Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In 1990, the IPCC’s First Assessment Report showed a schematic demonstrating the then understanding that the medieval warm period had been appreciably warmer than the present and that the Little Ice Age had been colder. However, in 1995 Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, an IPCC scientist, wrote an email to Dr. David Deming to say, “We have to abolish the medieval warm period.”
By 2001, the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report had obliged; and, notwithstanding my Expert Review of the draft Fifth Report, in which I had listed some 400 papers from the medieval warm period database at www.co2science.org establishing by measurement that the medieval warm period was real, was global and was almost everywhere warmer than the present, the IPCC defied the evidence and preferred the models that had been shown to be defective (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005).
In the autumn of 2013, the Government of Colombia invited me to Bogota, where, after several university lectures and two addresses to Simón Bolívar’s anti-corruption department, the Procuraduria, I was also asked to give a lecture to 200 trainees at the Army School of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence.
I began with a quotation from Sun Tzu, the earliest strategist to write about how to win a warm. Sun Tzu wrote: “All warfare is based on deception.” I explained to the trainees that I was going to demonstrate to them by various examples a method by which a lay intelligence officer could identify deception even in a field of study that was not his specialism.
My first illustration was the absurd “hockey-stick” graph that had falsely abolished the medieval warm period by a series of flagrant statistical dodges. I said that before the modelers had worked their gloomy magic to abolish the medieval warm period attempts to reconstruct global temperatures had concentrated on studying the measurable effects of temperature change. And the most obvious effect of temperature change on the environment was sea level.
Water expands a little as it warms. This thermosteric expansion makes sea level rise in warmer weather and fall in cooler weather. I looked for a reconstruction of sea level rise over the past millennium and, thanks to Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian, who reads everything, I came across a graph from Grinsted et al. (2009).
The Grinsted graph is a poor match for the hockey-stick graph. However, it matches the IPCC’s earlier schematic to a very high correlation. I told the trainee intelligence agents that this simple but robust method, which demanded of the intelligence agent nothing more than what our British James Bonds call “the Mark I Eyeball”, indicated that the Middle Ages had indeed been warmer than the present, and the Little Ice Age cooler.
I also pointed out that, notwithstanding the pronounced fluctuations in temperature over the past millennium, including the cold weather that had frozen the Thames in London and the Hudson in New York during several winters at the end of the 17th century (Fig. 1), global sea level had varied by as little as ± 20 cm throughout the millennium. With a graph (Fig. 2) from the inimitable Willis Eschenbach, I showed that in the past 420,000 years absolute global temperature had fluctuated by as little as 3 Cº, or 1%, either side of the long-run median. It is difficult to get global temperature to change much.
With this small fluctuation in temperatures, how had sea level risen by 400 feet (130 m) in the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age? The mean rate of rise was almost 4 feet/century. The answer is ice-melt. Once temperatures become warm enough to cause the ice on great northern-hemisphere land masses such as North America to melt, sea level will rise sharply, as it did after the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event that brought the last Ice Age to an end. In fact, global temperature rose by 5 Cº in just three years, according to the ice cores.
However, I said, in the past millennium the changes in the cryosphere had been comparatively small. The main reason for sea-level changes was thermosteric expansion, so the changes over the past 1000 years were in centimeters, not meters.
Nevertheless, it was clear that the weather had been warm enough in the Middle Ages to push sea level up by 20 cm, and cool enough in the Little Ice age to push it down by 20 cm. This profile did not fit the hockey stick (Fig. 3), but it did fit the IPCC’s 1990 schematic showing both the MWP and the LIA (Fig. 4).
The Director of the Intelligence School, who had been nodding enthusiastically throughout this part of my talk, quietly slipped out of the room and came back some minutes later clutching something.
At the end of my lecture, after several more than usually perceptive questions had come from the audience, the Director came on to the stage and presented me with a magnificent gong, the Medal of the Army School of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, that now has pride of place on my neo-Classical mantelpiece beneath the handsome portraits of my ancestors.
