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In Heaven + Earth (Global Warming: The Missing Science), Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at The University of Adelaide, Australia, asks us to embrace big-picture science views; for to recognize our limits is a sign of maturity. "Climate science lacks scientific discipline," says the pro-amalgamation Professor, and in order to see more clearly we need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach. This requires humbleness. In Chapter 2: History, Plimer travels back in time, thousands of years, in fact, to debunk Gore's catastrophic global warming myths. I particularly like his research on the ancient Greeks. For Plato (427-347 BC) advanced the...

In our information age, we’re bombarded with statistics on every danger the number crunchers can conjure — people struck by lightning, airplane vs. automotive deaths, and even drownings in bathtubs. But one statistic is curiously missing from the list. Even though President Obama and other global-warming alarmists warn of a looming climate apocalypse, they avoid giving a metric to prove their claims. They blame man-made climate change for a vast array of ills, including floods, droughts, wildfires, and tornados. But they never quantify what they say is the driving force behind it all: temperature.They have a very good reason. Actual...

Lake Sediments Record Climate Change At Cahokia INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA —National Public Radio reports that climatologist Broxton Bird of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and colleagues analyzed layers of calcite crystals interspersed with layers of mud on the bottom of Indiana’s Martin Lake in order to learn about historic rainfall levels at Cahokia. The study suggests that beginning in the 900s, the Central Mississippi Valley received more rain than usual. And carbon isotopes found in skeletons at Mississippian cities indicate that people ate a lot of corn. “That comes at right around 950, and that’s around the time the population at Cahokia...

Viking Farms Tell Cautionary Climate Tale Boundary walls built by Iceland's Viking farmers run through Unnsteinn Ingason's land. At some point, farmers stopped repairing the walls, and a climate change may help explain why. Ingason's land had been farmed for hundreds of years prior to his family's ownership. Here, ruins of a stone farm house with a turf roof on a hill behind Ingason's home. Archaeologist Adolf Fridriksson stands near the ruins of an early Viking farm. The farm was long ago abandoned, and its soil heavily eroded. Icelandic farmers bring their sheep down from the hills for the winter....

When your liberal friends talk about global warming, give them the one word answer that noone can explain: "Greenland." Why was the land that today is characterized as a huge icecap named Greenland? Eric the Red discovered Greenland in the 980 AD time frame. He called it Greenland because of the lush green fields and valleys. He saw in Greenland a tremendous potential for agriculture. His return trips would bring settlers who would number about 5000 and build 300-400 farms. What??????? Agriculture??? Farms??? Wait a minute, this country is nothing but a huge ice cap isn't it? Here is a...

A paper published January 21st in Quaternary Science Reviews reconstructs storm activity in Iceland over the past 1,200 years and finds storminess and extreme weather variability was far more common during the Little Ice Age in comparison to the Medieval Warm Period and the 20th century. The paper adds to many other peer-reviewed publications finding global warming decreases storm activity, the opposite of claims by climate alarmists....

The Norman castle at Pevensey Bay is one of the most historic sites in Britain. It is built inside of a Roman wall, and was William the Conqueror’s headquarters. It was also used as a defense outpost by Brits and Americans in WWII It is currently several miles from the sea, but at the time when the Romans and Normans built the structures, the water lapped right up to the edge of the stone. The map below shows the bay 900 years ago, and the current seashore as a dashed line.

As many readers are probably aware, there has been an important new posting at Climate Audit about the Yamal affair. This posting is an attempt to set out the whole story of Yamal. It reworks an article I did in 2009 and incorporates new developments since that time. I hope readers find it useful. I have also prepared a Kindle version of the post, for which there is a small charge - click here:Please also consider hitting the tip jar.The story of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known....

Washington — An unusually warm period a millennium ago may have been part of a natural planetary cycle, researchers say in a study of tree rings that scrutinizes the link between human activity and climate change. The study, appearing Friday in the journal Science, analyzed ancient tree rings from 14 sites on three continents in the Northern Hemisphere. It concluded that temperatures in an era known as the Medieval Warm Period about 800 to 1,000 years ago closely matched the warming trend of the 20th century. In recent years, many climate scientists have said an unprecedented warming spell that began...

What do you know? The Medieval Warm Period, which either “didn’t exist” or “only happened in Europe”, also hit Western Antarctica.Booth Island and Mount Scott are also on the Antarctic Peninsula. Photo: Stan Shebs. The climate models don’t know why the world was warmer 1000 years ago. They don’t know why it cooled into the Little Ice Age either. The models don’t do regional projections well, and they don’t do seasonal projections with any skill, and they (in the last ten years) don’t work on short decadal timeframes either, but surely when it comes to big global temperature changes the...

Reference Vinther, B.M., Jones, P.D., Briffa, K.R., Clausen, H.B., Andersen, K.K., Dahl-Jensen, D. and Johnsen, S.J. 2010. Climatic signals in multiple highly resolved stable isotope records from Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 522-538. Background The authors introduce the report of their new study by writing that "during the past 10 years studies of seasonal ice core δ18O records from the Greenland ice sheet have indicated, that in order to gain a firm understanding of the relationships between Greenland δ18O and climatic conditions in the North Atlantic region, it is important to have not only annually resolved, but seasonally resolved ice...

There has been a considerable amount of speculation over the past few years about which “leading” climate scientist told David Deming that we have to “get rid of” the Medieval Warm Period, including speculation (e.g. ukweatherworld) that it was Jonathan Overpeck (recently one of two Coordinating Lead Authors of AR4 chapter 6). While the identity of Deming’s correspondent remains uncertain, a Climategate letter from January 13. 2005, written as an instruction from Overpeck as Coordinating Lead Author to IPCC Lead Authors Briffa and Osborn (cc Jansen, Masson-Delmotte), states that Overpeck wants to “deal a mortal blow” to the MWP (and...

Hoaxes: With double-digit unemployment in a jobless recovery, half-a-million stimulus dollars have saved a ClimateGate scientist whose work could lead to economic disaster. To save this job, we'd lose millions of others. As we've gone from jobs saved or created to jobs funded in ZIP codes and congressional districts that don't exist except in galaxies far, far away, many interesting nuggets have been mined from the government's recovery.gov, which tracks the administration's lack of progress. It's one thing to fail to create real jobs. It is quite another to fund the jobs of people who would put millions of Americans...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann... ...Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. ...a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward...

Both Steve McIntyre and I are mentioned in this comprehensive summary. I’ve posted some excerpts below, with a link to the full report in PDF form. It is well worth a read. – Anthony Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the Climategate scandal THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR TRUTH The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better. In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to...

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain's Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA's James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact. For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests. Now, it turns out, it's the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth. We don't know who "Deep Throat" is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine's...

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the real threats to our nation has been a reduction in the media coverage of the endless end-of-the-world scenarios put forth by the vast network of environmental organizations, the Greens. On March 22nd, buried in those newspapers that published the story, was an article by Paul Recur, the Associated Press science writer. He reported that scientists at the Lament-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York had teamed with colleagues from the Swiss Federal Research Institute to publish a study that noted that whatever warming is predicted is perfectly natural. The report...