This is what global cooling really looks like – new tree ring study shows 2000 years of cooling – previous studies underestimated temperatures of Roman and Medieval Warm Periods

Holy Roman Empire! This is big.

Just curious, but if people have doubts about the quality of tree rings as temperature gauges, is there any reason to accept this with open arms?
I’d be interested in a discussion of the quality of data, methods and processes. It is from evaluating this among various studies that we might get a decent idea of how good tree ring data is and who is coming up with the most accurate interpretation of the data.

Did they forget the “hockey schtick” post processor?

Can’t be right. It actually shows the Roman and Medieval Warm periods. 😉
Of course Mannian science says that those are only local phenomena.

If I’m skeptical about tree ring data showing no trend prior to 1900, why should I accept a study that shows cooling using diffrent tree ring data?
What sort of “density” are they refering to? Acutal wood density? or Rings per cm?
How good is the correlation with density to “summer” temperatures?
Do winter temperatures matter in debate about cooling or warming trends over 2000 years?
Were the individual tree-ring source proxies equally weighted (unbiased), or weighted by training on a hypothetical target?
My gut is giveing me red flags over the concept that this paper has too much in it. It simultaneously puts forth a Lapland dendochron-thermal reconstruction with an orbital cooling configuration and solar insolation changes. Each of these would warrent its own paper.
Interesting paper, but my skepticism works both ways.

“The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were.”
So Trees are Thermometers after all?
Whether you have a warming narrative, or a cooling narrative, it’s still only proxy data. Frankly I don’t trust any tree ring results now.

Doesn’t ice core data show a gradual cooling over the whole Holocene? like this.
How well doe sthis match up against other reconstructions of the same period?

Anthony, give credit to whom it belongs: The number of – 0.3 C
downslope cooling per each millenium was already provided some
months ago by DONALD ARCHIBALD, in Figure 5,
Due 3 Temp Record 22 years smoothed, in your WUWT post “Ap
Index, Neutrons and Climate”…..
These above Mainz guys just repeat Donald and conclude their study with “this all
SUGGESTS that the IPCC MAY UNDERESTIMATE…..” ??
…..If someone cheats on my return change, should I day the next time:
Excuse cashier, I suggest that you may underestimate my due change??
JS
[REPLY: Uhh, did you mean David Archibald? -REP]

Too bad that it is treemometers, they will always have questionable validity.
That said as with ice-cores we see the 1000 year warming-cooling cycle that produced the Minoan, Roman, Medieval and now Modern warming, on this graph it appears to have an amplitude of about 0.5-0.7 deg (1-1.5 deg C peak to trough from linear trend). That this cycle coincides with modern warming (which started before significant CO2 rise) is very powerful evidence against “strong” CAGW. Gisp2 cores have similar amplitude, though the long term cooling trend is steeper at about 0.7deg/millenium.
Would be nice to see an expanded vertical axis and a few grid lines to get a better view of the temperature variation, that graph they produced is near useless without a vertical reference.

Excellent! I bet they used more than one tree. 🙂

I believe there have been other subfossil trees and stumps located in the Dead Sea region that show cooling started about 4000 to 5000 years ago. There was a great reduction in the level of the Dead Sea and a significant climate regime change when the Levant region assumed its current dry regime. Prior to that it was much wetter and the Dead Sea surface level was much higher than it is now. I believe it was this paper that I am thinking about from A. Frumkin (Quaternary Research, 2009)
http://geography.huji.ac.il/personal/Frumkin/pdf/QR%20Sedom%20wood%202009%5B1%5D.pdf

Yeah, but what about the really top notch researchers at really top notch universities like Penn State and UVa and East Anglia and…
What? Coverups? Their reputations are tarnished? Oh, well… never mind.

Occasionally you’ll see Warmistas talk about how they wish they could be found wrong so they can breathe a sigh of relief about humankind’s dire prospects. Well, this would be a good time for them to celebrate, in my humble opinion.

To be consistent if we claim trees are rubbish at recording temperature we have to accept that is the case when the results don’t support ‘the cause ‘ leave the picking of cherries to those who regard ‘useful data’ to be worth more than ‘valid data ‘.

Bob Tisdale says:
July 9, 2012 at 4:14 pm
Hey, Bob! I thrilled beyond description it hasn’t been 120 so far this summer in North Texas. It’s raining today and *COOL* LOL!!

