Trembling at the thought of setting anthropogenic global warmers up against the ever growing band of sceptics, I offer you this article on historical warm periods from the past. It is worth a read, and I will offer it to my students without comment, just to maintain a balanced view as ever!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/1...000-years-ago/

Steve J

"Steve Jackson" wrote in message
...
Trembling at the thought of setting anthropogenic global warmers up against
the ever growing band of sceptics, I offer you this article on historical
warm periods from the past. It is worth a read, and I will offer it to my
students without comment, just to maintain a balanced view as ever!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/1...000-years-ago/

Steve J
===============

Good for you Steve!

Will
--

On Thursday, October 18, 2012 4:58:05 PM UTC+1, Steve Jackson wrote:
Trembling at the thought of setting anthropogenic global warmers up against the ever growing band of sceptics, I offer you this article on historical warm periods from the past. It is worth a read, and I will offer it to my students without comment, just to maintain a balanced view as ever!



http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/1...000-years-ago/

============

Are you offering the paper or the link? Because you're not going to get a balanced view from Watts.

Also please note the title of the Esper paper: "Variability and extremes of *northern Scandinavian summer temperatures* over the past two millennia" (my emphasis).

How does this have any bearing on current *global* warming?

Stephen.

On Oct 18, 6:20*pm, "Dartmoor Will" wrote:
"Steve Jackson" wrote in message

...
Trembling at the thought of setting anthropogenic global warmers up against
the ever growing band of sceptics, I offer you this article on historical
warm periods from the past. It is worth a read, and I will offer it to my
students without comment, just to maintain a balanced view as ever!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/1...-demonstrates-...

Good for you Steve!

either way this digging up old tree trunks is a load of pigswill.
Ditto ice cores.

On 18/10/2012 18:49, Weatherlawyer wrote:
On Oct 18, 6:20 pm, "Dartmoor Will" wrote:
"Steve Jackson" wrote in message

...
Trembling at the thought of setting anthropogenic global warmers up against
the ever growing band of sceptics, I offer you this article on historical
warm periods from the past. It is worth a read, and I will offer it to my
students without comment, just to maintain a balanced view as ever!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/1...-demonstrates-...

I think that on the thousand year timescales there is a reasonable
expectation that certain lunar tidal range periodicities will play a
part. See for example the Keeling & Whorf PNAS papers. They are out of
fashion at the moment but I think they were onto something. I haven't
time to compare their model against these data at the moment.

In particular the 58 year and 93 year periodicity are both explicable in
terms of known sun-moon-earth configurations. Annoyingly there isn't
much at 54 years period which would be an obvious 3xSaros periodicity
(roughly same eclipse at about the same place on Earth).

Good for you Steve!

either way this digging up old tree trunks is a load of pigswill.
Ditto ice cores.

Not true.

It is actually a pretty good proxy for global temperature since the
stable isotope ratios in rain and the oceans vary according to the
amount of water locked up as permanent ice. Water vapour in the air is
preferentially light water. Several incredibly slow growing corals and
stalagtites are particularly good for this sort of analysis as well.

Can't expect a lying dittohead to understand science though.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On Oct 18, 6:34*pm, Stephen Davenport wrote:

How does this have any bearing on current *global* warming?

Stephen, I hope my A level students will rationalise that warming in
Scandinavia might just be more than a localised event, mirrored
perhaps in the UK, so certainly of continental proportions, long
before fossil fuel burning became an issue.

Let them think it through themselves - it is a debate after all, isn't
it? There are no certainties in this argument, and it may take
hundreds of years to resolve this issue.

I will pose your question to them however!

Steve J

In article ,
Steve Jackson writes:
Trembling at the thought of setting anthropogenic global warmers
up against the ever growing band of sceptics,

Ever growing? I would be surprised by that, as it seems to me - as a
reluctant convert to AGW some ten years ago - that the evidence is
becoming more compelling all the time.

I offer you this article on historical warm periods from the past. It
is worth a read, and I will offer it to my students without comment,
just to maintain a balanced view as ever!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/1...another-paper-
demonstrates-warmer-temperatures-1000-years-ago-and-even-
2000-years-ago/

Steve J

I think the point is that, if you accept that increased and still
increasing CO2 is the main cause of the current warming, then it will
almost certainly go on indefinitely into the future, and probably at an
accelerating pace. In 50 years time it will have far outstripped 1000
(and 2000) years ago, even if it has not yet quite done so.

