If you are really interested in climate change, I would strongly suggest reading The Weather Makers.

If you are interested in extinctions, I would suggest Under A Green Sky.

I don’t know if you have the level of interest required to read full length books on the subjects. They are both written for an educated general audience.

Interesting write-up. I’m surprised they mentioned neither the National Research Council nor the Wegman report.

Anyway, without a hockey stick, here’s a nice long graph, going back about 540 million years. It does not, of course, resemble a hockey stick at that scale.

http://tinyurl.com/geotemp

However, you may note that during human civilization, temperature has indeed been relatively constant. The little ice age and medieval warm periods are barely noticeable. And, today is warmer than the medieval warm period.

You will also notice that there are a few brief slightly warmer periods than today in the last 500,000 years. However, to get significantly warmer than now requires going back 20 million years, when it was about 3 degrees warmer than today.

This is important. To get 5 degrees warmer than today, a temperature well within the range of estimates for global warming, you must go back about 50 million years. As it was cooling from 55 million years ago, life began to come back from the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.

This is even more important.

Life did not begin to come back until the earth cooled quite a bit. 10 million years after the cometary impact at Chixulub, the comet could no longer be blamed for the lack of life. A warm earth can though.

Many extinctions on earth correlate with warm periods, most notably the biggest extinction of them all 250 million years ago. It was 6 degrees warmer than today at that time.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

Strangely this paper says the hockey stick IS in the IPCC report. I’ve never seen it, and you’ve never mentioned it either.

As for the math, you can look it up yourself. There are some good explanations at Watts Up With That if you want to learn. You feed in random noise, and you end up with a hockey stick. They’ve done fix after fix and made various claims about how the critiquers got it wrong, but in the end the IPCC dropped it from their latest report.

Well, I can believe a panel of experts or an anonymous blogger.

Think I’ll go with the experts.

BTW, the 400 years is still 67% of the original 600 year hockey stick graph. Your statement of 10,000 years shows plainly and simply that you are mistaking the hockey stick for one of many other studies that all coincidentally show the same thing as the hockey stick graph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph

As for the Wegmen report versus the National Research Council Report. One took scientists from 12 different areas and carefully evaluated the hockey stick from many viewpoints and concluded it correct for the bulk of its time frame.

The other was a report from a bunch of statisticians. Again, statisticians vs. climate scientists from many fields, I’ll go with the scientists.

The hockey stick stands.

DEBUNKED

One last point. If you think my reading of your non-peer-reviewed article was selective, it really did have at least 10 different paragraphs that mostly discussed a Chrichton work of fiction. I think if you found any real information in that article, it was you who were being selective. Perhaps there was a paragraph in that article that had a bit of meat to it. If so, yes, I missed it.

But, noticing 10 paragraphs about Chrichton in a one page article cannot be called selective reading.

Oh, and if you had actually read the peer reviewed article that “debunked” the already outdated older hockey stick article, you would have seen that they merely pointed out that there was not enough overlap in the data where they switched from tree rings to ice cores. That had already been addressed in the second article.

As you seem to think that the hockey stick was “bad math”, you probably think that it was a projection into the future. Just to make sure you are aware, the hockey stick graph is a graph of past temperatures. I fail to see how you could plug in anything you want with respect to past temperatures. This was not using climate models, but real hard data from the real world.

This one is obviously directed at me. However, half of your posts are not so obvious. Please make sure you reference the post to which you are replying.

As for the hockey stick, you are incorrect again Lyin’ Mike.

http://tinyurl.com/c85nqw

The “debunking” of the hockey stick was done by a bunch of assholes who debunked the first version of the article after the second version had already been printed. The second version had already addressed all of the concerns they raised with respect to the first.

It is unclear why the assholes bothered to publish their critique of the first article after the second had already come out. But, they did. And, somehow, they got it published in a peer-reviewed journal, proving that there is no bias against anti-climate-change articles in the peer reviewed publications.

Michael Crichton didn’t write it.

True. However, his caricature of scientists was the source of the vast majority of the article. Without the Chrichton fiction, there is no article. From your article, in case you didn’t read it.

the novel State of Fear by bestselling author Michael Crichton, appeared in German bookstores,

Crichton’s thriller deals with the violent conflict between sober-minded realists and radical idealists when it comes to the subject of climate.

While the impending catastrophe in Emmerich’s film is climatic, Crichton predicts an economic collapse in his novel.

In Crichton’s book, the idealists are so obsessed by their mission that, in a last-ditch effort to shake up public opinion, they finally trigger the catastrophes they themselves have predicted.

Crichton has certainly delivered an accurate portrayal of the dynamics of communication among the scientific community

in Crichton’s thriller, the general belief is that in order to keep public attention focused on the issue of “climate catastrophe”

Like the characters in Crichton’s novel who incite public fear, the media are now claiming that all kinds of extreme events are increasing in frequency

But there are always scientists for whom, in keeping with the maxims of the alarmists in Crichton’s book, these scenarios are insufficiently dramatic.

Crichton’s thriller deals with the violent conflict between sober-minded realists and radical idealists when it comes to the subject of climate.

Crichton predicts an economic collapse in his novel.

In Crichton’s book, the idealists are so obsessed by their mission that, in a last-ditch effort to shake up public opinion, they finally trigger the catastrophes they themselves have predicted.

OK, so, let me get this straight, the number one completely uninformed climate change denier in the world creates a caricature of climate scientists in a work of fiction in order to discredit scientists based on nothing. The idiots who wrote this article take the fiction as gospel and claims it to be truth and use it to discredit climate scientists.

Does this sort of totally whacked out logic actually work in your brain? If so, you need to go find that gnat in a hurry.

Our civilizations flourish when its warm and regress when it cools.

We’re talking about far greater change than that. Do you have an example of when humanity was alive at all, let alone what you would call civilized, that the temperature was 5 degrees warmer than today? We’ve survived cooler, that’s true. But, we’ve never survived warmer, at least not significantly warmer.

Remember, at 5 degrees cooler, NYC was covered by a multi-thousand foot thick glacier.

So, when exactly was it 5 degrees warmer in the last 200,000 years? (Link please!)