I’ve been reading the paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas that basically proves the present it not at all unusually warm, that the Little Ice Age was real and global, and that the Medieval Warm Period was also global and quite real. It is worth having a copy just for the 5 1/5 pages (!) of references in it. Full paper at this link:

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2006Q2/211/articles_optional/Soon2003_paleorecord.pdf

Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years Willie Soon 1, 2,*, Sallie Baliunas 1, 2 1 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MS 16, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

2 Mount Wilson Observatory, Mount Wilson, California 91023, USA ABSTRACT: The 1000 yr climatic and environmental history of the Earth contained in various proxy records is reviewed. As indicators, the proxies duly represent local climate. Because each is of a different nature, the results from the proxy indicators cannot be combined into a hemispheric or global quantitative composite. However, considered as an ensemble of individual expert opinions, the assemblage of local representations of climate establishes both the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as climatic anomalies with worldwide imprints, extending earlier results by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965), and numerous intervening research efforts. Furthermore, the individual proxies can be used to address the question of whether the 20th century is the warmest of the 2nd millennium locally. Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium. KEY WORDS: Paleoclimate proxies · Climate change · Environmental change · Little Ice Age ·

Medieval Warm Period

The real meat in it comes on pages 7 and 8 of the PDF (pages 95 and 96 of the publication page numbers). There they have 3 global images (maps) with each site of proxy data marked, and with each one color coded. I’m not going to take the time to do screen caps and carve out a copy, since you can just hit the PDF link. The first two look at ‘objectively discernible… Little Ice Age’ and ‘objectively discernible … Medieval Warm Period’, while the third answers “Fig. 3. Geographical distribution of local answers to the following question: Is there an objectively discernible climatic anomaly within the 20th century that is the most extreme (the warmest, if such information is available) period in the record? ‘Yes’ is indicated by red filled squares, ‘No’ is indicated by green filled circles or unfilled boxes and ‘Yes? or No??’ (undecided) is shown with blue filled triangles or unfilled boxes. Answer of ‘Yes a’ is indicated by yellow filled diamonds to mark an early to middle-20th century warming rather than the post-1970s warming”

Just looking at those images has weight. The first two are largely RED for YES. The last one is substantially GREEN for NO. You have to hunt around on the first two to find tiny samples of the other colors, and on the last one there are only a few very scattered “yes” and “maybe” spots.

FWIW, as near as I can tell they did not allow for the approximate 200 year lag between when a temperature anomaly shows up in Greenland and when it gets to Antarctica, so some of those outliers might be timing related, IMHO.

Those graphs alone would set the hair on fire for a Global Warmist…

6. DISCUSSION The widespread geographical evidence assembled here supports the existence of both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, and should serve as useful validation targets for any reconstruction of global climate history of the last 1000 yr. Our results suggest a different interpretation of the multiproxy climates compared to recent conclusions of Mann et al. (1998, 1999, 2000). Because the calibration of proxy indicators to instrumental data is still a matter of openended research (with differing sensitivities not only for the same proxy at different locations but also for different proxies at the same location), it is premature to select a year or decade as the warmest or coldest in a multiproxy-based record. Barnett et al. (1999) has pointed out that it is impossible to use available instrumental records to provide estimates for the multi-decadal and century-long type of natural climatic variations, owing to the specific period and short duration of instrumental records. Thus, paleo-proxies remain the only hope for assessing the amplitude and pattern of climatic and environmental change in the pre-anthropogenic era. We agree with Barnett et al. (1999) that each proxy should be studied first in terms of local change before several records can be combined for regional and larger spatial-scale analyses and interpretations. The conclusion derives mainly from the real possibility of non-stationarity in the proxy-climate calibration to instrumental records, the lack of adequate superposition rules given variability in each type of proxy, as well as the lack of clear physical understanding on the multidecadal climate variability from theoretical or empirical studies. All current calibration of proxies to large-scale instrumental measurements have been mainly valid over phases of rising temperature (Ogilvie & Jónsson 2001). The concern is that a different calibration response arises when the procedure is extended to an untested climate regime associated with a persistent cooling phase. Evans et al. (2002) worried about the reality of spurious frequency evolution that may contaminate a multiproxy reconstruction, in which the type of proxy data changes over time and no sufficient overlap of proxy data exists for a proper inter-proxy calibration/validation procedure. In other words, each proxy may have its distinct frequency response function, which could confuse the interpretation of climate variability. Finally, another concern is the lack of understanding of the air-sea relationship at the multidecadal timescale, even in the reasonably well observed region of the North Atlantic (Häkkinen 2000, Seager et al. 2000, Marshall et al. 2001, Slonosky & Yiou 2001, von Storch et al. 2001). Briffa (2000) concluded that dendroclimatological records may support ‘the notion that the last 100 years have been unusually warm, at least within the context of the last two millennia’ Slightly later, Briffa et al. (2001), by adopting a new analysis procedure that seeks to preserve greater, long timescale variability (which shows a notable increase in variance at the 24–37 yr timescale compared with a previous standardization procedure) in their tree-ring density data than previously possible, stated that the 20th century is the globally warmest century of the last 600 yr. This conclusion is consistent with the borehole reconstruction results of Huang et al. (2000). However, longer and more carefully reconstructed tree-ring chronologies from Esper et al. (2002) showed that the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as the 20th century for at least a region covering the Northern Hemisphere extratropics from about 30 to 70° N. An important aspect of both the Briffa et al. (2001) and Esper et al. (2002) studies is the new derivation of formal, time-dependent standard errors for their temperature reconstructions, amounting to about ±0.1 to 0.3°C from 1000 through 1960 (see also Jones et al. 1999, 2001). This assignment of standard errors contrasts with those assigned in Mann et al.’s (1999) annually-resolved series, where the uncertainties were assigned only for preinstrumental data points in their original publication (that assumption of ‘error-free’ instrumental thermometer data is incorrect—see Jones et al. 1999, Folland et al. 2001). Over the full 2nd millennium, Esper et al. (2002) deduced a slightly larger range in their confidence limits after 1950 (compared to the pre-1950 interval extending back to 800) and attributed those higher uncertainties to the accounting for the anomalous modern ring-growth problem (Graybill & Idso 1993, Jacoby & D’Arrigo 1995, Briffa et al. 1998, Feng 1999, Barber et al. 2000, Jacoby et al. 2000, Knapp et al. 2001).

