From The Earth Institute at Columbia University comes another tree ring hockey stick. I have to laugh though at the choice of graphic for the press release, which shows a weather event (Euro heat wave) in 2003, rather than showing us the science, like maybe a reconstruction. I wonder what absurd assumptions or tricks (like Zombie proxies) Mr. McIntyre will find in this one that he hasn’t already – Anthony
Earth’s current warmth not seen in the last 1,400 years or more, says study
Fueled by industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s climate warmed more between 1971 and 2000 than during any other three-decade interval in the last 1,400 years, according to new regional temperature reconstructions covering all seven continents. This period of manmade global warming, which continues today, reversed a natural cooling trend that lasted several hundred years, according to results published in the journal Nature Geoscience by more than 80 scientists from 24 nations analyzing climate data from tree rings, pollen, cave formations, ice cores, lake and ocean sediments, and historical records from around the world.
“This paper tells us what we already knew, except in a better, more comprehensive fashion,” said study co-author Edward Cook, a tree-ring scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led the Asia reconstruction.
The study also found that Europe’s 2003 heat wave and drought, which killed an estimated 70,000 people, happened during Europe’s hottest summer of the last 2,000 years. “Summer temperatures were intense that year and accompanied by a lack of rain and very dry soil conditions over much of Europe,” said study co-author Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty and one of the lead contributors to the Europe reconstruction. Though summer 2003 set a record for Europe, global warming was only one of the factors that contributed to the temperature conditions that summer, he said.
The study is the latest to show that the Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1250, may not have been global, and may not have happened at the same time in places that did grow warmer. While parts of Europe and North America were fairly warm between 950 and 1250, South America stayed relatively cold, the study says. Some people have argued that the natural warming that occurred during the medieval ages is happening today, and that humans are not responsible for modern day global warming. Scientists are nearly unanimous in their disagreement “If we went into another Medieval Warm Period again that extra warmth would be added on top of warming from greenhouse gases,” said Cook.
Temperatures varied less between continents in the same hemisphere than between hemispheres. “Distinctive periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age stand out, but do not show a globally uniform pattern,” said co-author Heinz Wanner, a scientist at the University of Bern, in a press release. By 1500, temperatures dropped below the long-term average everywhere, though colder temperatures emerged several decades earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia.
The most consistent trend across all regions in the last 2,000 years was a long-term cooling, likely caused by a rise in volcanic activity, decrease in solar irradiance, changes in land-surface vegetation, and slow variations in Earth’s orbit. With the exception of Antarctica, cooling tapered off at the end of the 19th century, with the onset of industrialization. Cooler 30-year periods between 830 and 1910 were particularly pronounced during weak solar activity and strong tropical volcanic eruptions. Both phenomena often occurred simultaneously and led to a drop in the average temperature during five distinct 30- to 90-year intervals between 1251 and 1820. Warming in the 20th century was on average twice as large in the northern continents as it was in the Southern Hemisphere. During the past 2000 years, some regions experienced warmer 30-year intervals than during the late 20th century. For example, in Europe the years between 21 and 80 AD were likely warmer than the period 1971-2000.
The study involved the collaboration of researchers in China, Pakistan, India, Russia and the U.S., among others, under the auspices of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. The project, Past Global Changes 2k Network, or PAGES 2k Network, was funded by the U.S. and Swiss National Science Foundations and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The data compiled in the study will be made public and incorporated into the 2013-2014 climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
==============================================================
Source: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/3081
But there’s no Title, no DOI, no citation to the paper of any kind. And the graphic is absurd.
Sloppy really. A press release should at least NAME THE PAPER.
UPDATE: After prodding the press release writers, they provided a link to the paper.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1797.html
Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia
Nature Geoscience (2013) doi:10.1038/ngeo1797 Received 09 December 2012 Accepted 11 March 2013Published online 21 April 2013
Abstract
Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.
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I questioned the 70,000 deaths number, so I looked it up. Sure enough, it’s straight out of Wikipedia.
I kept looking, and found a country listing of excess deaths in 2003. There were some missing, but they were headed for half that 70,000 number. The Telegraph had an article on the heat wave, and their number was 40,000, which sounds more sane.
Still a big number, but more a comment on European socialized medicine than the weather.
