Quote of the week: Steyn ups the ante on the Mann lawsuit

Medieval Warm Period
Medieval Warm Period in Australia & New Zealand

Climate alarmists have claimed for quite some time that late-20th-century and early-21st-century global temperatures were so high as to merit the word “unprecedented” when comparing them to temperatures of the past millennium or two; and they also claim that this achievement was both driven and sustained by the carbon dioxide or CO2 released to the air by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil. But to maintain this dual contention, they have been forced to further contend that the well-known Medieval Warm Period was neither hemispheric nor global in scope, but merely confined to the much smaller region surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean. And they have also had to contend that the MWP was never really as warm as it had long been believed to be.
In introducing their paper of quite some time ago, Wilson et al. (1979) wrote that one of their main objectives in conducting the study it described was to compare the Period anywhere other than in temperature record from New Zealand – which they emphasized is “in the Southern Hemisphere and a region meteorologically countries surrounding the unrelated to Europe” – with the climate record of England, where the MWP had already made its mark on that country’s and the surrounding region’s climatic history. Their contribution to this endeavor was to decipher the 18O/16O profile from the core to the surface of a stalagmite obtained from a cave in New Zealand, which was dated by the 14C method. And in doing so, they found that the proxy temperature record provided by the stalagmite was broadly similar to the climate record of England, exhibiting a period in the early part of the past millennium that was about 0.75°C warmer than it was in the mid-20th-century.….
A quarter of a century later, Williams et al. (2004)2 wrote that their new paper on the subject…
revealed a warmer-than-present late-Holocene warm peak located between 0.9 and 0.6 ka BP that they equated with the Medieval Warm Period of Europe, further noting that this period “coincided with a period of Polynesian settlement (McGlone and Wilmshurst, 1999).” Thereafter, they further reported that temperatures “cooled rapidly to a trough about 325 years ago,” which they said corresponded to “the culmination of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Europe.”…
….In clear contradiction of the claims of climate alarmists, these findings are but another example of the unending stream of studies from all around the world that continue to document the global presence of a warmer-than-present Medieval Warm Period; and they are becoming ever more difficult to deny, because they demonstrate that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the Modern Warm Period….
The results of the several studies described greatly advance the thesis that the MWP was indeed a global phenomenon, wherein temperatures throughout the world were significantly warmer than they have been anytime subsequently….

NORTHERN HEMISPHERE:
Medieval Warm Period found in 120 proxies. Plus Roman era was similar to early 20th Century.

….Ljungqvist used 120 proxy records — nearly 3 times as many proxies as previous studies and conclude: “during the 9th to 11th centuries there was widespread NH warmth comparable in both geographic extent and level to that of the 20th century”. Their proxies included ice-cores, pollen, marine sediments, lake sediments, tree-rings, speleothems and historical documentary data….
In April 2012 Christiansen and Ljungqvist published a study of 32 proxies going back as far as 1AD for the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere. They found the first millennium was warmer than the second, that the Little Ice Age (17th Century) was awfully cold and colder than the “Dark Ages” cooling (circa 300- 800AD), and about −1.0 °C below the 1880–1960AD level. It warmed a bit in the 1700′s then cooled again in the 1800′s almost back to where it was in the 1600′s. The Little Ice Age appears in records across vast areas, and the three century pattern of colder-warmer-and-almost-as-cold-again repeats all around the Northern Hemisphere….