GW Water further muddied - new study shows medievel warming

**deathgodusmc** · 03-28-12, 05:22 PM

Originally Posted by DJ Mr. White

Fucking noob. GTFO before I slap you with my microscopic e-peen.

So the internet does mimic real life for you.

**Alundil** · 04-02-12, 12:21 PM

Sigh - RL getting in the way of "Serious Internet Debate"

Sorry for the tardiness. And for the long response. Sucks having to "save" thoughts and rejoinders for days at a time.....

Originally Posted by Fovezer

But that was about alleged voter fraud. One thing you will (hopefully ) not catch me doing is using opinionated popular news sources to support a scientific position.

Oh...so opinion pieces are ok only some of the time....Never mind the fact that I wasn't using the opinion of the linked article per se, but that as I mentioned it was the first instance of the study/story I had seen to that point in time.

Originally Posted by Fovezer

When discussing certain things, such as a scientific theory like ACC, it is ok to dismiss nonscientific popular tabloid rags out of hand. Now had you posted the actual paper or from scientific source, even a science blog, I'd take more time to consider it.

I take it that you also practice the concept of "shooting the messenger" regardless of the message. I'd hate to be your postal worker.

Originally Posted by Fovezer

The headline of the article you linked to clearly tries to make this appear that this is a problem for ACC. I still don't see how this would "muddy" any water, though? In fact, it makes no reference to ACC. All the paper says, from what I can tell, is that the Medieval Warm Period may have extended beyond Europe. So what? How does that change anything we see today?

Headlines are headlines and taken with a grain of salt, or should be. Do you need some salt? I guarantee that I could pull some equally slanted headlines from some of the sources you've used but what's the point in doing so? Does the headline make the story any more or less valid or the contents any more or less accurate? No not really. It's just that there will always be people who read a headline and believe the headline no matter what. There are many, many people like that here at TPG. You know who they are. I know who they are. Some of them don't know who they are.

The part you mention, and the article's statement to that part was this:

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe. In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.
...
The scientists were particularly interested in crystals found in layers deposited during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ approximately 300 to 500 years ago, and during the Medieval Warm Period before it.

Both climate events have been documented in Northern Europe, but studies have been inconclusive as to whether the conditions in Northern Europe extended to Antarctica.

As I understand things - there are statements (or assumptions) by the IPCC, in each of the subsequent Assessment Reports, to the effect of the MWP was not global and might be localized to Europe. There is a dearth of valid (or valuable) measurements that strech back that far of any use.
Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by 1990 FAR

Within the 1990 report, the LIA is taken to be global in extent but the MWP is not. Climate over the last 1000 years is mentioned very briefly in the SPM of the 1990 report. The MWP is not mentioned at all, and the LIA described by ...probably fluctuated by little more than 1°C. Some fluctuations lasted several centuries, including the LIA which ended in the [19th century] and which appears to have been global in extent. The MWP is mentioned in the executive summary to chapter 7, as MWP around 1000 AD (which may not have been global).

Originally Posted by 1992 Suppl

The graph stops in 1350 and does not show an MWP. The only text reference to the MWP is qualified by in this region in boldface.

Originally Posted by 1995 SAR

This too shows no MWP (it only goes back to 1400) and colder temperatures otherwise before the 20th century, of the order of 0.5 °C colder.

Originally Posted by 2001 TAR

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.
Was there a "Little Ice Age" and a "Medieval Warm Period"? and says 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.

Originally Posted by 2007 AR4

The evidence currently available indicates that NH mean temperatures during medieval times (950–1100) were indeed warm in a 2-kyr context and even warmer in relation to the less sparse but still limited evidence of widespread average cool conditions in the 17th century (Osborn and Briffa, 2006). However, the evidence is not sufficient to support a conclusion that hemispheric mean temperatures were as warm, or the extent of warm regions as expansive, as those in the 20th century as a whole, during any period in medieval times

The benefit of the study by by Lu, of Syracuse, is that it opens up another vector of examining what past temperature trends might have been. It also gives some credence to the concept that the MWP was not, necessarily, limited to the Northern Hemisphere and that it might, indeed, have been mroe of a global trend.
Here's the link to the online paper. It will be in print in April.
ScienceDirect.com - Earth and Planetary Science Letters - An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula

What does that mean? It begins to re-frame the discussion, imo, in a more "whole" manner of increasing the evaluation of other more varied and disparate systems that record variables that have bearing on tempurature and climate related data. This is important. Does it refute ACC/AGW/etc? No. But then I didn't claim that it does, nor does the article if you re-read it. You claimed that I, or the article, claimed that and it's just not the case.

Originally Posted by Fovezer

Actually, the deniers are always out in force. Look in our government, for example. There is a lot of denying going on in there. Big Oil funds fake citizen's groups and fake "science" organizations. All these deniers, just like loud-mouth creationists, have the mainly gullible and ignorant American public denying evolution and ACC. I think that is a big problem, myself.

Ah the stereotyping never gets old apparently. To say that there are just as many people on either side of the aisle (or coin) of this discussion attempting to sway the guillible public would be an understatement. You'll probably say that this is equivocation, but when either extreme of the discussion is "The Sky is Falling" or "Nothing to see here" it's not equivocation, it's observation.

Originally Posted by WickedTribe

This reads like someone who's trying to play the victim. One one hand, she claims that people are treating her statements like a non-story
...
And then on another, she seems to complain about how she doesn't know why such a big story was made out of it
...
So which is it? Is it no news, or is it being blown out of proportion? And if it's in the news, maybe that's because she did an interview, spouting some unsupported claims, in a tabloid.
...
She's an attention whore, and has been called out for it, but she's still being published, and she's still being interviewed. She's hardly being ostracized, and her science isn't beings censored in any way.

AH - so we're going to name call now? Really? That's hardly sporting of you. We were doing so well up until this point. I'd hardly call speaking to the public (as others have and continue to do) an "attention whore". But by all means, let's go ahead and count the public speaking and blog posts and other "look at me" comments of all the people involved in the debate. I am fairly certain that the "attention whore" label won't fit most (all?) of the hard scientists on this topic but rather the pols, pundits and celebs that are astride either side of the issue.
The ostraciztion comment was directed towards the common disdain that I see routinely aimed at anyone that asks pointed questions needling the "accepted concensus". That was the point of that comment. And it's real. People who continue to question certain facets of the IPCC stand are labelled and stereotyped as "deniers" and "cranks" and "Big Oil junkies and shills" whether they are or not. You have danced on that line just as often as Fov and Hawg and Jinx and Toad and many others who have graced this forum. Some people are cranks, some are shills, and some are deniers. But all questioners are not all or any of those things. That's the point that you lose everytime you do that. That's the point that the media loses in their function of presenting fact (which they don't do well btw). That's the point lost in the scientific discussions as well. Too many people decide it's easier to "throw the baby out with the bath water." Several people here are guilty of this (across numerous aisles, stances, discussions, affiliations).

Originally Posted by Toad

Yeah, the fact that the Earth has had warmer and colder periods has been known for a long time.

No one has argued that it isn't the case. Just what the effects of those are and how they relate to the current warm/cooling trend. That detail always seems to get lost in the gross generalizations of the debate. \o/

Originally Posted by Toad

I'm glad that we're nurturing a more inquisitive nature here at the TPG political forums, though...

Me too