. Soon is labelled a ‘denier’ in the pejorative sense, tied to big oil. and his status constantly demeaned with derogatory comments such as ‘astronomer Willie Soon’ rather than climate scientist. So politics and ideology are taking second place to science.
This very good article puts things into some sort of perspective.-
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2004/10/01/ironies-abound-in-hockey-stick-debacle/
Which brings us back to your comment about using ‘anecdotal’ evidence.
There is huge controversy over many proxies of temperature as actually measuring moisture (or something else) instead, or being contaminated or just plain not being accurate, so why use proxies when we have first hand accounts from real people who kept records of fish catches or grain yields or when they planted crops or told how the climate was changing and recorded droughts or famine? Our forefathers had a very keen sense of the natural world and recorded things very well as it might mean the difference between life and death if crops should fail.
We have many references to the Roman warm period , which demonstrate the alpine passes were considerably more ice free than the present;
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/may16/hannibal-051607.html
and glaciers much higher in altitude. This is the original German version of the study
http://alpen.sac-cas.ch/html_d/archiv/2004/200406/ad_2004_06_12.pdf
a much shorter English language version is here;
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=772
There are numerous contemporary records of climate change from the Venerable Bede, The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, The Doomsday book through to Pepys.
As also previously cited here the 1000 year long records of the Byzantine Empire show many other climatic changes. As the climate warmed and became drier we also have their plans of the extensive irrigation systems they built.
This from the Byzantine empire in the 8th Century “Some 2,000 kilometers to the southeast, a well-informed observer at Constantinople recorded that great and extremely bitter cold settled on the Byzantine Empire and the lands to the north, west (confirming the Chronicon Moissiacense’s statement concerning Illyricum and Thrace), and east. The north coast of the Black Sea froze solid 100 Byzantine miles out from shore (157.4 km). The ice was reported to be 30 Byzantine “cubits” deep, and people and animals could walk on it as on dry land.38 Drawing on the same lost written source, another contemporary, the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicephorus I, emphasized that it particularly affected the “hyperborean and northerly regions,” as well as the many great rivers that lay north of the Black Sea.39 Twenty cubits of snow accumulated on top of the ice, making it very difficult to discern where land stopped and sea began, and the Black Sea became unnavigable. In February the ice began to break up and flow into the Bosporus, entirely blocking it.
Theophanes’ account recalls how, as a child, the author (or his source’s author) went out on the ice with thirty other children and played on it and that some of his pets and other animals died. It was possible to walk all over the Bosporus around Constantinople and even cross to Asia on the ice. One huge iceberg crushed the wharf at the Acropolis, close to the tip of Constantinople’s peninsula, and another extremely large one hit the city wall, shaking it and the houses on the other side, before breaking into three large pieces; it was higher than the city walls. The terrified Constantinopolitans wondered what it could possibly portend.”
At 66 ppb, the spike in the GISP2 sulfate deposit on Greenland dated 767 is the highest recorded for the eighth century (see Fig. 5) and shows that this terrible winter in Europe and western Asia was connected with a volcanic aerosol that left marked traces on Greenland. It occurred in the middle of a pronounced cooling which lasted some 40 years after the finish of the Roman warm optimum ;
http://www.medievalacademy.org/pdf/Volcanoes.pdf
In the US this example of warming comes from the extensive weather records of Thomas Jefferson;
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch07.html
“A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their development, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those over flowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now. “
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/JEFFERSON/ch07.html
(from observation 1772 to 1779 written in 1781?)
The following, condensed from the records of the Hudson Bay company, demonstrate that climate change is not a new phenomena.
“Over the fifteen years between 1720 and 1735, the first snowfall of the year moved from the first week of September to the last. Also, the late 1700s were turbulent years. They were extremely cold but annual snow cover would vary from ‘extreme depth to no cover’. For instance, November 10th 1767 only one snowfall that quickly thawed had been recorded. June 6, 1791 many feet of snow in the post’s gardens. The entry for July 14, 1798 reads ‘…53 degrees colder today than it was yesterday.”
As well as actual instrumental records we have available to us thousands of such records as the ones above, with first hand accounts that show the lives of real people. In my own town the fortunes of those involved in fishing were made and lost over hundreds of years as climate altered and warm water Pilchards were replaced by cold water cod and Herring and vice versa. The warmth in the latter part of the 18th century caused social dislocation as the Cod moved north to cooler waters and men stayed away longer to reach Newfoundland. The reliability of fish as a temperature proxy is well known;
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PaEPcGJOxOQC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=pilchards+climate+change+devon&source=web&ots=S8Dq9v3O4f&sig=l4VMl6UBROkm4qAtPGWkGS2or5E&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA39,M1
The Bronze Age inhabitants of nearby Dartmoor farmed the tops of the modest peaks and retreated as temperatures cooled-their dwellings are still there and have been subject to numerous studies over 150 years. The MWP inhabitants also farmed the tops in the MWP- we know the crops they grew and their slow descent down into the valley as climate cooled is recorded.
The vast body of knowledge about the Vikings habitation on Greenland is well documented in ‘The Viking world’ by Stefan Brink or you can go and look at the remains in the thermafrost. Examples of another thriving civilisation-the Ipiatuk- also subsequently frozen in time 1000 years previously- can also be found in the arctic
But instead of respecting this vast volume of material demonstrating that climate constantly changes and historically this current episode is nothing out of the ordinary, some people choose to rely on highly theoretical computer models utilising often dubious proxies.
I have posted above a few of my random samples of studies and ‘anecdotes’ above A good repository of additional studies set out in a more formal manner is here..
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
I have been through around fifty of them and would say around 75% are good to excellent and the other 25% from fair to poor. Good reading.
tonyb

“and El Nino years tend to produce higher CO2 increases than other years”
Hot water more CO2, that figures.
Also those figures are increases so they do average and it is clear that the excess of one year has severely reduced the growth in recorded CO2 the next.