We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
============================

Whether this data is accurate or not, or whether the warmist’s data is accurate or not, doesn’t even seem to matter anymore at this point, IMO. With so much ‘evidence’ pro & con, I think the only obvious answer can be: there is no change, man-made or otherwise, in the degree, in variations in speed, or in ways that the climate’s been changing since there’s been a climate.
We’ve just developed some really nifty technology to measure all these ‘changes’, which aren’t really ‘changes’ at all…

Either (mad) Mann will respond that he’s Bored of the (tree) RIngs,
or he’ll complain that:
“I talk to the trees
But they don’t listen to me”….
er, no, we should be listening to them (provided it’s more than one, and not cherry-picked
(shades of George Washington saying, ‘I cannot tell a lie, I cherry-picked that tree….’).
Good to see that a study comes out that corroborates what rational minds have been
saying and observing about climate/weather and cycles thereof: even better to see that
it’s passed the gauntlet of peer review.
Hope that we can get more data from various sources in case the Mann-handlers
want to use these trees to create hockey sticks. Briing on the ents….
Difficult that there are more factors than just temperature that affect tree growth,
though I imagine there are ways to check if environmental stress (nutrients,
competition from other trees, fires, etc.) is also involved…

At RC, the take away message I got, was that this study has a unique feature, in that the divergence from the modern temps does not happen. Therefore MM, ES and GS say that this has a very good chance to help move the science along. (They are not all ogres all of the time). As always, we must wait for the next crew to use the new method to see if there are serious flaws in it.

Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.

The Earth keeps gaining a relatively small amount of mass, online I see estimates from 10^7 to 10^9 kg per day, with the mass of the Earth about 6*10^24 kg. The Earth’s orbital speed over time should be slightly slowing due to drag from whatever particles are out there. I would think both of those would lead to the Earth getting closer to the Sun.
So why is the Earth moving away from the Sun? Is the Sun shedding so much mass (and energy that was mass) that its gravitational force is weakening?

I guess the Romans were more industrialized than we ever imagined. Since global warming has been a hoax, can we get our money back?

When the vikings found Greenland, it was green. They had to move when it got cold again.

My latest study of ring around the collar has determined that climate change is caused by switching from using Tide in my laundry.

I don’t see a hockey stick.

“an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.”
The Earth is moving away from the sun?
We’re doomed!

I must echo the concerns of others here, specifically;
1. If tree rings aren’t great thermometers, then they aren’t great thermometers. Agreeing or disagreeing with your position neither increases or decreases their accuracy.
2. These are summer temperatures and the changes in warming/cooling are mostly in the winter. So it is another piece of the puzzle but hardly a game changer.
3. The trees are from a smalll geographical region in Northern Europe. This is a regional study and is no more indicitive of global temps than the CET or GISP2 ice cores.
4. It’s a tree ring data set. As Max points out above, tree rings only really show whether it was a good or bad growing season. I have yet to see a paper that explains why we can assume that a particular season was good or bad due to temperature and not due to other factors effecting growth.
It is an interesting paper, but I’m sceptical about the validity of tree rings.

Density measurements? How did they control for the other factors besides temperature that can influence tree ring density?

In the top right of the second graph in this article, if one clicks to enlarge, the late 1930s are seen to be as warm as the final years in the graph extending up to 2006. That is also what is seen in http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif
(Within the timeframe of the past century, in overall shape of the trends, such basically supports the Loethle reconstruction too, within its margin of error, which used only non-tree-ring proxies in contrast, which I graphed in http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg using data from http://www.ncasi.org/programs/areas/climate/LoehleE&E2007.csv — which includes likewise seeing a major temperature decline in the mid 20th century to a bit afterwards).
A similar pattern is observed again, for the late 1930s being as warm as today, including 0.7 degrees Celsius decline 1930s->1960s for the entire northern hemisphere average, in the original National Academy of Sciences graph discussed at http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2012/05/rare-corporate-courage-and-common-sense.html
Contrast to how, for instance, the CAGW movement’s “official” Hadcrut 4 temperature reconstruction shows a totally different temperature trend for the northern hemisphere specifically just as it does for its global temperature reconstruction; due to convenient hockey stick type adjustments, it is wrong both in the northern hemisphere and globally. (If such is plotted for the northern hemisphere at http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1880/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1880/to:2013/mean:60 there is not just a small deviation but a totally vastly different trend with the 1940s-1960s conveniently revised to be about flat to hide the decline).
Meanwhile, as an example of cross-checking with other considerations, the global cooling fear of the 1960s-1970s did not occur for just no reason. In other words, true temperature history is not even close to that seen on most widely publicized graphs today but rather is one where:
* Temperatures rose from the 1910s-1930s, to a level roughly as high as now.
* Temperatures then had a major decline in the 1950s-1960s, a decline about as much as the entire global warming of the more recent past several decades.
* Then temperatures rose in the 1970s-1990s up to current temperatures which have been at a temporary near-plateau but slightly declined 1997-2012 after the 1997 albedo change.
Such is a particularly big deal as it utterly effects whether there is any actual large deviation from overall solar-GCR forcing trends beyond the fluctuations reasonable to expect from ocean oscillations on top (60-year cycle AMO+PDO and shorter fluctuations such as El Ninos and La Ninas).
Combine true temperature data with true solar data showing major rise in solar activity since the Little Ice Age, as in http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/GW_Part6_SolarEvidence_files/image008.jpg where the open circles are even cross-checking with aurora incidence (one way to cross-check whether a particular numerical percentage adjustment of sunspot counts over time is reasonable or not), also as in http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/GW_Part6_SolarEvidence_files/image023.gif — and all fits in overall trends. The CAGW proponent claims that there is excessive mismatch actually rests on pillars of fudging the temperature and solar data in convenient revisions.
The first step in creating a true model of climate would be carefully sticking to non-fudged data alone to help avoid GIGO, which is tricky since the dishonest kind is so widely publicized today that few climate scientists fully know the real picture even amongst those honestly trying. Someday I’m going to try to find some non-fudged southern hemisphere temperature data too to further complete the picture, but the global average is going to approximately fit what the more reliable indirect proxy figures show, such as http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028492.shtml which notes:
“The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003). The highest decadal rate of rise occurred in the decade centred on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) with the lowest rate of rise occurring in the decade centred on 1964 (−1.49 mm/yr).“

The temperatures “rose in the 1970s-1990s” in my immediately prior comment was minor mistyping; I mean from the end of the 1970s through up to the 1997 albedo shift and 1998 El Nino, before how since then there has been decline (slight decline so far but wait for beyond around 2014).

In a relatively moisture rich environment in the mid latitudes treemometers sort of work. Elsewhere, not so much.

Compared to GISP2, Alley 2000, the above temperature profile does not exactly match, but the GISP2 profile shows a greater rate of cooling than the trees, added here in black:
http://i49.tinypic.com/9prvqh.jpg

The truth is also best served cold.

All them horses, Alex..
And all that marchin’ about everywhere.. way to much CO2 and methane produced.

Decreasing temperatures over the last 2000, 9000 and 12000 years are well known from high quality reconstructions such as
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028600.shtml
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
(figure 3, which is upside down in temperature)

As well as temperature, and moisture, and horse manure….trees like CO2 🙂

This paper is as suspect as those delivering the “we are all going to fry and drown” message. Only summer reconstruction, dodgy proxies. Meaningless.

Two big problems with this paper.
1 It’s using tree rings as a proxy for temperature when other limiting factors (water, sunlight, nutrients, etc) are important.
2 It’s published in Nature Climate Change which has demonstrated no ability to organise legitimate peer review. So much junk science has got published in there that I doubt anything that it deems worthy of publication.
It is interesting that this did get published anywhere, though.
Perhaps peer review needs redefinitioin, again?

timg56 says:
July 9, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Just curious, but if people have doubts about the quality of tree rings as temperature gauges, is there any reason to accept this with open arms?
#####
1. Maximum latewood density
2. Esper
3. rob wilson
4. Zorita
That’s 4 reasons. 1 technical and 3 based on the quality of prior work,

I maintain that tree rings are an unreliable thermometer and any reconstruction based on tree rings cannot accurately show temperature. If you combine this reconstruction with Briffa’s and Mann’s and all the others, you get a mess of contradictory information whose only worth is to tell you that tree ring based reconstructions are complete bunkum.
Which is also a useful way to show, categorically, that Mann’s Hockey stick is utter rubbish.

The paper cuts both ways. The cooling trend makes MWP less dramatic compared to the trend rather than the long term average. (Of course the Hockey Stick had long term gentle cooling already.) I suspect this result will be welcomed into the fold.

Gaudenz Mischol says:
And the skeptics will now accept the tree ring reconstructions…. :-))))
NO !!! , only as another possible piece of the puzzle
Mann’s use of trees was basically fraud on the statistical side of things, these guys look like they may have a bit better understanding. We will see if they produce the data and how they came to their conclusions so others can check it.. That is a VERY GOOD pointer to scientific honesty, sadly missing in most climate science.

of course…. penny just dropped. Zorita, Luterbacher, Esper, Timonen…
This is the way the Team are distancing themselves from Mikey Mann.
Now Mann’s cover is blown, with everyone knowing exactly why, the others still need to keep the grants flowing. Cynical, but realistic. But also, with no acknowledgement to Steve McIntyre evident here, it means that this portion of Climate Science looks set on the road to recovery….
If the data and metadata are archived and auditable…

I suspect their slight bow to ‘anthropogenic forcing’ is the main reason this got published in this journal… without it, would we have seen it?

@davidmhoffer
A single tree doesn’t tell us anything. IIRC Finnish Forestry Institute uses minimum of 50 trees to determine the temperature for each year.
And the treeline on mountains is a good calibrator. If the trees cannot grow nowhere near where they grew 800 years ago because it is too cold, then we can reasonably conclude that it was warmer previously.
But there are other ways to determine the temperature. I know people from the Finnish Geology Department and they say that meltwater runoff is not detectable during the MWP anywhere on Finland south of Jyväskylä. This translates to snowless winters in areas we now have typically around 100cm of sno every winter. The tree rings confirm this.

Where are the error bars on the reconstruction?
What is the instrumental record they use where the 40’s are warmer than now?

Conclusions should not be taken too far. They calibrated against JJA temperatures of 3 stations in the common period:
“The MXD climate signal was assessed using Pearson correlation coefficients between the lakeshore subsets Ket-L (r = 0.74), Kir-L (r = 0.75) and Tor-L (r = 0.74) and mean JJA temperatures recorded at the global historical climatology network stations Haparanda, Karasjok and Sodankyla over the 1876–2006 common period. Running correlations were applied to analyse the temporal characteristics of the signal revealing reduced coherence among the station records as well as between the station and proxy data centred in the 1910s (Supplementary Fig. S10). The long-term N-scan record integrating lakeshore and subfossil MXD data correlates at 0.77 (r2 = 0.59) with regional JJA temperatures. We transferred this record into a JJA temperature reconstruction using ordinary least square regression with MXD as the independent variable. This approach provides conservative estimates—owing to the reduction of variability caused by unexplained variance29—of pre-instrumental climate variability and derived long-term trends.”
They mention variance loss here!

timg56 says:
July 9, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Just curious, but if people have doubts about the quality of tree rings as temperature gauges, is there any reason to accept this with open arms?

You have a good point but if they release ALL their data and methods then it’s up to others to try to find fault with it. I too am sceptical about tree rings being thermometers.
Will Warmists accept this with open arms? If tree rings from Briffa and Mann was good enough for them then what about this study? Just questions.
They will call this “just regional.” I may be wrong but I recall that Mann and Briffa’s hockey sticks studies were also regional. The recent US heatwave was also regional.
The Medieval Warm Period was global.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php

Almost a Laplander says:
July 9, 2012 at 11:37 pm
@R Barker
I have read previous studies using trees from lapland as a temperature proxy. Why these are so good proxies is that unlike many other trees, the only limiting factor for their growth is the temperature….
Nope. People really do need to get their head around the concept that a single tree lives in its own complex ecosystem which may share many similar variables with its neighbours. No one tree or small sample of trees is a proxy for anything. Geographic variation imposes large, mostly unreconcilable, constrants on sample homogeneity for statistical purposes.
The treeline in the scandinavian mountains was much higher during the MWP, so the temperature certainly was much higher than today.
Now this is a pursuable goal for the purpose of climate interpretation on a local basis, but again you have the problem of isolating climate from weather geography and other factors over the long term. Treelines will wax and wane with climatic and geographic influences – this is true of most terrestrial species at their environmental limits. However, the issue of isolating climate as the limiting factor is complex. The experimental scale is beyond most research methodology and budgets that I’ve seen so far. At best, the conclusions are mostly only anecdotal, notwithstanding the number of “names” on the citation.
Scottish Sceptic says:
July 10, 2012 at 1:04 am
SteveSadlov “In a relatively moisture rich environment in the mid latitudes treemometers sort of work. Elsewhere, not so much.”
Trees respond to the dominant controlling factor. If that is not water, then it allows more influence of temperature, but we are still left with the problem of “canopy adaptation”. The problem is that trees will grow until no more trees can grow. …
Overly simplistic and not necessarily true. You are conflating trees with forests. Canopy is but one chaotic variable controlling the life of a tree in a forest. What is true is a tree will grow until it can grow no more. The limits to growth of an individual tree are not the same as the limits to growth of trees in a forest, but they are chaotically interconnected. A forest is the net sum of an almost unresolvable number of component ecosystems, each contributing to the other, but each standing alone on its own merits. The relationship is not synergistic, however. “Climate” scientists that don’t understand this and persist on dabbling with cores have little hope of resolving climate….

Very difficult proxy to use…

Tree rings are affected by rainfall, humidity, disease, soil composition, sunlight and other factors. Identifying the growth attributable to temperature is not a straightforward task. Call me skeptical.
The good news: The authors have not grafted thermometer measurements onto proxy data.

This long term cooling due to orbital effects is I believe correct. I found it to be about 0.2 deg C/1000 yrs in my 2004 paper:
Loehle, C. 2004. Climate Change: Detection and Attribution of Trends from Long Term Geologic Data. Ecological Modelling 171:433-450
and frequent evidence of similar cooling in more extensive data sets:
Loehle, C. and S.F. Singer. 2010. Holocene Temperature Records Show Millennial-Scale Periodicity. Canadian J. Earth Sciences 47: 1327-1336
It has even been found in Mann’s work.
Note that 0.3 deg/1000 projected back to the Holocene warm peak gives 0.3×7000 = 2.2 deg C warmer, which matches various estimates I have seen (for at least northern hemisphere temps). Since polar bears and most everything else did just fine then, and that is when human agriculture began, it is hard to argue that a similar warming today will be catastrophic, unless you hold a Panglossian view of the world (what is can not be improved upon).

Now all of a sudden tree rings are great predictors with fine resolution? And from a single place in Finland they predict the temperatures of all of Europe?

Scottish Sceptic writes:
The problem is that trees will grow until no more trees can grow. It does not matter whether it is the middle of the tropical jungle, or the sparse canopy of the north, the fact is that if more trees could grow, they would. So, if conditions “improve” the result may be a spurt in growth for individual trees, but it is also likely that more trees can grow, and fairly rapidly (a few decades), there will be more trees, these trees then compete reducing growth for other trees so that any individual tree will tend towards its optimum growing conditions.
But it occurs to me, looking at the the photos of the trees in their paper, leaning over the lake, that the effect of competition for sunlight with other trees may be mitigated by the trees being lakeside–basically always having a clearing. This may imply other sampling problems: is the open space created by the lake on the north side, south side (or does it matter since they are far north and the sun is shining nearly from every direction in summer?). Is there a sampling bias by taking the trees that fell in–the ones that stuck their neck out farthest?

If I were just a little bit excited by temperatures than I am, I would surely conjecture that the Decline of the Roman Empire was sparked by the Decline of the temperatures.

So we are trending towards an over due interglacial period. Makes Sense

Babsy says:
July 9, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Bob Tisdale says:
July 9, 2012 at 4:14 pm
Hey, Bob! I thrilled beyond description it hasn’t been 120 so far this summer in North Texas. It’s raining today and *COOL* LOL!!
___________________________
OT looks like the East Coast Heat Wave broke. Temps are back down into the 80’s F for the rest of the week – tomorrow is supposed to have a high of 82F (77F in mid N. Carolind at 10:30 AM)
After reading Dr. Tim Ball’s comment my distrust of treeometers is now complete. Thanks Dr. Ball especially for pointing out trees only record the growing season and not the winter temperatures where annual cooling shows the most. If it is the winter temperatures that are critical then the whole annual global temperature idea is bogus and it is the NH November through February temperatures where we should be looking and where the signal for ‘climate change’ is strongest. (SH doesn’t show as much change either because of the amount of ocean.)

Vuk
As you may have seen elsewhere, I do believe that tree rings are a reasonably good proxy for moisture but even in a small country like the uk rainfall varies greatly from place to place and year by year. So although rings might show moisture it is very localised. Look forward to seeing some of yoir studies in print.
Whilst everything may be vey green things havent set-i havent been able to grow outdoor tomatios for 5 years, which when you look at the cet decline over the last decade speaks volumes that we need a plan b (cooling) as well as a plan a (Warming)
tonyb

George says:
July 9, 2012 at 5:16 pm
While tree rings by themselves may not represent temperature, the combination of tree rings and the isotopes contained in the wood together can be a pretty good indication.
_______________________________
I was thinking the same thing (Shackleton’s isotope work on deep-sea sediment cores) However that was not what was done here.

…used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland …

One wonders why isotopes are not used since these are sub-fossil. Anyone know?
It also does not negate Dr. Tim Ball’s observation about winter temperatures.

Antbones says:
July 9, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Wow… And just last year you were posting stories about how bad tree ring proxies were… I guess if it fits your agenda it’s ok?
____________________________
If you bothered to read all the comments you will see most of us are STILL saying tree rings are bad proxies.

All this tells me is that if you try hard enough, you can find a piece of data to say whatever the hell you want it to say. Tree ring chronologies are by-and-large complete junk…

With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien…
One tree ring to rule them all,
One tree ring to follow,
No other rings above Yamal,
Lest warmist claims prove hollow.

I will buy some of the astrophysics and leave the tree rings for another day.

Gaudenz Mischol says:
July 10, 2012 at 1:23 am
“How many want to bet that the Warmists will now declare tree rings unreliable?”
And the skeptics will now accept the tree ring reconstructions…. :-))))))))))
__________________________________
DOPE, bad science is STILL bad science and tree-ometers are bad science unless someone has managed a quantum leap discovery like isotope analysis in sea cores by Shacklton

So Time in 1974 and Newsweek in 1975 actually got it right?!?

I hope the circular reasoning demonstrated in the last two sentences of the abstract are not an indication of the quality of the work

tonyb says:
July 10, 2012 at 7:44 am
……Whilst everything may be vey green things havent set-i havent been able to grow outdoor tomatios for 5 years, which when you look at the cet decline over the last decade speaks volumes that we need a plan b (cooling) as well as a plan a (Warming)
tonyb
_____________________________
Yes that is what is really worrisome about the whole mess and I do not see our governments addressing the issue instead I see governments catering to corporate greed.

“In summary, we have record low grain inventories globally as we move into a new crop year. We have demand growing strongly. Which means that going forward even small crop failures are going to drive grain prices to record levels. As an investor, we continue to find these long term trends…very attractive.” Food shortfalls predicted: 2008 http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/dancy/2008/0104.html

“Recently there have been increased calls for the development of a U.S. or international grain reserve to provide priority access to food supplies for Humanitarian needs. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) and the North American Export Grain Association (NAEGA) strongly advise against this concept..Stock reserves have a documented depressing effect on prices… and resulted in less aggressive market bidding for the grains.” July 22, 2008 letter to President Bush http://www.naega.org/images/pdf/grain_reserves_for_food_aid.pdf

In march of 2008 …USDA Undersecretary Mark Keenum, [said] “Our cupboard is bare.” U.S. government food surpluses have evaporated…
The following are the big winners in the biofuel scam and the 2008 food riots in over thirty countries.
Archer Daniels Midland profits soar to 550 percent
Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, Cargill,
Monsanto record breaking profits
Cargill record breaking profits
This is where it gets very interesting.

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
…hedgers followed Goldman’s lead and joined the commodities index game, including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, to name but a few purveyors of commodity index funds….
…and the bankers were ready with a sparkling new casino of food derivatives. Spearheaded by oil and gas prices (the dominant commodities of the index funds) the new investment products ignited the markets of all the other indexed commodities, which led to a problem familiar to those versed in the history of tulips, dot-coms, and cheap real estate: a food bubble. Hard red spring wheat, which usually trades in the $4 to $6 dollar range per 60-pound bushel, broke all previous records as the futures contract climbed into the teens and kept on going until it topped $25. And so, from 2005 to 2008, the worldwide price of food rose 80 percent — and has kept rising. “It’s unprecedented how much investment capital we’ve seen in commodity markets,”…
Today, bankers and traders sit at the top of the food chain — the carnivores of the system, devouring everyone and everything below. Near the bottom toils the farmer. For him, the rising price of grain should have been a windfall, but speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain — from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel. At the very bottom lies the consumer. The average American, who spends roughly 8 to 12 percent of her weekly paycheck on food, did not immediately feel the crunch of rising costs. But for the roughly 2-billion people across the world who spend more than 50 percent of their income on food, the effects have been staggering: 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world’s “food insecure” to a peak of 1 billion — a number never seen before…..

And that is the complex interplay between the speculators in food derivatives, bankers lending “investment capital ” to those speculators and the corporations like Monsanto (seeds) Cargill (grain traders) and Archer Daniels Midland (biofuel producer) who have “Convinced” governments that grain storage is so passé. The starvation related deaths of children has no real place in that interplay.

Bill Clinton: “We Blew It” On Global Food
Today’s global food crisis shows “we all blew it, including me when I was president,” by treating food crops as commodities….
Clinton took aim at decades of international policymaking by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others, encouraged by the U.S., that pressured Africans in particular into dropping government subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed and other farm inputs, in economic “structural adjustments” required to win northern aid. Africa’s food self-sufficiency subsequently declined and food imports rose.
Now skyrocketing prices in the international grain trade – on average more than doubling between 2006 and early 2008 – have pushed many in poor countries deeper into poverty….

In light of that information Lester Brown’s “Grain Reserves” Shell Game is an interesting read. The shearing of the sheep or insider trading comes to mind.
The recent trumpeting of the hot weather in the USA might also have something to do with grain trading as well as CAGW. Global Wheat, Soy and Corn Reserves Decline as Demand Grows, Crops Falter
Lester Brown on the Russian wheat crop failure last year.

…Brown noted that the bottom line indicator for global food security is world carryover stocks or the amount of grain in the bin when the new harvest begins.
“The rule of thumb is that world grain reserves should not drop below 70 days of consumption,”
However, the USDA’s Aug. 12 World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report the ending stocks of grain is enough to meet 72 days of consumption, which Brown said is moving uncomfortably close to the 64 days of carryover stocks in 2007 that caused the large spike in world food prices….
http://agweekly.com/articles/2010/08/13/news/ag_news/news32.txt

So a 2+1/2 months supply is now the rule of thumb for the world’s grain reserves. The US government has made “Hoarding” sort of illegal BTW.
This article shows just how ‘interconnected’ and vulnerable our food supply now is http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-05/drought-stalks-the-global-food-supply

I believe this data to be reliable. But I also believe this chart supports that increased CO2 may contribute to warming.
Yes, this trendline shows cooling…from zero AD. But take a close look at the data from time point of the industrial revolution, or even as recent as the turn of the 20th century. if you did, the trend line would steeply incline upward.
I didn’t think this had to be pointed out but I guess it does. The issues is NOT that the earth has never been warmer, can’t get warm on its own, etc. The issue is does adding CO2 above and beyond naturual causes increase the rate of warming beyond what we can safely adopt to.

Dan Marsh says:
July 10, 2012 at 10:44 am
“The Earth is cooling 0.3 degrees C per millennium, because … increases in the distance between the Earth and the sun. WAIT, WHAT?!!!
Since when is the earth rapidly flying away from the Sun? I mean if distance to the sun is even a 1% factor in that, within a few million years, life on Earth would be doomed!”
Orbits vary due to interaction with other planets’ orbits in the solar system. Earth Sun distances vary but do not simply increase or decrease in a linear fashion. The Earth’s orbital shape vassilates over time causing the Earth Sun distance to change to closer at times and farther at other times. See the Milankovich cylcles for more on this.

“Medieval Scotland’s wines were much enjoyed in Europe” – who says? Let’s not over-egg the cake.

@Gail.
gees Gail, I live in a city, ain’t no horses here..
Just saying that in medieval and roman times.. there were lots of horses, knights in armour, roman legions with chariots etc and there seems to be a definite correlation.. dark ages was cold, and all the horse got et…. and now you tell me that there are STILL lots of horses.. and we are in another warm period.. so there …. further proof of my hypothesis. :-))
at least as solid as the CO2 hypothesis, anyway.

Hey, I’ve realised that Mike Mann must have used cherry trees for his proxies. What do all of you think?

Will says:
July 10, 2012 at 11:40 am
……. The issue is does adding CO2 above and beyond naturual causes increase the rate of warming beyond what we can safely adopt to.
________________________________
No Will, you are missing the really big picture and therefore the actual issues.
#1. CO2 levels were actually getting dangerously low for continued plant life. So low plants had evolved the C$ and CAM mechanisms to cope with the starvation level CO2 during periods of glaciation when CO2 is absorbed by the colder water and the level falls dramatically.
Here is a peer reviewed paper on the subject:
Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California
#2. If CO2 causes some warming, ~ a climate sensitity to CO2 (doubling) of 0.3C is one calculation without adding in the amplification that is not a proven fact – then given we are at the END of this interglacial and the temperature is headed DOWN due to the increase in the distance of the earth from the sun, the more CO2 the better!
GRAPH: five interglacials and CO2 Present is on the right and the CO2 although higher is NOT causing a major increase in the temperature. As shown on this graph the temperature is gradually falling throughout the Holocene interglacial and we are at the bitter end.
Again a couple of peer reviewed papers:

Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic
….Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) w11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present. Early Holocene summer sea ice limits were substantially smaller than their 20th century average, and the flow of Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean was substantially greater. As summer solar energy decreased in the second half of the Holocene, glaciers reestablished or advanced, sea ice expanded, and the flow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean diminished. Late Holocene cooling reached its nadir during the Little Ice Age (about 1250-1850 AD), when sun-blocking volcanic eruptions and perhaps other causes added to the orbital cooling, allowing most Arctic glaciers to reach their maximum Holocene extent….

Arctic temperatures falling
The reconstruction shows lower summer temperatures from A.D. 1630 to 1840, a subsequent warming up to the mid-20th century and a cooling trend afterwards. According to our data, a temperature increase is observed during the past decade. The good coherence of multi-decadal to secular trends of our reconstruction and series of observed solar activity indicate that solar activity may have been one major driving factor of past climate on Kola Peninsula.
600 million year graph of global temperatures – various proxies showing we are at near glacial temps….

Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….

Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried? – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
“Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade….
But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…”

There is a bunch more discussion on the subject here: The End Holocene, or How to Make Out Like a ‘Madoff’ Climate Change Insurer
At this point I much rather chance higher temperatures than a return to Little Ice Age conditions or worse.

Will says:
July 10, 2012 at 11:40 am
……. The issue is does adding CO2 above and beyond naturual causes increase the rate of warming beyond what we can safely adopt to.
If you consider where the CO2 is most likely coming from, its from coal that WAS ONCE TREES.
It got buried, lots of it, which greatly depleted the NATURAL level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
If you know anything about predetor/prey or food scarity algorithms, then it is pretty obvious that for many thousands of years the level of CO2 has been BARELY AT PLANT SUSTAINABLITY levels. (this is further confirmed when you consider that plants, and animals can survive, and indeed flourish, in CO2 levels many multiples of what we currently have.)
Finally, we are releasing some of this long lost carbon, and restoring the proper balance !!!

