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Comments 42301 to 42350:

  1. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints
    Noting above the commenters who want to talk about the reliability of models, I think the article should mention that model-based fingerprinting is complementary to basic physical fingerprinting like carbon isotopes. Of course one has to accept that CO2 is a GHG to begin with for any of it to make sense. :/
  2. Medieval Warm Period was warmer

    I agree that the few barley grains found could have been imported.  It is logical that the earliest Vikings would have experimented with cereals.  These experiments might well have failed given the short growing season both then and now.  Henrickssen, however, believes that these grains were locally harvested.  

  3. Medieval Warm Period was warmer

    My interpretation of D'Anrea's studies is that he believes in present day CO2 induced global warming.

  4. Medieval Warm Period was warmer

    Spoonieduck

    Since you did not link your study I searched D'Andrea et al and found this study published in May 2012.  It studies lakes in Svalbard, which is about as close to Greenland as Ellesmere Island.  Here D'Andrea says:

    "We find that the summer warmth of the past 50 yr recorded in both the instrumental and alkenone records was unmatched in West Spitsbergen in the course of the past 1800 yr, including during the Medieval Climate Anomaly, and that summers during the Little Ice Age (LIA) of the 18th and 19th centuries on Svalbard were not particularly cold, even though glaciers occupied their maximum Holocene extent."

    The past 50 years are the warmest in the record.  Many more crops are currently grown in Greenland than were attempted during the Viking settlements.  The original settlers were hunters and not farmers.  Greenland was never full of trees.  A few barley grains in a  midden could have been imported.  They could grow barley today but it is cheaper to import from Denmark.

     You only referenced one study.  The others you describe without referencing or linking.  How can I check what you say the studies claim?  When I read DeAndrea et al 2011, I do not see the claim that the weather in 1100 was similar to today in Greenland.  I see  that it was warmer than earlier but no reference to current temperatures.  Direct links allow me to read the study also.

    Your  assertion that since Greenland was named "Green" that it was warmer in 1000 AD than it is now is incorrect.

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] I deleted your duplicate post of this comment. 

  5. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints

    LandyJim - I would suggest reading through the Models are unreliable thread, followed by How do Climate Models work, and if you wish to commenting there. 

    Long story short - climate models are based on physics, fed forcings, and progress from there. Neither global nor regional observations can be generated from those physics unless anthropogenic forcings are part of the input.

    I'll note that claiming that major factors '...may have been overlooked or simply ignored as an "inconvenient truth"', without evidence, is rather contrary to the"No accusations of deception" portion of the site Comments Policy. 

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] Let's move this discussion to a more appropriate thread, i.e., How reliable are climate models? Thank you. 

  6. Medieval Warm Period was warmer

    Does the D’Andrea et al. 2011 research say anything about what the authors believe their findings indicate about the general temperature of the arctic region during the medieval warm period? These are excerpts from the abstract for D’Andrea et al. 2012 published in GSA that indicate at the locations investigated were not as warm in the MWP as recent (not average for last 100 yrs.) temperature.

    “The Svalbard Archipelago occupies an important location for studying patterns and causes of Arctic climate variability.”

    “We find that the summer warmth of the past 50 yr. recorded in both the instrumental and alkenone records was unmatched in West Spitsbergen in the course of the past 1800 yr., including during the Medieval Climate Anomaly, and that summers during the Little Ice Age (LIA) of the 18th and 19th centuries on Svalbard were not particularly cold, even though glaciers occupied their maximum Holocene extent.”

  7. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints

    LandyJim, can you point to a model of real-world phenomena in any area of science that is not subject to your criticisms.  All models of real-world phenomena fail at accuracy.  Some models are useful; some are not.  You can toss all the climate models out the window and still have excellent confidence that the climate system will store more energy with an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration.  In fact, you can have high confidence that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in about +1C equilibrium increase at the surface, without adding in any feedbacks.  No GCMs necessary.  

    I don't know what you mean by "human intervention."  Do you mean the different likely emissions scenarios?  Models definitely incorporate those.

    What SkS study?

    What do you mean by the "chemistry of humanity" and the "chemistry of nature"?  What do you think of when you think of each of those?

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] Let's move this discussion to a more appropriate thread, i.e., How reliable are climate models? Thank you. 