On returning to Scotland I told a friend of the award. He replied, “Intelligence medal? You?” That is what friends are for.
Think about it for a second. Figs and olives in Germany! Yet it wasn’t really that warm! Sheesh!
The Medieval Warm Period was a localized, Northern Hemisphere affair. There is a consensus so please remain silent.
But, but, we have changed our minds. Afterall, we must get rid of this warmcold period. You really have to laugh at this comedy. :-O
Here is Lamb from 1965 on the Medieval Cold Period. 😉 Brooks suggest something outrageous. In reality there was always lots of sea ice. Breath easy now.
@max
“Al Gore must be giving a LOT of Gorebull Warming lectures. Can we send him to South Africa?”
For heaven’s sake, man, we have enough problems here without freezing in the middle of summer. There was tennis ball sized hail a few days ago, Nelson Mandela has risen into the pantheon of emaqawe and it is the wet end of the 19 year drought cycle. Have you ever heard of fusarium roseum in maize?
My condolences to the people of Northern Europe and Southern Africa for their losses this week. It has been rough.
farmerbraun: The Seattle Times ran a series about how ocean acidification was destroying WA and OR oyster farmers. Dr Cliff Mass, a meteorology professor at U of WA, took issue with the series and the bad science involved. He was excoriated for his lack of expertise and experience. Dr Mass [replied] with an extensive post upon his blog.
Needless to say, his response was silenced the alarmists.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/11/coastal-ocean-acidification-answering.html
[“was silenced by the alarmists” or “silenced the alarmists” ? Mod]
In the tradition of Sun Tzu, CAGW zealots have implemented an all out war of deception/misdirection regarding the recent Braddock, Rosenthal, Linsley and Oppo peer-reviewed paper, which shows the Medieval Warming Period (WMP) was warmer than today AND a global event.
Yet another paper that busts Mann’s stupid Hockey Stick to smithereens…..
Rather than admitting their very serious error that the WMP was NOT cooler than today and was NOT just a localized phenomenon , Warmunists only cite this paper’s observations of rapid and “unprecedented” (there is that word again) OHC warming over the past century….
Even if 20th century OHC levels did rise at “unprecedented” rates, this still doesn’t prove anything as there were other climate factors taking place during that time such as: LIA recovery, the strongest 63-year (1933~1996) string of solar cycles in 11,400 years (Solanki et al), a Super El Nino event in 1998, a rapid increase in ice-melting carbon soot and other phenomenon and oh yeah, an increase in CO2 levels….
Given these and other realities, it’s not surprising the 20th century experienced a warming trend (HACRUT4 1900~1999 trend: 0.05C/decade), but even if 50% of that warming were attributed to CO2 forcing, that’s only 0.25C, with roughly 50% of all known fossil fuel reserves consumed to date…
Moreover, even if one makes the rather generous 50% CO2 forcing assumption (i.e. 0.25C of total 0.5C 20th century warming), CO2’s forcing effect is logarithmic, so CO2’s next 120ppm increase will be even less that 0.25C…
What’s even more curious is that 1/3rd of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 have been made over just the last 17 years, and the lower troposphere RSS trend has been -0.000C/decade… Oh, my….
Is such a small increase in CO2-induced global warming catastrophic? Not so much… To the contrary, an excellent case could be made that the small rise of global temperatures, combined with the positive effects of CO2 fertilization on crop yields and forest growth have been a net benefit to humanity.
The CAGW scam is starting to implode with 73 out of 73 CMIP5 model projections now above observed temperatures and we’re now into 17+ years of no global warming trend, despite record CO2 emissions. CAGW’s projections vs. reality only get worse from here.
The CAGW charlatans will try to ride their newest OHC hobby horse as long as possible, but pretty soon, empirical evidence will overwhelm this last ditch effort of deception and misdirection.
And so it goes….until freedom and logic are restored.
