Only 9100 of last 10500 years were warmer than 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Only 9100 of last 10500 years were warmer than 2010

wattsupwiththat.com

24 pointscwan20 comments

A few thigns which immediately jump out:

1) "1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century." While true for the USA, it was more than offset by cooler weather elsewhere. [http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warm...]

2) There is significant evidence that the "Medieval Warm Period" was regional. http://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+warm+period+regional

3) All of the data in this blog post was from a single ice core sample in Greenland. So at a minimum the title is very misleading, and should be "In Greenland only 9100 ...". This fits with the previous errors of picking regional temperature sets which back his claims and presenting them as representative of global temperatures.

4) Temperature proxies, like ice core data, are apparently only valid when they agree with him.

I expect we'll shortly see a rebuttal where someone includes graphs of some of the many other 10,000 year temperature proxies. See, for example, the wide variability of different proxies as graphed together here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_...

Wow. I'm actually pretty surprised to see this kind of anti-scientific nonsense on HN. I realize there are a lot of libertarians here, but this is science, not politics. When you manage to get 97% of scientists to agree on something, it's a pretty damned good indication it's real.

AGW is a fact, guys. The global warming denial "movement" has been funded almost exclusively by oil and industry interests, and has nothing to do with science. It's the same idea behind the Koch brothers' astroturfing of the Tea Party. In fact, the two phenomena are one and the same. The only reason the Tea Party is so strongly against environmental regulation is that it's been financed to the tune of $100M by David Koch, head of the second-worst polluter in America.

It's science, guys. I didn't think HN, of all places, would buy into this denialist garbage.

Minor note: I'm a libertarian and not a GW denialist. Careful with the broad brush there, as denialists, Tea Party folks, etc. are most often bog-standard Republicans. (Easy test of a "libertarian": get that individual talking politics with your average Republican; if they aren't arguing in ten minutes, that individual isn't actually a libertarian, just pretentious.)

But yes, we do get quite a bit of denialism around here. Sorry.

"Libertarian" isn't a pure term or concept. There are many Tea Partiers who consider themselves libertarian, although I would agree with you that they really aren't, as they tend to be socially conservative. The Koch brothers themselves are, or at least claim to be, libertarian.

In linking GW denialism and libertarianism, I'm simply noting a fairly strongly correlation between the two. Of the groups that tend to deny AGW, libertarians and conservatives, both paleo- and neo, are at the forefront.

" "Libertarian" isn't a pure term or concept. "

Not as a single doctrine along the lines of the Democratic or Republican platforms/talking points, no. However, the group that called itself "libertarian" or "right-libertarian" before the word became the new term of choice for faux-independent Republican voters is one that's rather distinct from your average Republican.

ETA: and they agree rather well on positions on issues that are anathema to most admitted Republicans.

And that group is not remotely of one mind on the subject. Some of them are denialists, and even those of us who acknowledge warming distrust the suggested government solutions or the use of the issue as an excuse for expansion of government authority. Hence my advice against the broad brush.

It's a small point, but Democrats can't be considered to adhere to a single doctrine either, which is partly why they're having so much trouble governing. As a "big tent" party, they have members with a wide range of political views, from very liberal to pretty conservative. That, for example, is why they couldn't pass single-payer health care: too many conservative democrats didn't want it. Also, lobbying from the insurance companies, but that's a different story.

Please, let's not even go to that perennial bit of mythology, especially after you reduced Republicans to paleocons (a group whose most powerful figure in Republican circles is, well, Ron Paul) and neocons (a disfavored group glowering at the populists and others who elbowed them out of power a few years ago).

Otherwise, we have to drag up all the self-congratulating Republican mythology that they use when they lose power in whole or in part, and neither of us want to dwell on that brand of glurge.

The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally centrist parties with halos of more right-wing or left-wing members who have little actual power, but don't feel they have any home anywhere else. Their communities have decades-old mythologies about why they win or lose power that have little or nothing to do with why Americans vote.

Food for thought: If the scientific consensus came to be that the current global warming trend IS NOT anthropogenic, what would that matter?

That is, say the recent global warming is a natural trend - do we still try to mitigate it? If not, why not? The implications could still be dire for poorer countries in non-temperate climates.

Of course the flip side of this question is: if it's concluded that global warming is anthropogenic, why do we assume that the best course of action is to reverse it? Isn't it reasonable to suggest that perhaps many more lives could saved by using that money to "adjust" to global warming rather than try to turn back time?

This chart seems really disingenuous:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/easterbro...

I don't see any explanation for how the dates defining the "periods" were chosen. It looks a lot like they were chosen to maximize the number of cooling "periods." Shift the cut-off dates to the right a bit, and you'll get four periods of warming in a row (1890-now), at which point it seems silly to divide that up into arbitrary periods.

