[Aristotelian]

Years ago, the Wall Street Journal editorial page published a piece by a pair of professors showing 1,500 years of climate change, based on tree ring data. It showed that the earth's temperature oscillates when looked at over a long period. Since reading that piece, I have refused to be alarmed by the Global Warming (or, as they now call it, Climate Change) hypothesis.

[zeestephen]

Call me a cynic.

With these new cooler predictions any future trend showing unusual warmth will be hyped as ultra-dangerous.

See, see.....our models say cooling, but man made CO2 is still making the Earth hotter!

[palmer]

tree ring data

Gotta be careful with that. The tree ring widths don't always match to temperature (rainfall and sunlight are also factors). Over at climateaudit.org, Steve McIntyre has been dissecting the statistics of tree rings for quite some time. Basically what happened in 1998 and 1999 was a guy named Mann and some collaborators found some tree rings that did appear to match up to temperature (Bristlecone pines). So they ran some calculations that repressed the tree rings that didn't match to 20th century temperature and highlighted the ones that did. The result: the famous hockey stick showing temperature steady for 1000 years, then taking off. The essential problem is that the Bristlecone pines are not good proxies for temperature over the long haul as they were affected by local precipitation changes and poor measurement techniques.