Jon says:
December 8, 2013 at 9:16 am
Jon says:
December 8, 2013 at 12:24 pm
Give it a rest will you. Your assertion has nothing to do with the subject of the post and you grow irksome.
From the third graph, what’s a “Mediaeval”?
@Robin: are you familiar with “Non-Centered Principal Components Analysis”? That is how the hockey stick came about from the proxies that Mann used. This was written up in the Wegman report to Congress, and in a Steve McIntyre paper. McIntyre’s readers could probably get you some code to run your samples.
Pax
@Robin: btw, I do not recommend the Wikipedia article on the Wegman report. It is burdened with a number of red herrings and ad hominem attacks against Wegman. I would suggest reading it for yourself. PCA is described in an appendix to the report.
It appears Micheal Mann is in bed with University of Florida and UF is in bed with IPCC. The Lakeland Fl Ledger did an editorial on them.
There was a time when the Geography dept. that was studying sunspot activity on Hurricanes. That appears to have fallen by the wayside.
I have written rebuttals to the paper before and never published. I think it is time to quit fixing Stupid.
I lost out on a Hurricane conference in Greece last year due to plane schedule. Mann was a center point in the conference. I think I would have wasted $5Gs.
Paul
One thing to bring out from a Russian scientist is modeling is not science.
In figure 2, the variation of ± 3 Cº is compared to the average Absolute Temperature of the Earth’s surface (i.e. about 15Cº = 288K) to yield a variation of 1%. Whilst Absolute Temperature comparisons are relevant for planetary science, a more meaningful comparison in the context of Earth’s climate would be the temperature range in which food crops grow (e.g. about 5-35Cº) so the ± 3 Cº variation is closer to 10% of the relevant range than 1%.
Still within the range of adaptability.
Christopher Monckton writes:
“I had listed some 400 papers from the medieval warm period database at http://www.co2science.org establishing by measurement that the medieval warm period was real, was global and was almost everywhere warmer than the present,”
There are a number away from the Arctic that say it was warmest around the 7th to 9th centuries, like this one: http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l2_gdansk.php
that was during a peak cold period for Greenland: http://snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
In the next week, the green band going through Michigan will be filled in. Then we’ll have 2/3′s Continental USA covered. Counting Alaska, 75% of the USA Land mass will be covered.
We came pretty close yesterday. Tiny bits of solid precip (sleet) halfway to the coast, but too warm for real snow — just freezing rain and a bit of sleet to the west. I’ve already seen snow this winter in Durham. This is early December. For most of the 80s and early 90s, I’d still be picking tomatoes in December. The last time we had substantial snow in early December (that I can remember) was 1973, when I took my multivariate calculus final at Duke with an inch or so of snow falling outside in what would have been the second week of December. So far we’ve been having rain that could be warm or cold (warm three days ago, cold for the last two days) or cold dry weather. Not a lot of sunny warm days. Eventually we’ll get the cold and wet at the same time.
Or not. NC is famous for promising snow and not delivering (we notice, because snow = holiday in NC and all points south:-). I’ve learned the hard, bitter way that the weather people predict snow three or even four times for every time that it actually snows, and fail to predict snow only once in a decade. We’re downright eager, which leads to optimistic mistakes. Actually a nice example of how hopes and expectations color the predictions even of professionals who should know better.
On another thread I had occasion to go look at the list of US state record temperatures by year and location over the last 120 or so years, which are conveniently collected in several databases and displayed on several websites. Just about exactly 1/2 of the high temperature records were set in the 1930s. There is no real pattern to the low temperature records or high temperature records OUTSIDE of the 1930s. In particular, there is absolutely nothing unusual about the number of high temperature records or low temperature records set in the last 30 years (the last quarter of the record). If the US had warmed substantially, one would expect there to be SOME sort of surplus of high temperature records and SOME sort of deficit of low temperature records (such as there was in the 1930s).
rgb
Sounds more like Mikey or Philbert.
Robert;
That record of predicting 4 snow days for every one that occurs reminds me of the crack about economists, who have correctly predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions.