Thank you Professor. I see the regional medieval warm period and the little ice age, correlating very well with T’s global picture.
By the way, I couldn’t agree more on climate hysteria. Loved Apocalypse Never. Annihilated my anti-nuclear hysteria instantly. Apart from the fact that nuclear annihilation as far more, orders of magnitude more, likely than global mortality increasing beyond hundreds of thousands extra a year the next quarter century. When we get to 4 degrees in the next half, that should warm up a bit. A million a year by century’s end. But don’t worry, it will vastly be poor brown people. And the same amount for traffic fatalities.
No grapes in the year 1000 in Greenland. That graph is poorly labeled as “change”. It is just temperature. Change would be a differential measure with the units in value/time.
Riiiight. Your beholder’s share. Nobody else here has any problem interpreting that data. Your graph shows the rate of change at temperature, going back 3,000 years out of 800,000, presumably years, in the title. When was the last time grapes grew in Greenland? Br careful how you answer there.
Suggest we move the climate change discussion to a thread (possibly private) as it’s not directly related to prayers for Jamaica. Thank you
Hey, I appreciate you sharing this, but I’ve got some concerns about the CO2 Coalition as a source - and some of the specific claims here don’t hold up. Let me explain:
On the witch hunt analogy:
The comparison falls apart because Medieval people attributed climate change to magic with no physical mechanism while torturing confessions out of people. Modern climate science is based on measurable physics - we can literally put CO2 in a lab and measure how it absorbs infrared radiation. This has been understood since the 1850s (Tyndall, Arrhenius) as @t_aquaticus noted. The evidence types couldn’t be more different.
On that graph:
Look closely at the bottom - it stops in 1947. That’s not an accident. If you extend it with actual temperature data through today, we’re now about 1.2°C warmer than pre-industrial baseline, which is warmer than the Medieval Warm Period peak. The paper this comes from (Loehle 2007) has major problems - even the author said it wasn’t meant to represent global temperature, and it had dating errors that required a correction.
On 1650-1850 warming:
We actually DO know what caused it! The Little Ice Age cooling was driven by low solar activity (Maunder Minimum) and increased volcanic activity. As the sun’s output recovered and volcanic activity decreased, temperatures rose. This is well-documented, not mysterious.
On “why would natural mechanisms stop?”
They didn’t stop - we can still measure solar and volcanic forcing. But here’s the key: since about 1950, solar activity has been flat or declining slightly. Natural forcings alone would predict slight cooling. Instead, we’ve seen rapid warming that matches the increase in greenhouse gases almost perfectly. CO2 didn’t “replace” natural forcings - it just became the dominant one. Again @T_aquaticus showed you just this:
On water vapor:
Water vapor IS a major greenhouse gas, but here’s the critical difference: it’s a feedback, not a forcing. The atmosphere can only hold water vapor based on temperature (it rains out in ~10 days). You can’t independently increase water vapor levels. But CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries. When you add CO2, temperatures rise, and warmer air holds more water vapor (about 7% more per degree C), which amplifies the warming. CO2 is the dial on the thermostat; water vapor is what amplifies the effect.
About the source:
The CO2 Coalition is funded by fossil fuel interests. The author (Craig Loehle) works for a timber industry research organization and regularly speaks at Heartland Institute conferences funded by ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers. This isn’t independent climate science - it’s advocacy dressed up as research.
I’m happy to dig into any of this further if you want. The science here is actually pretty solid - and yeah, sometimes inconvenient.
The quicker we run out of oil and gas, 30 years?, the quicker the next ice age can start. In one hundred thousand years. Of course we can easily bring that forward to now with the nuclear war.
Potholer54 is the YouTube channel for journalist Peter Hadfield. He’s uploaded numerous videos debunking climate change ‘skeptics’. The blog ‘RealClimate’, with contributors actually engaged in climate science, is also a good technical source for understanding the scientific context, dissection and countering correction for most of the information William has presented.
And that’s all I’m going to add to this discussion. I’ve followed this BS pushed by a handful of repeatedly cited skeptics and amplified by a few ‘coalitions’ for over a couple decades and it’s always the SSDD.