Shake the bones and spill them out to tell the shaman science story.
What makes tree rings larger or smaller, isn’t it a combination of things? Sunlight, favorable weather, rainfall, competition for ground nutrients, shifts in ground water level? Overall temperature might well simply get lost in there. Ice cores could tell more, but they only happen where it’s icy all the time.
“The study also found that Europe’s 2003 heat wave and drought, which killed an estimated 70,000 people, happened during Europe’s hottest summer of the last 2,000 years. ”
Say WHAT?! 70,000 in one year?? Show me the data. WUWT back in 2008 had an article that listed GLOBAL deaths as being only 33k combined for 2000 to 2006. And that is ALL things attributed to weather.. Broken down to just extreme temperatures (including cold) its more like 5,671 deaths per year for 1990 to 2006.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/global_deaths_table_1900-2006.png
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/05/going-down-death-rates-due-to-extreme-weather-events/
A bit off topic but but I think I have detected a troll trail.
Every comment above before 6:08 has a down arrow, regardless of whether it is even stating an opinion of not.
At 6:08 the troll trail ends.
Can there really be people who see it as their duty to thumbs down every comment on the board in the name of protecting the planet? I guess so.
Noble work. I am sure Gaia thanks you, whoever you are.
It seems I spoke too soon. All the posts after 6:08 have also been thumbed down.
I guess even the most dediated workers need a cup off tea occasionally.
MattN says:
April 22, 2013 at 3:21 pm
Looks like a few of us here would like to see a citation or two for your statement: “… we also know from ice cores there are no less than 7 one hundred year periods in the last 26,000 years that changed temperature at a much, much higher rate than the 20th century.” JP
These sort of publications are actually good news (if you ignore the rhetoric and attempts to co-opt every recent weather event as ‘proof’).
It is putting into the mainstream that most of the last 10,000 years on earth were in fact hotter than today. Suddenly gone are the shrill shrieks of “unprecedented warming” and “boiling oceans”.
It is becoming increasingly obvious the planet has been (and perhaps still is) on a cooling trend, and in the longer term we can see that no recent interglacials lasted as long as 10,000 years.
It may be becoming clearer to all that precipitous action should not precede far greater understanding of the systems regulating our planetary temperature.
I have a feeling that should we survive the politics and preaching of the CAGW hysteria era that the scientists involved will be held up by history as an example of leaping to conclusions and of religious devotion to a cause.
Thomas Spaziani says:
April 22, 2013 at 8:16 pm
“The study also found that Europe’s 2003 heat wave and drought, which killed an estimated 70,000 people, happened during Europe’s hottest summer of the last 2,000 years. ”
Say WHAT?! 70,000 in one year?? Show me the data.
From a study done in Europe in 2007, analyzing the mortality due to the heat wave of 2003:
“In total, more than 80,000 additional deaths were recorded in 2003 in the twelve countries concerned by excess mortality compared to the 1998‐2002 period. Whereas 70,000 of these additional deaths occurred during the summer, still over 7,000 occurred afterwards. Nearly 45,000 additional deaths were recorded in August alone, as well as more than 11,000 in June, more than 10,000 in July and nearly 5,000 in September.”
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_projects/2005/action1/docs/action1_2005_a2_15_en.pdf
“…Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years….”
Question arises:
Is there anyone in the world who thinks a long term cooling trend is a good thing?
This is the same Ed Cook who admitted in the CG1 emails that we know “f*** all” about climate variability based on proxies greater than 100 years ago. Did he think we’d forget?? The tiny amount of respect for him I might have had is now gone.
No way that they can conclude from their noisy proxies that the European heat wave of 2003 was any worse than the famous heat wave of 1540!
Chris says:
“In total, more than 80,000 additional deaths were recorded in 2003 in the twelve countries concerned by excess mortality compared to the 1998‐2002 period. Whereas 70,000 of these additional deaths occurred during the summer, still over 7,000 occurred afterwards. Nearly 45,000 additional deaths were recorded in August alone, as well as more than 11,000 in June, more than 10,000 in July and nearly 5,000 in September.”
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_projects/2005/action1/docs/action1_2005_a2_15_en.pdf
So pretty much unlike the numbers posted in the WUWT article, this one is just doing some statistical gymnastics to justify the majority of ALL deaths that happen during the summer months to heat? Without a single medical opinion of the deaths considered in the count? Well geez in that case no one must die of anything but heat now.
Ed Cook in the Cimategate emails shows his lack of math ability:
“It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of filter theory stuff in it. It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the mathematics appears to be correct theoretically”
“With the exception of Antarctica, cooling tapered off at the end of the 19th century, with the onset of industrialization”
Damn those factory overlords cursing us to a century of not freezing!
/sarc
Stan W. says:
April 22, 2013 at 5:21 pm
@crispin — this station shows about 1 C of warming in Wellington since 1970:
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/6435
Looks to me that the temperature is the same as it was in 1970?
Thomas Spaziani says:
April 22, 2013 at 11:34 pm
“So pretty much unlike the numbers posted in the WUWT article, this one is just doing some statistical gymnastics to justify the majority of ALL deaths that happen during the summer months to heat?”
No, that’s not what the report says. I quote “The excess mortality cumulated during summer 2003 has recently been assessed at the request of the European Union.” Excess means that which occurred above the norm.
Section 4 is titled: “4. Excess mortality in 2003 compared with the 1998‐2002 average”
Once again, excess meaning above the average of 5 prior years.
From Section 4: “The countries most affected by this excess summer mortality
were Luxembourg, Spain, France and Italy, where mortality increased by 14.3%, 13.7%, 11.8% and 11.6% respectively.”
Clearly the report is built by comparing the number of deaths during the summer of 2003 to the average during the same months during 1998-200, not by assigning all summer 2003 deaths to heat related causes.
“The study also found that Europe’s 2003 heat wave and drought, which killed an estimated 70,000 people, happened during Europe’s hottest summer of the last 2,000 years.”
70k? Natures ‘unofficial’ serial killing streak these past winters should be far more worrying but a frozen Nan is a apparently nice way to go and better than toasted Nanp. In fact freezing to death in great numbers is so much fun that alarmists are not being alarmed by death and chaos as death and chaos can only happen when it’s warm (which is our fault)….and that warmth is unprecedented
Since you warm science deniers are clearly unhinged and conspiracy prone I propose – as a thought experiment of course – burning you all so you can feel the heat the planet is experiencing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9959856/Its-the-cold-not-global-warming-that-we-should-be-worried-about.html
/sarc
It is interesting that the first century AD, which they say was warmer than the last decades of the 20C, was the Age of the Antonines, and Gibbon describes it as a period of unprecedented prosperity and well being.
More pastoral farming ‘watering’ the trees in recent decades?
More nitrogen run-off from arable farming ‘watering’ the trees?
Are these scientists the same that made up the consensus of 77 scientists. They must have been selected for a special ability to ignore the many peer reviewed papers from China, Japan, Tibet, Caribbean etc etc that have all show that the MWP was global, though maybe not entirely synchronous, and that it was as warm as or warmer than the end of the 2oth century. But we do not need ice cores, pollen, stalagmites, tree rings or any other proxies to know that, just to know what is in the history books relating to crop production – it was not possible to build the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Gothic cathedrals etc without food production that reflected a warm climate. And we also have the archeological records from Greenland for the MWP showing that grains were produced and cattle kept in areas which are currently under the ice or too cold to grow grains. Since, according to Arrhenius, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would result in an increase in temperature mainly in the north of the NH, at night and in the winter – as GISS have conveniently produced by homogenizing land temperatures over the Arctic ocean, we do not need any statistical evaluation to tell that this Pages2K project has produced trash, even if some of the data may we good but used in the wrong way. As my Professor used to say ” you can see what you want in any data with the eye of faith” and AGW is a belief system not real science.
Night of the Living Government Scientists.
This starts to look like a trench war; a war of attrition.
They turn tax payer dollars into bogus proxy studies to justify claiming more taxpayer dollars.
@Stan W – And that airport belonged to the local flying club until 1973 when it was sold to Waterloo Region and City and began expansion. UHI all the way I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_of_Waterloo_International_Airport
More ‘unprecedented’ gar-bage from the Lost In Space team. The stink of high desperation is rank.
If any of these calculations are based on tree rings, of course the trees grow faster now.
With the increase in CO2 the planet is getting greener, grows better and can feed another two billion people, not to mention the additional animals. What is so horrible about that?