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Another look at the Hockey Stick

From J. Storrs Hall writing at Watts Up With That:

Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data
One thing that Climategate does is give us an opportunity to step back from the details of the AGW argument and say, maybe these are heat-of-the-moment stuff, and in the long run will look as silly as the Durants� allergy to Eisenhower. And perhaps, if we can put climate arguments in perspective, it will allow us to put the much smaller nano arguments (pun intended) into perspective too.

So let�s look at some ice.

I�m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.

So what does it tell us about, say, the past 500 years? (the youngest datum is age=0.0951409 (thousand years before present) � perhaps younger snow doesn�t work so well?):

Well, whaddaya know � a hockey stick. In fact, the �blade� continues up in the 20th century at least another half a degree. But how long is the handle? How unprecedented is the current warming trend?

Yes, Virginia, there was a Medieval Warm Period, in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that � that�s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all. And the following Little Ice Age is what killed them off, and caused widespread crop failures (and the consequent burning of witches) across Europe. But was the MWP itself unusual?

Well, no � over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.

Dr. Hall shows a few more plots (we are very very lucky climate-wise) and concludes with this 'graph:

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists� insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.

Perfect word to use -- poppycock Nothing like a couple of plots to put things into perspective... Posted by DaveH at December 10, 2009 9:30 AM