This is an impressive study and it corroborates previous observations of a slow cooling Arctic. Thus Kaufman et al. (Science, 4 September 2009) published an Arctic temperature curve based on lake sediments that showed a two thousand year, linear, slow cooling that was followed by sudden warming at the start of the twentieth century. They attributed the cooling to a steady, orbitally-driven reduction in summer insolation. Spielhagen et al. (Science, 28 January 2011) likewise observed a similar slow cooling followed by sudden warming at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their data were obtained from a foraminiferal core taken from the Arctic Ocean near Svalbard. Combine this with the current study from the Johannes Gutenberg Universität and we have multiple independent confirmations of a two thousand year cooling trend. As to the warming that began in the Arctic with the twentieth century, I have determined that its cause was warm water carried north by by Atlantic Ocean currents and not any greenhouse effect. For the full story of Arctic warming, download this article:
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/arno-arrak.pdf

In order to really understand the meaningfulness and validity of this study you have to understand the very specific arctic conditions of the Finnish Lapland. Temprature is and has always been the limiting growth factor for this location. This fact vastly increases the scientific credibility of the results.
A Finn who knows Lapland

Erkki Saarikoski says:
July 10, 2012 at 8:17 pm
In order to really understand the meaningfulness and validity of this study you have to understand the very specific arctic conditions of the Finnish Lapland. Temprature is and has always been the limiting growth factor for this location. This fact vastly increases the scientific credibility of the results.
A Finn who knows Lapland
_______________________________________
Thank you,
The nice thing about WUWT is the number of experts who can increase your knowledge if you have an open mind.
I still want to see a critical analysis by some one like Steve M. and others. The amount of game playing with tree rings has left a nasty taste in the mouth of most of us.

Face it, Mann had an agenda to support, whereas a less ideologically-bent view has shown an opposite trend.
One person made tons of money and fame; the others, not so much.
Who do you think is lying?

Anthony… what can I say? You know what I’m talking about. Five years from now…..

Congratulations! You managed to get this study misrepresented on FOX News!

Anthony Watts misleads the audience already in the title of his article:
“This is what global cooling really looks like – new tree ring study shows 2000 years of cooling – previous studies underestimated temperatures of Roman and Medieval Warm Periods”
However, the temperature reconstruction and the trend of -0.31 K/millennium is for Northern Scandinavia and the Arctic zone, but not for the global temperature anomaly. And conclusions about how the temperatures in Roman or Medieval times compare to present day temperatures can only be drawn for this region from this study, but not for the global temperature anomaly.
And most of the devote followers here don’t notice or don’t care about being misled. They just want to get confirmed their preconceived views.
Although I don’t really understand why the fake skeptics crowd, except the ones who dismiss tree ring proxies altogether, is so excited about this study.
How do the results of the study contradict man-made global warming, as some seem to believe here? If the natural trend due to orbital forcing is cooling, then it rather supports the view that the warming trend in the 20th century, particularly the one since the mid 70ies is largely man-made.
Notable: One of the conclusions of the study is the better agreement (oh, oh!) of the new proxy reconstructions with the results from simulations using state-of-the-art coupled climate models, which take the variation of the orbital parameters into account.
Watts also writes:
“it seems only fair to show what real science rather than what he and Dr. Trenberth’s government funded advocacy looks like. I can’t wait to see how Dr. Michael Mann tries to poo-poo this one. ”
These are the kind of personal, inciting statements, which don’t belong in a scientific argument. But this here is just an opinion blog. Anthony Watts doesn’t do any science. Thus, personal attacks against scientists are allowed.
REPLY: Even though this is an insulting and spiteful comment, I’m going to allow it as Dr. Perlwitz is entitled to his opinion. It should be noted that Dr. Perlwitz is on the government advocacy payroll at NASA GISS. His page is here: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/jperlwitz.html
My issue, and the issue with many here, has been Mann’s insistence that the MWP was a small event confined to sections of the NH, rather than broader, perhaps global. Dr. Mann (an the GISS team) has gone to great lengths to obscure and erase the MWP (as was done in the shoddy MBH98 paper), and that’s the issue I’m addressing.
I’m not interested in a discussion, since there is no basis of trust between Dr. Perlwitz and myself, we aren’t going to change each other’s viewpoints. Ever since I found out your boss, Dr. James Hansen, resorted to stage theatrics in June 1988 with Tim Wirth, I have no trust whatsoever in GISS. At one time Dr. Hansen’s work motivated me to do a nationwide project with the National Arbor Day Foundation in 1990 and 1991 to offset CO2 by planting trees with the help of weathercasters nationwide. Now, having seen what he is, I see him and GISS in general as nothing more than funding survivalists willing to distort science as needed to preserve the organization. Following your lead on wordplay, he’s a “fake scientist”, demonstrated by deeds to be mostly an activist now.
As for the “Anthony Watts doesn’t do any science.” comment, I’ll see you in 2013.
Be as upset as you wish. But I’m entitled to my opinion too.
– Anthony

[SNIP – like I said, not interested in a discussion right now. Have a nice weekend Dr. Perlwitz, and you too Smokey. I have better things to do than moderate this fight. – Anthony]