In his new book the ‘The Weather Makers’ (Text Publishing, Melbourne, $32.95) Professor Tim Flannery suggests that the medieval warm period was unique to Europe with “a survey of global temperature records (from ice-cores, tree-rings and lake deposits) showing that, if anything, Earth was then overall slightly cooler (0.03C) than in the early and mid twentieth centuries”. This according to Flannery shows that the “idea of a global Medieval Warm Period is bunk.” (pg 44)
The real bunk is perhaps Flannery’s claim that the world’s leading science journals are telling us that species are vanishing right now as a consequence of climate change. (pg 6)
He is a good writer though, and there is some interesting stuff in the book including his comment there are three agents of change:
1. shifting continents,
2. cosmic collisons and
3. climate-driving forces such as greenhouse.
Flannery writes that while they all act in different ways, they drive evolution using the same mechanisms “death and opportunity”. (pg 46)
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Any references byb Flannery to substantiate the species loss claim?? I don’t want to buy another book. Still haven’t gotten to Ian Lowe’s little bedsitter.
The “global” vs regional extent of the Medieval warming has been contested.
But of course this may be hard to determine for the rest of us as many anti-AGWs have said that 50% of scientific papers are wrong and peer review is flawed. So we’re going to have a hard time deciding. And we’re also now prepared to call a trend on 3 numbers…
I think it’s also interesting that people put a lot of faith in wiggles in trees, lake bottoms and ice cores yet dismiss the 20th and 21st century data as suspect – on what basis would you be selective ? The fact that you “like” one or the other.
Jennifer’s comments in The Land have certainly warmed up Messrs Lowe + Flannery.
Tim finds global thinking too small; he says that his book reflects the “near universally acknowledged seriousness of this situation”.
He said that we know that fossil fuels and other human activities have contributed in large part to increase in greenhouse gases and warming.
He then denied that central planning is part of the solution but added that govt can “foster” the renewable energy industry and needed to ratify Kyoto, so that we can benefit from carbon trading.
He said that all this can be done without jeopardising the quality of life in Australia.
And as he said, its all just commonsense.
In the Newcastle Herald local weather guru Martin Babakhan urges a nuclear power plant to drive a water desalinator for Newcastle. He freely admitted that his previous forecast of heavy rains for 2005 have run afoul, and now cheerfully forecasts drought and hard times.
Meanwhile those silly farmers are buying more machinery as good rains have lifted prospects.
Note the lack of references !! Of course if you don’t like peer review – blaze away !
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/070.htm
2.3.3 Was there a “Little Ice Age” and a “Medieval Warm
Period”?
The terms “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” have been used to describe two past climate epochs in Europe and neighbouring regions during roughly the 17th to 19th and 11th to 14th centuries, respectively. The timing, however, of these cold and warm periods has recently been demonstrated to vary geographically over the globe in a considerable way (Bradley and Jones, 1993; Hughes and Diaz, 1994; Crowley and Lowery, 2000). Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased glaciation in a number of widely spread regions outside Europe prior to the 20th century, including Alaska, New Zealand and Patagonia (Grove and Switsur, 1994). However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these regions differs considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely independent regional climate changes, not a globally-synchronous increased glaciation (see Bradley, 1999). Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries. With the more widespread proxy data and multi-proxy reconstructions of temperature change now available, the spatial and temporal character of these putative climate epochs can be reassessed.
Mann et al. (1998) and Jones et al. (1998) support the idea that the 15th to 19th centuries were the coldest of the millennium over the Northern Hemisphere overall. However, viewed hemispherically, the “Little Ice Age” can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late 20th century levels (Bradley and Jones, 1993; Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998; 1999; Crowley and Lowery, 2000). Cold conditions appear, however, to have been considerably more pronounced in particular regions. Such regional variability can be understood in part as reflecting accompanying changes in atmospheric circulation. The “Little Ice Age” appears to have been most clearly expressed in the North Atlantic region as altered patterns of atmospheric circulation (O’Brien et al., 1995). Unusually cold, dry winters in central Europe (e.g., 1 to 2°C below normal during the late 17th century) were very likely to have been associated with more frequent flows of continental air from the north-east (Wanner et al., 1995; Pfister, 1999). Such conditions are consistent (Luterbacher et al., 1999) with the negative or enhanced easterly wind phase of the NAO (Sections 2.2.2.3 and 2.6.5), which implies both warm and cold anomalies over different regions in the North Atlantic sector. Such strong influences on European temperature demonstrate the difficulty in extrapolating the sparse early information about European climate change to the hemispheric, let alone global, scale. While past changes in the NAO have likely had an influence in eastern North America, changes in the El Niño phenomenon (see also Section 2.6), are likely to have had a particularly significant influence on regional temperature patterns over North America.