On Thursday, October 18, 2012 8:32:16 PM UTC+1, Steve Jackson wrote:


Stephen, I hope my A level students will rationalise that warming in

Scandinavia might just be more than a localised event, mirrored

perhaps in the UK, so certainly of continental proportions, long

before fossil fuel burning became an issue.

===========

Well, I hope they're smart enough to notice a faulty syllogism that concludes the *certainty* of a continent-wide phenomenon based on flimsy premises of "might just be" and "mirrored perhaps". And "continental proportions" still ain't global.


Stephen.

"Steve Jackson" wrote in message
...

Let them think it through themselves - it is a debate after all,
isn't it? There are no certainties in this argument, and it may
take hundreds of years to resolve this issue.

No, it is not a debate. It is an established fact that carbon dioxide is a
greenhouse gas. Without it, the Earth would be frozen and life impossible.
Burning fossil fuels, i.e. oxidising organic carbon, adds CO2 to the
atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, by burning coal
and oil we have increased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 280 ppm
to nearly 400 ppm, getting close to a 50% increase. Over the last 100 years
global temperatures have risen by about 0.8 degrees Celcius.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/gtc.gif
This may not seem much, but its effect on water vapour content of the
atmosphere is significant. It is the increase in water vapour, the other
major greenhouse gas, which is causing Global Weirding as was shown in the
eponymous programme shown tonight on BBC 4. It will be repeated on saturday
evening at 8 pm.

In the graph it can be seen that the warming paused between 1940 and 1980.
It is believed that this was due to the industrial polution produced by the
western world absorbing and reflecting solar radiation. The pasue in warming
since 2000 is probably due to the Asian Brown Cloud, polution produced by
India and especially China now that all manufacturing industry (both heavy
and light) has been exported there.

Carbon dioxide is not the only thing that drives climate. As the pioneering
climatologist quipped "There are at least nine and twenty ways of
constructing a theory of climate change, and there is probably some truth in
quite a number of them." The greenhouse effect is one of the true theories
but at present it is masked by the others. This is what Anthony Watts
exploits in his web pages which are not science. They are psuedo science
propoganda. If you want your students discuss science I recommend you read
the RealClimate blog. http://www.realclimate.org/

Cheers, Alastair.

On 18/10/2012 21:47, John Hall wrote:
In article ,
Steve Jackson writes:
Trembling at the thought of setting anthropogenic global warmers
up against the ever growing band of sceptics,

Ever growing? I would be surprised by that, as it seems to me - as a
reluctant convert to AGW some ten years ago - that the evidence is
becoming more compelling all the time.

By ever growing he means the amount of money fossil fuel and right wing
think tanks are spending on PR mouthpieces to fool the public.

The Daily Wail seems to be in on it as well.

I offer you this article on historical warm periods from the past. It
is worth a read, and I will offer it to my students without comment,
just to maintain a balanced view as ever!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/1...another-paper-
demonstrates-warmer-temperatures-1000-years-ago-and-even-
2000-years-ago/

Steve J

I think the point is that, if you accept that increased and still
increasing CO2 is the main cause of the current warming, then it will
almost certainly go on indefinitely into the future, and probably at an
accelerating pace. In 50 years time it will have far outstripped 1000
(and 2000) years ago, even if it has not yet quite done so.

Fortunately the damage is roughly speaking linear in temperature for
each doubling of the CO2 concentration. Future generations will curse us
for not doing something sooner - though at present I only favour no
regrets energy saving measures because the worst polluters on the planet
are determined to cheat so there really isn't any point in making cuts
that might hurt.

Steve J might also like to introduce his students to the primary
scientific literature on ADS abstracts where they can find actual papers
written by scientists showing that AGW is real (including ones who make
guest appearences at right wing shindigs pretending that nothing is
happening and it is all natural). Hint: you cannot balance the Earth's
energy budget after ~1970 without including GHG forcing.

Try for example
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996ApJ...472..891S

Baliunas is a well known favourite of the ultra right wing trash the
planet for fun and profit brigade.

They should be encouraged to go and read the original paper in a
university library. Watts up with that is not exactly even handed in its
treatment of the subject and will introduce denier bias. Although he is
by no means as bad as that Australian con-man John Daly.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown