{"id":3742,"date":"2009-12-11T04:52:06","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T09:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=3742"},"modified":"2009-12-11T14:55:02","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T19:55:02","slug":"hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2009\/12\/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watts Up With That?<\/a> | by John Griffing | Dec. 12, 2009<\/p>\n

One thing that Climategate does is give us an opportunity to step back from the details of the AGW argument and say, maybe these are heat-of-the-moment stuff, and in the long run will look as silly as the Durants\u2019 allergy to Eisenhower. And perhaps, if we can put climate arguments in perspective, it will allow us to put the much smaller nano arguments (pun intended) into perspective too. <\/p>\n

So let\u2019s look at some ice.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core<\/a>. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years.\u00a0 As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.<\/p>\n

So what does it tell us about, say, the past 500 years? (the youngest datum is age=0.0951409 (thousand years before present) \u2014 perhaps younger snow doesn\u2019t work so well?):<\/p>\n

\"histo6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, whaddaya know \u2014 a hockey stick.\u00a0 In fact, the \u201cblade\u201d continues up in the 20th century at least another half a degree.\u00a0 But how long is the handle? How unprecedented is the current warming trend?<\/p>\n

\"histo5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, Virginia, there was a Medieval Warm Period, in central Greenland at any rate.\u00a0 But we knew that \u2014 that\u2019s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all.\u00a0 And the following Little Ice Age<\/a> is what killed them off, and caused widespread crop failures (and the consequent burning of witches) across Europe.\u00a0 But was the MWP itself unusual?<\/p>\n

\"histo4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, no \u2014 over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP.\u00a0 Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.<\/p>\n

\"histo3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In fact for the entire Holocene \u2014 the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization \u2014 the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline.\u00a0 From this perspective, it\u2019s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean.\u00a0 If it lasts.<\/p>\n

\"histo2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From the perspective of the Holocene as a whole, our current hockeystick is beginning to look pretty dinky. By far the possibility I would worry about, if I were the worrying sort, would be the return to an ice age \u2014 since interglacials, over the past half million years or so, have tended to last only 10,000 years or so.\u00a0 And Ice ages are not conducive to agriculture.<\/p>\n

\"histo1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026 and ice ages have a better claim on being the natural state of Earth\u2019s climate than interglacials.\u00a0 This next graph, for the longest period, we have to go to an Antarctic core (Vostok):<\/a><\/p>\n

\"vostok\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, we\u2019re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history.\u00a0 But the broader lesson is, climate doesn\u2019t stand still.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t even stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.<\/p>\n

Does this mean that CO2 isn\u2019t a greenhouse gas? No.<\/p>\n

Does it mean that it isn\u2019t warming? No.<\/p>\n

Does it mean that we shouldn\u2019t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 We should do all those things for many reasons \u2014 but there\u2019s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech.\u00a0 (There\u2019s plenty of money, too, but it\u2019s all going to climate science at the moment. \":-)\" ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.<\/p>\n

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists\u2019 insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing<\/em><\/strong> that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watts Up With That? | by John Griffing | Dec. 12, 2009 One thing that Climategate does is give us an opportunity to step back from the details of the AGW argument and say, maybe these are heat-of-the-moment stuff, and in the long run will look as silly as the Durants\u2019 allergy to Eisenhower. And … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[111,75,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-cooling","category-global-warming","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}