The hemispherically averaged coldness of the 17th century largely reflected cold conditions in Eurasia, while cold hemispheric conditions in the 19th century were more associated with cold conditions in North America (Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 2000b). So, while the coldest decades of the 19th century appear to have been approximately 0.6 to 0.7°C colder than the latter decades of the 20th century in the hemispheric mean (Mann et al., 1998), the coldest decades for the North American continent were closer to 1.5°C colder (Mann et al., 2000b). In addition, the timing of peak coldness was often specific to particular seasons. In Switzerland, for example, the first particularly cold winters appear to have been in the 1560s, with cold springs beginning around 1568, and with 1573 the first unusually cold summer (Pfister, 1995).
The evidence for temperature changes in past centuries in the Southern Hemisphere is quite sparse. What evidence is available at the hemispheric scale for summer (Jones et al., 1998) and annual mean conditions (Mann et al., 2000b) suggests markedly different behaviour from the Northern Hemisphere. The only obvious similarity is the unprecedented warmth of the late 20th century. Speleothem evidence (isotopic evidence from calcite deposition in stalagmites and stalactites) from South Africa indicates anomalously cold conditions only prior to the 19th century, while speleothem (records derived from analysing stalagmites and stalagtites) and glacier evidence from the Southern Alps of New Zealand suggests cold conditions during the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries (Salinger, 1995). Dendroclimatic evidence from nearby Tasmania (Cook et al., 2000) shows no evidence of unusual coldness at these times. Differences in the seasons most represented by this proxy information prevent a more direct comparison.
As with the “Little Ice Age”, the posited “Medieval Warm Period” appears to have been less distinct, more moderate in amplitude, and somewhat different in timing at the hemispheric scale than is typically inferred for the conventionally-defined European epoch. The Northern Hemisphere mean temperature estimates of Jones et al. (1998), Mann et al. (1999), and Crowley and Lowery (2000) show temperatures from the 11th to 14th centuries to be about 0.2°C warmer than those from the 15th to 19th centuries, but rather below mid-20th century temperatures. The long-term hemispheric trend is best described as a modest and irregular cooling from AD 1000 to around 1850 to 1900, followed by an abrupt 20th century warming. Regional evidence is, however, quite variable. Crowley and Lowery (2000) show that western Greenland exhibited anomalous warmth locally only around AD 1000 (and to a lesser extent, around AD 1400), with quite cold conditions during the latter part of the 11th century, while Scandinavian summer temperatures appeared relatively warm only during the 11th and early 12th centuries. Crowley and Lowery (2000) find no evidence for warmth in the tropics. Regional evidence for medieval warmth elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere is so variable that eastern, yet not western, China appears to have been warm by 20th century standards from the 9th to 13th centuries. The 12th and 14th centuries appear to have been mainly cold in China (Wang et al., 1998a,b; Wang and Gong, 2000). The restricted evidence from the Southern Hemisphere, e.g., the Tasmanian tree-ring temperature reconstruction of Cook et al. (1999), shows no evidence for a distinct Medieval Warm Period.
Medieval warmth appears, in large part, to have been restricted to areas in and neighbouring the North Atlantic. This may implicate the role of ocean circulation-related climate variability. The Bermuda rise sediment record of Keigwin (1996) suggests warm medieval conditions and cold 17th to 19th century conditions in the Sargasso Sea of the tropical North Atlantic. A sediment record just south of Newfoundland (Keigwin and Pickart, 1999), in contrast, indicates cold medieval and warm 16th to 19th century upper ocean temperatures. Keigwin and Pickart (1999) suggest that these temperature contrasts were associated with changes in ocean currents in the North Atlantic. They argue that the “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” in the Atlantic region may in large measure reflect century-scale changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (see Section 2.6). Such regional changes in oceanic and atmospheric processes, which are also relevant to the natural variability of the climate on millennial and longer time-scales (see Section 2.4.2), are greatly diminished or absent in their influence on hemispheric or global mean temperatures.
Phil
The book cites some references, but not wrt the species loss comment.
Rog
Haven’t seen this week’s The Land. I’m in Darwin and haven’t been near a newsagency. But have seen a few crocs – and should see a few more tomorrow. It is very hot, but the locals tell me no more than usual.
Phil, despite all your endless blather Lowe, Flannery & Co are still advocating that human society should submit to a “natural law” or a “natural order” (as determined by you and your enlightened cronies). This demand for societal reformation denies the legitimacy of the present structure and seeks to impose an uncompromising untested ideology that acts on and not through society. Such political naivety and foolishness is inherently doomed, we have all had our experiments with “national socialism”, nobody will surrender hard won freedoms to an ideology based only on ecology.
A “new” political party (or a wolf in sheeps clothing)?
Environment
The deep ecology movement restated what the NSDAP believed: that in order for humans to exist without destroying their environment, it had to be placed on equal footing with humans, recognizing in addition that its space requirements were greater as while humans are one species, nature is uncountable interlocked species, creating a codependent, eternal whole.
For this reason our goals regarding the environment are to decrease the human land-use footprint, decrease our use of resources and reprocess our waste so that we do not introduce it to the environment. These are simple goals with complex implications.
There must be a leadership factor other than profit-motive.
When our guiding principle is profit, nature and our own integrity take second place and are pushed aside by the need to use more, sell more, buy more. A National Socialist government returns leadership to the culture and people, and relegates money to its role as a mechanism for achieving those ends. Land use should be a question of a logical use of the land to benefit the society as a whole, not whose profit can be made from another fast-food restaurant or discount store. Further, without excessive profit motive, products will be designed to last longer and thus produce less eventual waste.
Population must regulate itself.
If we do not check our breeding, we will overrun the earth. There are two factors in managing population; the first is quantitative, the second, qualitative.
There are literally too many humans on planet earth. Every generation begets another, and thus population grows exponentially despite natural and social (poverty, warfare) factors. Our current population occupies too much space and even if placed on vegan diets, too many resources, and produces too much waste, to avoid irretrievably damaging our ecosystem. Although there is in theory space for more, earth is treated best by a population of under a half-billion people, which provides enough for every nation on earth to have a reasonable population.
Second, our population has bred dysgenically, in that there are many people capable of little but having jobs and buying things at discount stores, and few who have a creative impetus and intelligence and character to match. If we are to limit our population, it does not make sense to do so in some egalitarian fashion like a lottery, but to pick from among us those who have excelled and encourage them to breed while others do not. This ensures that every future generation will be stronger, smarter and of better character than the last. These people by their inclination will be respectful to nature, as intelligent people of good character tend to be.
To a modern mind, this policy seems inhuman and threatening, but considering that overpopulation and degeneration of our breeding stock will ensure us all an equal apocalyptic fate, or worse, an life of ongoing boredom and failure, these inhuman concepts provide for a better future for all people. Those who cannot contribute are spared the burden of breeding, and given more time and money to focus on their own wants; those who are born in the future will be of a higher quality. The reduced human population will coexist with nature and, by breeding more stable and capable individuals, begin again to approach the heights of culture and meaningful life experienced by those in ancient populations.
There must be government which can act quickly and decisively on environmental issues.
No democracy will act to offend its citizens, who for the most part are composed of people who see only their own lives and, being unable to balance the whole in their decision-making (most can barely handle themselves), will act for themselves first and by that decision, exclude the collective and our environment from the equation. Further, democracies move slowly because they are forced to state every decision in terms of the lowest common denominator, provided oversimplified, incremental changes which are as often as not reversed by the next elected official. No dictator could be so incompetent as to reach a par with democracies in terms of environmental and cultural damage.
This will reverse both the selfish individualism that has gotten us to this state in history, and the domination by money of government resulting from the tendency of people to vote for what they think gives them the highest degree of income. A saner political system will subsidize those who have need and are worthy, and will guarantee a living for the average person so they are not forced into economic competition with others, and can focus on being better at their livelihood, at being friends and parents, and members of the community.
Our livelihoods must not rely on exploiting existing resources.
We view natural resources as products in a store: something we purchase, use, and discard. We simply find it, pay for it, and then consider the transaction over. A more sensible view is to see natural resources as an ongoing process, for example the forest that grows and produces timber: we can selectively take trees, but we cannot cut too many down, or the forest dies. Similarly we must view our food sources such as fish and game as living systems in their own right. The correct way to use these is not to exploit existing resources, but to determine what we need and cultivate independent systems for producing it in an ongoing and humane manner.
This also applies to the animals that are currently kept in tiny spaces, fed chemicals and the remains of their own kind, and used to generate vast profits. The industries and people who currently make their living from these tasks will continue to do so, but in a more logical fashion that is less destructive to the environment and to their personal spirit. What pride and self-respect is there in slaughtering caged animals with bolt-guns and electrocution ponds?
Aesthetics of our society must reflect the natural ideal.
When we build boxy plastic and steel empires to replace the rolling and diverse natural landscape, we are stating as clearly as any philosophy or political propaganda that we are opposed to nature and want to assert our own deathless order in response. This is not only a fantasy, but also cultivates in us an alienation from nature, such that we fear dirt and defecation and death and cannot deal with them on a psychological level. Any future civilization must have architecture that emphasizes the diversity and structural beauty of nature, and must integrate its dwellings and offices and shops with truly natural space, instead of a few planted trees surrounded by miles of concrete, glass, plastic and metal.
Our spiritual system must harmonize with nature.
Modern spirituality operates by defining death as alien, and by creating forms of intellectual compensation, by which one considers an eternal life or a moral absolute as superior to the order of nature. By thus avoiding the issue of death, such religions become dominated by it, and are correctly called death-religions, in no small part because they bring death to nature and thus to the original soul within each of us. Mainstream Christianity and Judaism seek to dominate nature, while Buddhism and primitive superstition seek to submit to it. It is better to find a balance, and to find for ourselves a place within nature as independent spiritual and moral agents, according to its principles.
This does not mean that we wish to wholly exclude religions such as Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism from our belief, but that we believe it must be recognized that what we have now are interpretations of an original colored by the prejudices of our society, and that therefore we can return to the original interpretation and place it in a correct light. Nature and tribe and family come before abstract spiritual values, especially those which promise things not observable here on earth, and religions must be re-interpreted to reflect these values, which are most likely closer to the original state of those religions.
http://www.nazi.org/nazi
http://www.nazi.org/nazi/national_socialism/
Ah Rog you’ve caught me out – just back from starching the grey uniform and polishing the iron cross.
Yes it’s true you will all become slaves to our ambitions, we are the supremacists, you are swine, we will take your possessions and rights for the good of the state and regulate your life. We will never surrender until you are all under our control.
(On the other hand doesn’t that sound like Johnnies new IR legislation or terrorism bill too ? – oh well …)
Well I thought you and your cronies would be the like to be hanging around sites that distribute Nazi literature.
At least my cronies won’t throw you in jail without trial for saying the Royal Family are a bunch of ninnies and losers.
Meaning while back on the point of evidence based analysis of environmental issues whether there is global warming and debate on the facts of the matter…
Well I’m not so sure that the Royals are such losers Phil, at least they still have their heads, and the Crown Jewels.
Well said. Touche !
Also in the letters section of The Land is this piece;
‘Inexact Science’ Bruce Gardiner from Armidale writes
“I cannot let Jennifer Marohasy’s article go unchallenged.
From its tenor, one gains the impresssion that science is “exact”. This is not the case. Science is, by nature, reductionist. It provides insights into what happens to one variable if all others are held constant….”
…..”Agricultural production is being maintained by increasing inputs of finite resources at non-sustainable levels. Can we afford to follow this experiment to the point where global systems collapse just to prove that what we are doing is not sustainable?
Personally I think that if there is even a one percent chance that what we are doing is not sustainable, then we should adopt a precautionary approach and assume that it isn’t. The alternative is pretty permanent”…..
A one percent chance is sufficient in science? No wonder there is a divide in perception…
More on CO2 and atmosphere, it appears that fossils from the carboniferous period indicate an atmosphere of much increased CO2 with the same climate as today;
“Average global temperatures in the Early Carboniferous Period were hot- approximately 22° C (72° F). However, cooling during the Middle Carboniferous reduced average global temperatures to about 12° C (54° F). As shown on the chart below, this is comparable to the average global temperature on Earth today!
Similarly, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Early Carboniferous Period were approximately 1500 ppm (parts per million), but by the Middle Carboniferous had declined to about 350 ppm — comparable to average CO2 concentrations today!
Earth’s atmosphere today contains about 370 ppm CO2 (0.037%). Compared to former geologic times, our present atmosphere, like the Late Carboniferous atmosphere, is CO2- impoverished! In the last 600 million years of Earth’s history only the Carboniferous Period and our present age, the Quaternary Period, have witnessed CO2 levels less than 400 ppm.”
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
And the orbital forcings were ?
And the position of the tectonic plates – Pangea etc – were what and where …. at what latitudes (getting what solar forcing) moving where ….
Flora and fauna were what ?
May have been a few other differences perhaps …
You tell me what these other influences would have been up to ? (i.e. I’m not totally sure)
But Rog – all very interesting nonetheless and thanks for bringing it up ….
And what were methane levels?? And regardless, the real problem is how the increase in CO2 are causing the oceans to become more acidic.
The solubility of CO2 in water varies inversely with temperature, so as the oceans warm, CO2 is lost to the atmosphere, not the other way round. How can oceanic CO2 levels INCREASE, and cause a lowering pH (increased acidity) in ocean water, if its temperature goes up? PLease explain!
Whatever happened to the “precautionary principle”?
Taught in environmental courses and advocated by natural resource practioners. If we applied that principle to climate change, we would need to park our cars and close down coal-fired power stations.now.
As Phil says, the alternative is pretty permanent
Whatever happened to the “precautionary principle”?
Taught in environmental courses and advocated by natural resource practioners. If we applied that principle to climate change, we would need to park our cars and close down coal-fired power stations.now.
As Phil says, the alternative is pretty permanent