The data he started with is relatively high resolution, with a data point for every year, apparently, and he's simplified that down to just four bits of data (four periods, each either warming or cooling). Then he analyzes those four bits at length. And he conflates "cooling" with "cool" and "warming" with "warm" in the process. He describes the second "cooling" period as "cool" even though the chart shows the average temperature is higher than the previous "warming" period, which he describes as "warm."

This doesn't seem reasonable to me. Frankly, his eagerness to slice up that high-res temperature data into big, discrete pieces, with no rhyme or reason, would alarm anyone who has ever designed any sort of feedback-based control-loop system; that's no way to find real trends in noisy data.

And his blog is full of ads. I realize pointing that out is sort of ad-hominem, but it seems unserious. Stephen Hawking's website isn't full of ads exhorting the viewer to "measure the age of the universe yourself!"

Hmm, I don't know much about the science behind global warming but this looks quite convincing, it basically argues that temperature shifts are natural, not man-made.

Anyone care to put some holes in this argument?

Yeah, here's a giant hole: I don't care what the temperature was in 4000 BC.

Right now, the ice caps are melting, and all available science points to CO2 as the reason. Maybe the reason in 4000BC was CO2, maybe it was something else. But right now, the ice caps melting are going to create a whole bunch of problems for us.

I also noticed that in this guy's "historical long view" graphs, he omitted the last 30 years so that we don't see a big spike at the end. And they seem to all be normalized differently. Very honest of him. I'm sure he's motivated by pure science and not politics.

Whether that's true or not, do the benefits of stopping the ice caps melting outweigh the negative effects on us for the future? Just because something is going to cause us a whole bunch of problems does not mean the solution will not cause more problems and implementing a solution blindly is likely to be profoundly disappointing in the long run.

Every decision must be weighed against the effects of both making it and not making it. I am unconvinced those who say "We should do something to prevent global warming" fully understand what we may be doing to our future in an effort to solve a problem we may not have. On top of that, our political class is probably unable to have the type of discussion required to make that decision anyway.

Hmm perhaps that they are looking at a single iceberg core from a single location?

I would prefer to trust the satellite observations over everything else. All the other global temperatures estimates are much less accurate.

Then again I'm not a climatologist. 97% of climatologists "who have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change" there is a human made global warming [1]

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6.html would be a good place to start reading.

Additionally, even if you take the OP article at face value, nothing in it constitutes an argument that current temperature shifts are not man-made. All he's done is shown that there has been natural temperature variability in pre-industrial times. This is clearly not an argument that current warming is not man-made.

Whether or not it's man-made isn't really an interesting question, as far as I can tell.

In fact, the only interesting question is what is worse: the effect of climate change, or the cost of trying to avert it. And virtually all discussion of climate change completely ignores that very question.

The IPCC goes into substantial detail on cost estimates for mitigation, in brief:

> Stabilizing CO2 concentrations at around 445 to 535 ppm, limiting the longterm temperature rise to about 3.6 to 5.4°F (2 to 3°C), is estimated to reduce the cumulative growth in global GDP 3 percent by 2030. This is equivalent to only a 0.12 percent reduction in annual growth rate of GDP.

More importantly 'what it would cost' is pernicious to calculate. Especially when 5% of global GDP could conceivably be a huge number of people: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost...

Shows one data set. Does not detail any methodological assumptions used to interpret that data set. Does not elaborate or respond to contrary views. Not science.

Global warming does not really matter (and we can't do anything about it).

Oil production of almost all countries has already peaked (this is undisputed). The only nations where production hasn't peaked yet (Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) are expected to peak in this century.

What will happen when we have a global peak? Just look at the state of the current economy and imagine energy costs exponentially rising. There are also economic scenarios that do not predict a huge rise in energy costs, but most (all?) of them predict a shrinking economy.

"Green energy" is not the solution to this problem. Yes, it's a replacement for oil (at a much smaller scale), but it does not prevent rising energy costs. In the short-term things like coal will be a replacement for oil and will dramatically increase CO2 emissions. And it's rather unlikely that any country will abide to CO2 emission agreements, when its own energy supply is at stake.

I think that we'll see some rather large changes during the next decades. And global warming is only one among many other larger problems.

He is a geologist. I don't know his politics, but he seems to be a genuine scientist. http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/resume.htm

While I personally am a supporter of global warming theory, let's not dismiss him out of hand. Many scientists through the centuries had theories that were rejected until proven right. Remember, science is not about what you think or feel, it's about what is testably provable.

I'm a skeptic about any claim of understanding climate at this point, whether pro-GW or anti-GW. I just don't think the science is there, and I think the politics have gotten way ahead of where the science is.

Having said that, I have problems with the use of proxy climate data, such as this author does with ice cores. While useful to start an inquiry, many times these things are overrated. Add to that the fact that everybody is able to grow their own "adjustment" functions to try to extrapolate the measurement to the climate at large, and having a discussion using data like this seems problematic, at least to me.

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