By Paul Homewood
There have been many attempts to get rid of the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age, and here’s another one:
The speed and extent of current global warming exceeds any similar event in the past 2,000 years, researchers say.
They show that famous historic events like the "Little Ice Age" don’t compare with the scale of warming seen over the last century.
The research suggests that the current warming rate is higher than any observed previously.
The scientists say it shows many of the arguments used by climate sceptics are no longer valid.
When scientists have surveyed the climatic history of our world over the past centuries a number of key eras have stood out.
These ranged from the "Roman Warm Period", which ran from AD 250 to AD 400, and saw unusually warm weather across Europe, to the famed Little Ice Age, which saw temperatures drop for centuries from the 1300s.
The events were seen by some as evidence that the world has warmed and cooled many times over the centuries and that the warming seen in the world since the industrial revolution was part of that pattern and therefore nothing to be alarmed about.
Three new research papers show that argument is on shaky ground.
The science teams reconstructed the climate conditions that existed over the past 2,000 years using 700 proxy records of temperature changes, including tree rings, corals and lake sediments. They determined that none of these climate events occurred on a global scale.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49086783
As with the other failed attempts, this latest one claims that the MWP and LIA were only localised phenomena. But nothing could be further from the truth.
These three new studies rely on proxies, but time and again hockey stick studies based on proxies are proven to be fake, based on cherry picked proxies and dodgy statistics.
In fact, we have no need to rely on proxies, because the actual evidence of warm and cold periods is very real and substantial across the world.
We are all familiar with the evidence from Greenland ice cores, which clearly show both the MWP and LIA:
http://www.kaltesonne.de/temperatures-over-the-past-10000-years/
There is also strong evidence from upper tree lines in both California and the Alps that the MWP and LIA were very real and significant events:
HH Lamb – Climate, History and the Modern World
The massive expansion of glaciers in Europe during the 17th & 18thC is very well documented, as is the fact that they began receding in the mid 19thC, long before man made CO2 had any effect.
But glaciers throughout the world underwent similar changes. Glaciologists believe that Icelandic glaciers reached their Holocene maxima during the LIA.
In Alaska as well, glaciers advanced in stages between the 12th and 19thC, when they reached their maximum extent. The scale of this advance is indicated by the recent discovery of the remains of medieval forests, as the glaciers melt.
Four hundred year old forests have also been uncovered by retreating glaciers in Patagonia. Glaciers in Peru and Chile also provide unmistakeable evidence of the LIA, as Lonnie Thompson notes, writing about the Quelccaya glacier in Peru, describes:
The fact that the Little Ice Age (about A.D. 1500 to 1900) stands out as a significant climatic event in the oxygen isotope and electrical conductivity records confirms the worldwide character of this event.
Other glaciologists estimate that the Cipreses and San Rafael glaciers in Chile reached maxima in 1842 and 1875.
Across the Pacific, in New Zealand the Franz Joseph glacier also grew alarmingly, as historian Brian Fagan revealed:
In New Zealand the Franz Joseph glacier was “a mere pocket of ice on a frozen snowfield nine centuries ago”…. Then Little Ice Age cooling began and the glacier thrust downslope into the valley below smashing into the great rain forests that flourished there, felling giant trees like matchsticks. By the early 18th Century, Franz Joseph’s face was within 3 km of the Pacific Ocean .
The high tide of glacial advance at Franz Joseph came between the late 17th Century and early 19th Century, just as it did in the European Alps.
Much more detail on these and other glaciers can be found here.
The evidence from New Zealand is supported by tree rings and speleotherms, which show the MWP and LIA very clearly.
None of these are localised occurrences, they are major climatic events which took place over hundreds of years.
And there are many other lines of evidence. For instance, both the MWP and LIA have been found to be distinctive features of the regional climate in S Africa.
There is another piece of evidence from lakes in Central Africa. Lakes such as Ghana’s Bosumtwi and Lake Malawi have much higher water levels now than during the LIA, while lakes closer to the equator are now much lower.
Submerged trees provide evidence on long-lasting drought just a few centuries ago – Lake Bosumtwi
This is due to a phenomenon well understood by meteorologists. When the Earth cools, the weather belts are compressed to the equator. As a result, the narrow equatorial zone receives more rain, while the areas to the north and south become drought stricken. The Great Sahel drought of the 1970s was a classic example of this.
The rainfall patterns clearly identified in African lakes such as these is strong evidence of a cooler climate during the LIA.
I could go on. Other studies have found evidence of the LIA in China and Tibet.
Even Antarctica was affected, as a study by Bertler et al showed. According to their Abstract:
The Little Ice Age (LIA) is one of the most prominent climate shifts in the past 5000 yrs
Now charlatans pretend that the Little Ice Age never really existed.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 29, 2019 at 02:51PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 