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In Germany climate science used to be considered completely settled.

Global temperatures had been pretty much steady for a thousand years before skyrocketing upwards as soon as man really started industrializing about 150 years ago, Germans were told again and again.

But today Germany’s major media are beginning to realize that this view is perhaps quite naïve after all. Though most major media outlets here do think man is responsible for global warming, many seem to be having second thoughts and coming out to say: Gee, looks like natural factors may be important after all.

Source: www2.tu-berlin.de/

Germany’s version of the BBC is ARD television and at the ARD website we find an unusually semi-sober report on the history of the earth’s climate.

First off the ARD presents its version of the above chart, thus acknowledging that climate has been changing naturally throughout the Holocene and that there have been warmer periods than today.

Old towns bear names related to wine-making

The ARD piece even goes on to say that the Medieval Warm Period from the years 800 to 1300 was similarly as warm as the “last climate normal period of 1961 to 1990, whose mean temperature is used as the reference value.” The ARD writes further:

Using alternative reconstructions that period was even about 0.5°C warmer than today.”

As evidence that this was probably the case, the ARD writes that many towns and villages that were founded during the Medieval Warm Period actually bear names related to wine-making: “places that are too cool for this today“.

The ARD then describes the ensuing Little Ice Age as a time of harsh winters, crop failures, starvation and witch hunts. All this, the ARD claims, was caused by “fluctuations in solar radiation and a series of especially powerful volcanic eruptions,” citing Tambora in 1815 as an example.

Of course anyone with a half knowledge of climate science knows that solar radiation is not the real culprit for climate change over the last 1000 years, but some other solar mechanism involving solar magnetic fields, cosmic radiation and cloud seeding. We’re just going to remain patient and wait for the ARD to get up to speed on this. In the meantime we can take heart that progress is being made.

Finally, I find that little tail they’ve added to the Modern Warm Period on their chart to be very amusing (see figure below, circle). That’s the warming all the panic and hysteria has been about?

Circle around little tail indicates recent warming that has caused worldwide panic and mass hysteria.