For those not wanting to read Climate Audit, nor acknowledge the contributions made by McIntyre and McKittrick to our improved understanding of paleoclimatology (most notably the breaking of the Mann hockey stick), additional support regarding the existence and importance of the medieval warm period (MWP) comes from two studies summarized by CO2Science (here and here). Together,
- ...they greatly advance the thesis that the MWP was indeed a global phenomenon, and that there is thus nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about earth's current warmth...
- ...the two records closely mimic each other, with both of them indicating greater peak warmth during the Medieval Warm Period than during the Current Warm Period.
Alarmism about climate is predicated upon the assertion that contemporary temperature changes are both unprecedented and unnatural. Using the Little Ice Age as a base point for today's temperatures is a contrivance designed to promote alarmism. The existence and world-wide distribution of the Medieval Warm Period, greatly devalues the credence of any assertion of climate alarmism, which is why paleoclimatology has become a discipline of great policy import over the past decade.
The science of climate change is multi-faceted and extensive because climate is a dynamic, multi-variate entity. Left to themselves, the various disciplines may eventually have resolved many of the disputes over data and their meaning that have emerged. I say may, because the point is mute. Once the IPCC was formed, the science ceased to exist in an objective, value-free, apolitical vacuum and all climate science became enmeshed in an increasingly polarized and ideological politicization that persists today.
Is science ever truly objective and non-ideological? That's a good undergraduate philosophy question. The reality for climate change is that the science has become massively politicized. Until this is explicitly acknowledged within the various disciplines themselves, the overall result will remain as disputed and contested as the politics it mimics.
