Friday, June 03, 2011

Washington Post blog: "if the skeptics did happen to be right, and it was warmer in the medieval era than Mann thinks, that would actually be more worrisome, not less"

Yep, it’s safe to start fretting about carbon again - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post
[Warmist Brad Plumer]: (Fun tangent: I'm sure most people are vaguely familiar with the brouhaha over Michael Mann's famous hockey stick graph showing that the Earth is heating up at a faster rate than at any time in the past 1,000 years, right? The climate-skeptic argument is that Mann — and all the other scientists who have reproduced his work — downplayed the Medieval Warm Period. That's doubtful. But if the skeptics did happen to be right, and it was warmer in the medieval era than Mann thinks, that would actually be more worrisome, not less — it would mean the Earth is actually more sensitive to changes in radiative forcing than climatologists have suspected.)

6 comments:

blogagog said...

It would (and does) suggest that we are powerless against the sun's musings.

Get over it. We're not that great.

John Marshall said...

No it would not! It would mean that the climate was less sensitive to atmospheric feedbacks. Climate is shown to be driven by solar inputs, Milanchivich Cycles and cosmic ray changes.

graphicconception said...

The worrying thing is how come there is still any doubt about the MWP?

After decades of research you would think we might know whether it was warmer or not.

Anonymous said...

What's worrying is they are still listening to what Mann said.

Anonymous said...

What's alarming about this article is that this guy:
1. Actually consults the site Skeptical Science. If you've never been there, don't waste your time - pure agw nonsense.
2. Actually thinks we could warm by as much as 4C by 2100. That's Al Gore material.
3. Has apparently never considered that people in sub-Saharan Africa would not be overwhelmed by warming, but would begin to migrate to cooler lattitudes, lattitudes current inhospitable to to extreme cold.

But the good news in all this is that solar panels will come to our rescue. Can't wait to strap one of those babies on my truck!

Anonymous said...

Jones (of CRU fame) admitted some time ago that it was a whole different "ballgame" if the MWP was global rather than regional.

These folks had decided to ignore hundreds of peer-reviewed documents showing the MWP was global, and probably warmer - and all the anecdotal evidence also confirms that.

In the meantime the number of peer-reviewed studies has increased to 963 (as of a few days ago, with more confirming studies coming in all the time)