I’ve bolded the bit where he uses Jones to toss Mann under the bus… Throughout the paper it is so heavily filled with citations that you would have to attack darned near everyone to tear it down.

One bit from the Conclusion section:

Climate proxy research provides an aggregate, broad perspective on questions regarding the reality of Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period and the 20th century surface thermometer global warming. The picture emerges from many localities that both the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm epoch are widespread and near-synchronous phenomena, as conceived by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965) and numerous researchers since. Overall, the 20th century does not contain the warmest anomaly of the past millennium in most of the proxy records, which have been sampled world-wide. Past researchers implied that unusual 20th century warming means a global human impact. However, the proxies show that the 20th century is not unusually warm or extreme.

Basically what they have done is taken the ‘rubber ruler’ of a spliced proxy-instrumental approach, shown that it is error prone (i.e. useless) and then taken an all-proxy approach that finds nothing is out of whack at all.

I can certainly see where that will just cause the Warmers to howl and thrash around in anger. Which likely explains all their howling and thrashing and desire to trash anyone involved, nearby bystanders, and anyone who reads the paper… Which leads me to:

A New Metric

I think there is a valuable metric that can be applied to Climate Science (and Climate ‘science’) papers. The “Woman Scorned” metric.

(From the well known folks wisdom “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Congreve

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned,” spoken by Zara in Act III, Scene VIII. (This is usually paraphrased as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”)

(Or in this case a ‘Cranky Climate Warrior’ rhetorical “woman scorned”)

Simply look at how “outraged”, furious, angry and totally upset they are, and you know how good the paper is. Any added insults “to the person” via attempts to get them fired, have their funding revoked, block publication, or sue them ought to add additional points. I’d suggest as a starting formula, that “general fury” be graded on a 1 to 10 scale, then for each additional major assault on the authors, another 10 points be added.

On this scale I think as a rough first cut, this paper would rank 10+10+10+10 (they could not block publication as it is a ‘done deal’ and I think there was talk of a law suit, but don’t know if anything came of it). So that makes it a 40 score out of 50 possible. I think.

As a future enhancement, one could assign negative points for the praise heaped on steaming piles of nonsense, and in that way get the Warmista papers ranked as well. But that I’ll leave for others to design.

One hopes that someone will put up a page (someone who knows the literature better than I do and can pull out the “big ones” from memory) where they list the major papers, and assign the Woman-Scorned index score to them. In cases where finer grain sorting is needed, the bonus “10” can be graded into single digits. So “talk of a suit” might rank a 1 or 2 while “actual suit in court” gets the full 10. In this way would could have a quick and easy reference to just which papers were the most important to read, print out, hand to friends, and graffiti on the sides of IPCC bound jets…

;-)

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