  8. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    American climate denier Prof.Richard Lindzen occupies the Alfred P. Sloan chair at MIT.  Sloan Foundation funds plays about science, but refused to fund "Extreme Whether" because it is a play that unmasks the nefarious tactics of climate deniers.  We need a culture of climate change...and one is growing, novels, photographs, plays, despite the difficulties with funding, the artists, like the scientists, will not be stopped.

  9. Medieval Warm Period was warmer

    D'Andrea et al, using the 'alkenone thermometer' as applied to lake core sediments reported in Geophysical Research, vol. 13, 2011:  "We generated  a 5,000 year long, decadally resolved record of summer water temperature from the annually-laminated sediments of Lower Murray Lake on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic.........Most notably, the alkenone record reveals warm lake water temperatures beginning approximately 800 A.D. and persisting until approximately 1200 A.D., with temperatures up to 2-3 deg C warmer than the mean temperature for the last 100 years.  This distinct warm period of Ellesmere Island interrupted a Neoglacial cooling trend that began approximately 2,000 years earlier."

    Using similar alkenone studies, D'Andrea and colleagues studied cores from the bottoms of Lake Braya So and E, close to the original Norse Greenland settlements.  In 2011 they reported that, during the time of earliest Vikng coloniation, the weather was relatively mild, similar to today.  Around 1100 A.D. the temperatures dropped 4 deg C in 80 years.....  D'Andrea et al. reported these findings to the National Academy of Sciences.

    Peter Steen Henrickssen, an archaeobotonist doing research--digging into middens left by the Greenland Norse--for the National Museum of Copenhagen claims to have found a few grains of charred barley in the lowest level of one of the middens.  Because of the context and the presence of extraneous chaff, he believes that this was barley cultivated in the early days of the Greenland colonies.  Today, no cereal grains can be grown in Greenland.

    As you correctly noted, a few potatos are grown in southern Greenland today.  Potatos weren't grown in Norse Greenland because potatos were only grown in the Andean mountains at the time.  They weren't 'discovered' and brought to Europe until after 1528.

  10. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints

    Not wishing to get into a debate of the merits of climate change as a whole, but i do see a flaw in the modelling used. Firstly, to do a model without human intervention requires a set of assumptions to be made that may or may not be accurate, secondly the Human only model requires a lot of assumptions to be made that may or may be accurate, and then they use the output to produce a model into which they add natural variations..

    That is flawed science in my humble opinion, regardless of the truth about human impacts on the climate. People can pat themselves on the back all they like, but I am skeptical about the accuracy of such models.

    We can argue about the impact of human activity on warming the climate all we like, but it is a proven fact that some human activity actually causes a cooling of the climate, was this taken into account in the models in the SKS study? I'll take a bet that it may have been overlooked or simply ignored as an "inconvenient truth" and the problem with that is that all your models are then inaccurate.

    Lastly, has anyone completed a study to see how the chemistry of humanity and the chemistry of nature interact and impact the cliamte, the assumptions made about natural variations may be wrong because the chemistry if the atmosphere may be vastly different (good or bad) without humans dumping millions of tonnes of gases into the atmosphere each year.

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] Let's move this discussion to a more appropriate thread, i.e., How reliable are climate models?

  11. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints

    KR, I agree... except that their 'fans' are clearly too delusional to understand how stupid that ACM graph is.

    Heck, the graph even winds up showing a small warming trend. Thus, the only 'knock' against SkS in the entire piece is in denouncing our "OMG we're all going to DIE" alarmism... and that's just a rather pathetic lie given the lack of any page like that on this site.

  12. The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry

    Thanks K.a.r.S.t.e.N.  I haven't gone into it in as much depth as you have, and yes I used the GISS forcing data.  I think you're saying that the GISS aerosol forcing is too large, which would make the net forcing unrealistically small, and the sensitivity therefore too high... is that correct?  I think James Hansen did an analysis relating to this in a recent paper - trying different response times and different aerosol forcings.  Possibly this was the paper which brought on his comments about a 'Faustian bargain'.  I will have to dig it out and re-read it...

  13. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints

    hank_ - Indeed, that's hilarious. They posted something attempting to diss the SkS Escalator emphasizing year-to-year variations (strawman, nobody seriously discusses trends from yearly varations) and portray a 12 year time-span for their "rational observers" (which is a prime example of the 'too short for significance' timespans shown in the SkS Escalator, uncertainties of about ±0.168 °C/decade 2σ).

    Quite frankly an "own goal" for ACM, it makes them look quite the fools. 

  14. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints

    Just a heads-up for all SkS readers. The Skeptical Science 'escalator' gets a mention on this Aussi blog. Well worth a look for a few laughs;

    australianclimatemadness.com/2013/09/16/the-skeptical-science-escalator-of-alarmism/

    Click the graph.

  15. The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry

    @Icarus:
    Which forcings did you use? In case it is based on GISS, please see my comments #5 and #10 in which I point to some rather intractable inconsistencies with these data.

    Kosaka and Xie don't touch upon the sensitivity issue. However, J-N Gammon did, coming up with a rather low TCR estimate (based on the CM2.1 model used in the study) after an initially more plausible range. While his revision was certainly justified, the model itself seems to have issues with the aerosol forcing as Paul S pointed out in the comment section. I agree with him, which should bring the TCR estimate back to J-N-G's original posting.

  16. What's causing global warming? Look for the fingerprints

    Arguing about climate change is sort of a hobby of mine, and the SkS "fingerprints" list has been a primary weapon in my arsenal since I discovered it. I've done a lot of such arguments, and to this day I've yet to see a "skeptic" who can respond to it.

  17. The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle, and puzzles Curry

    Does the Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie study cite a value for climate sensitivity based on their data?  The value which drops out of my 2-box model is 0.77°C/W/m², or around 2.8°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO₂.

     

  18. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    Dana @5 - Thanks for your good wishes. I rather suspect that the PCC has many fewer teeth than a great white shark, so maybe a bit of luck will come in handy? Time will tell! I'll certainly let you know if we start making any significant progress.

  19. libertarianromanticideal at 20:28 PM on 17 September 2013
    The Economist Screws Up on the Draft IPCC AR5 Report and Climate Sensitivity

    From "Commie" Hedegaard, Europe's climate action commissioner, said:

    "Let's say that science, some decades from now, said 'we were wrong, it was not about climate', would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?."

    EU policy on climate change is right even if science was wrong, says commissioner

  20. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    @Albatross #3:

    I can't speak for other skeptics, but I'm certainly not in a panic over AR5.

  21. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    Wow, look what happens when you have a life away from online threads...

    A few days back I was reading a rather disingenuous post by josieki and asked her two questions about her observation that science, from her personal experience, is often corrupt. My questions were directed at her personal experience and inquired if working in the corporate world of science for profit that certain shareholder issues may have had more to do with creating the air of corruption she precived then any other explanation…it was her world I wondered if she had considered that possibility. After her opening salvo aimed at the integrity of science she attempted to anchor her point to "Climategate"

    It was her mention of Climategate that caused me to log in and reply I responded and thought I had accurately characterized the nature of this non-conspiracy conspiracy. She started this with an attempt to kick a dead horse that has long ago been shown to be a rotting corpse of cherry pick snippets and out of context personal correspondence that in no way has been shown to establish evidence of scientific collusion in the service of an agenda that is counter to the findings. Now she gets to have my own post pulled and retreat into the ether and anyone who was engaged by her is to suffer a moderated silence?

    The beauty is that there is still a world outside of thread discussions and moderation...time to go enjoy the day.

  22. One Planet Only Forever at 12:46 PM on 17 September 2013
    The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    The worst among the contrarians are the ones who "actually know better but refuse to fully and properly inform on this issue or try to misinform", the ones who are informed and intelligent but deliberately develop and disseminate deceptive claims. Those claims then get repeated by the second worst type of people, the ones who deliberately want to fight against the best understanding of all the available information because such increased public awareness does not suit their interests. And those misleading messages get ready acceptance by the third worst type of people, the ones who want more personal wealth, pleasure, comfort and convenience for themselves without caring about how sustainable their actions are.

    Burning non-renewable resources has to end because it is simply not sustainable, even without considering any future consequences it creates.

    And the denial/delay dance continues because most of the wealth and power is in the hands of those who did not care about how they got that wealth and power. They will fight to maximize their short-term personal gathering of wealth, power, pleasure, comfort and convenience any way they can get away with.

    The future has already lost a lot. It stands to lose a lot more from the careless actions of those who only want more for themselves.

    The truth will eventually win out, but the more fortunate changing their way of life to be sustainable forever should have started 20 years ago (or even earlier). All the deliberate contrarians who know better are the most despicable intelligent people on the planet. But despicable people can be popular. Therein lays the flaw of promoting popularity as a measure of legitimacy.

  23. Arctic sea ice delusions strike the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph

    The author correctly points out that, compared to the 2012 record lows of Arctic ice area and volume, a relative recovery in both was to be expected in 2013 and this has occurred – but with what effect on ice cover in future years?

    Increased area of sea ice cover in 2013, means that albedo has also recovered so might we expect a further increase in area covered by sea ice in 2014?

    Or will on-going Arctic amplification of average global surface warming combined with loss of 2013 ice volume outweigh the effects of increased albedo, resulting in decline of sea ice mass and area in 2014?

  24. Philippe Chantreau at 11:16 AM on 17 September 2013
    Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    This is indeed a dilemma. Restoring the responses but not the posts would be unfair and even somewhat misleading. Now that decision has been taken to remove all the posts and associated responses, I think mods should stick with it and leave it at at that. Restoring per request only should be grounds for selectively restoring responses, but that would put undue burden on the mods, and the authors would probably be unsatsified because of a loss of context. No real good option, I think it should be left alone now.

  25. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    DSL, a reasonable compromise would be to restore all the posts, but to snip the contents of josieki's posts as per her request with an explanation that her request is the reason for the snip.  Moderators call, of course.

     

  26. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    I'm torn.  I agree with Tom re the posts replying to Josiecki.  On the other hand, I'd argue that error is the actual reason Josiecki wants all the posts removed.  After all, if she believes in the truth of those posts, she'd defend their publication.  I'm also sad about losing such an excellent, sustained example of empty rhetoric.

  27. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    I seriously object to the actions of the moderator in complying with josiecki's requist.

    She does not have the right to request the deletion of anybody's posts other than her own.  Nor does she have the right to remove the context of other people's replies to her by removing her posts.  Therefore the complete removal of all her posts is an unreasonable request that should not have been complied with IMO.

    This situation is very different from that in which a poster immediately after posting discovers an error in their post and requests removal before others have responded.  Rather, we have had several days worth of debate removed because josiecki found it personally embarassing just how little she could defend her opinions (none of which, I believe, she ever offered substantive support of).

    I request that the moderators actions in removing those post be reconsidered by the entire moderation team and that the posts be reinstated.

    Moderator Response:

    [DB] The matter has been brought up for discussion.

  28. Global Warming’s Missing Heat: Look Back In Anger (and considerable disbelief)…

    Philippe, I disagree. I like to look at WUWT to see what is the latest thing they are now trying to deny. I find reading their posts and finding the errors to be a good way to pass my time. 

  29. To frack or not to frack?

    Note that the UT/EDF study was just published in PNAS (a useful press release is here). It shows that extensive mitigation of emissions as advocated does work as expected, pushing total "leaked" emissions quite low (likely <1%). Unfortunately, mostly sites where active mitigation measures are in place were investigated.

    While we study the results and wait for more studies to be published, stay tuned for an update to this post some time in the fall.

  30. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    Waiting for a response....

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] You hae requested that all of your comments be deleted. Your request will be honored.

  31. Arctic sea ice delusions strike the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph

    Part of the explanation is Agung.  See figure 2 of Domingues et al. 2008 and especially Balmaseda et al. 2013.

  32. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    All:

    Per his/her request, the most recent post of josiecki has been deleted. DSL's response to it has also been deleted. 

  33. Arctic sea ice delusions strike the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph

    I've had a question for a while about the heat content chart.  What is the "dip" in the ocean heat content between 1960 and 1970?  Is that a plot artifact, or have to do with the baseline?  It's just always a bit weird how it starts at 0, then drops, then jumps back up.  I reference people to that chart fairly often but some of them point to that drop and try to cliam there's something wrong.

  34. CO2 effect is saturated

    davidwell, regarding comment 277"

    If a ring-down optical path lengh was say 900 meters, then the pulse duration would be 3 microseconds. If the lifetime of the v2 CO2* state is much longer than that would some probe beam intensity survive even at 100% CO2?  I ask this because I'm guessing that the excited state (v2 CO2*) does not absorb the probe beam. Anyway, I'm just a guy that likes science, and your question is interesting to me. 

  35. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    Jim @2 - good luck.  Rose is one of the worst "journalist" serial climate misinformers on the planet.  Climate scientists in particular (except Curry of course - go figure) are clearly getting really sick of him distorting their work.

  36. CO2 effect is saturated

    Excuse me, I am but a poor and ignorant engineer.  Also, as MThompson , above, I have not read all the pages.

    so, with that, I venture the following question:

    with ring down IR spectrophotometers with path lenghts of hundreds of meters, would not the premise that "saturation" in the heating of the atmosphere from increasing CO2 occurs..

    also mean that the spectrophotometers might become useless at a % CO2 level which intercepts all their source laser IR energy?

    Which doesn't happen, up to 100% CO2.

    Probably I'm missing something here, your elucidation is solicited.

  37. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    This is a good thread.  I'd like to compare it to "The Stages of Dying", but don't have the time or inclination.

     

    Stage 5 "it's too damn late, may as well enjoy the process"  is an analogue to what I have felt which is "WTF, nobody gives a s...."  and go away in despondence and rejection.

    Direct Air Capture can possibly "save the day":  here's hoping.

  38. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    Since late 2009 this somewhat heated debate has gone on, "deniers" are falliing off the wagon by droves.  Only the most  "attached to their arguments"  persons can fail to accede to some facts, inconvenient or not, that the reality bearing down will affect us all the same.

     

    "It's not that warm", saith the lobster, turning pinkish..

  39. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    Well the fake skeptics and those in denial are in a panic with the release of the IPCC's fifth assessment report looming.  They don't seem to be able to decide whether they accept the stolen draft report's findings or that the report is largely wrong or part of some conspiracy. No surpises there though, fake skeptics are renowned for the logical fallacies and contradictory nature of their arguments.  As Dana shows they are also very nicely demonstrating all five elements of denial, sometimes simultaneously!

    Steve Sherwood in response to Judith Curry's musings (see more at the Australian Media Centre):

    "Just as it is possible to know that a cancer patient is likely to die without treatment, even if the date or particular symptoms cannot be predicted accurately."

    To build on Prof. Sherwood's excellent analogy-- fake skeptics like Dr. Curry seem to believe that uncertainty always means the patient will die later, never sooner. Or at its extreme, that the patient will not die, even though 97% of patients will the same disease do die.  I'm all for optimism, but denying reality when their is so much on the line is just irresponsible and to be frank, stupid.

  40. 2013 SkS Weekly Digest #37

    I sort of agree with numerobis because quantity is not quality and sometimes I don't have time to read the trolls and debunk them, espetially if the troll authors are helpless and the best tactic is "don't feed the troll". So "trolling threads" could be indicated as such.

    I noticed that recent trolls are evolving around "GW has stopped since 1997" and Cook at al 2013 about 97% consensus. I don't understand the reason for the former because science is so simple in  our debunkings. The latter suggests poor understanding of statistics and polling techniques in general public, so there is something to do in that area.

    I remember other weeks with proliferate scientific discussions both explaining and complementing the articles. But this week lacks them.

    Moderator Response:

    [DB] Fixed text per request.

  41. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    We're now officially pursuing David Rose and the Mail on Sunday via the UK's Press Complaints Commission. Our latest riposte to "The David & Judy Show":

    http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2013/09/shock-news-why-isnt-the-arctic-ice-free/

    For Lomberg et. al. we're still at the Twitter stage!

  42. The 5 stages of climate denial are on display ahead of the IPCC report

    Alternative POV (or the same view stated differently):

    If someone wants to protect their investment, whether financial, political, business or just their way of life. Attack the source of the problem (climate science) so that delays make it impossible to proceed with the changes that effect your investment.

  43. Arctic sea ice delusions strike the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph

    @funglestrumpet - Thanks for your kind words. As recommended by the PCC I have had several communications with the Managing Editor of the MoS. A brief extract:

    Them - "If you wish to express a different opinion, you are welcome to write a letter for publication which I will forward to our letters editor for consideration. "

    Us - "There's been a large "hole" in the sea ice near the North Pole for weeks. It's invisible in the images in your article. 100-200 words is nowhere near enough to explain the significance of that one "inaccuracy" to your readership, let alone all the others."

    More on my own blog:

    http://econnexus.org/the-great-white-con-continues/

  44. CO2 effect is saturated

    MThompson @275, that mental picture is largely correct.  What is missing at this point is that the probability of a CO2 molecule absorbing a photon falls of towards the wings of the absorption band so that near those wings, the distance before nearly all light is absorbed is 100s of meters, or at the very fringes, thousands.

    More important, however, is the next step, which is described here (which, if you have not already covered that material, I recomend you read before going further).

  45. CO2 effect is saturated

    I’m new to this thread, and I confess that I’ve not yet read all the preceding comments. I’m still trying to construct a good mental image of the role of CO2 in global warming.

    According to the article that starts this thread, “Consider the CO2 absorption band around 15 μm (about 650 cm-1), it is strong enough to not let any light go through after a few tens of meters at surface temperature and pressure.”

    Now I believe this statement to be even more generally true because the earth’s blackbody radiation in the entire 750 to 600 cm-1 band is around 3x1022 photons per square meter per second. Furthermore, I estimate that near the earth’s surface there are about 1x1022 CO2 molecules per cubic meter. Thus a few tens of meters of the near-earth atmosphere should be plenty to absorb all photons in the band, not just the central emission at 650 cm-1. The high rate of collision between bending-mode CO2 (v2 CO2*) and the other atmospheric molecules will transfer that vibrational energy to translational energy quickly, thus converting the photon energy to thermal energy. The v2 CO2* population should stay very close to the distribution predicted by Boltzmann statistics for the observed temperature and pressure ranges. Any increase in CO2 concentration within these “few tens of meters” will not lead to additional warming.

    Of course the observed increase in CO2 is not confined to very near the surface of the earth.

    This is where I’m at so far in my mental picture. I want to make sure I’ve got this right before I continue. Any corrections or suggestions would be most appreciated.

  46. Medieval Warm Period was warmer

    Spoonieduck,you are an extraordinaryly selective reader.  When I read Dugmore et al 2011, I saw that Greenalnd never raised crops, only pastoral animals.  Today they raise cabbages and a number of other crops in Greenalnd.  It must be warmer in Greenalnd now since they were unable to raise crops in 1200 that they can raise now. Dugmore states:

    "the Greenlandic economy seems from the outset to have been geared to obtaining and exporting rare and prestigious commodities such as walrus tusk and hide, narwhal teeth, and live polar bears."

    It would have taken years or decades to build barns for herds and to breed sufficient animals to support a society.  The original settlers were primarily engaged in hunting and exporting high value objects. You ignore this completely.   Dugmore goes on to say:

    Climate variability always provided challenges to Norse
    Greenland’s TEK, and the notion of a uniform medieval warm
    period has long been replaced by the realization that even the
    earliest periods of settlement saw considerable variability requiring
    effective coping strategies. The Norse Greenlanders survived many
    hard years before the 13th century and not only persevered but prospered.
     
    Dugmore states blankly that your argument that your notion of a midieval climate optimum is false.  The paper you referenced does not support your wild speculations.
  47. Bert from Eltham at 10:33 AM on 16 September 2013
    2013 SkS Weekly Digest #37

    Exactly moderator! The more trolls that comment is a fair indicator of the fear these same trolls have in the veracity of the real information in that story. This also gives a a better measure of the 97% as the tiny minority still loudly decry its insignificance! Bert

  48. 2013 SkS Weekly Digest #37

    I find that the story that "attracted the most comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week" is actually the one that got the most trolls posting.  I'm not sure that's something to highlight.  Maybe remove that line?

    Moderator Response:

    [JH] My purpose is to highlight "where the action is" re comment chatter. In that context, a comment is a comment. 

  49. 2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #37B

    William, try PIOMAS. You need to identify yourself to download.

  50. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy

    Philippe Chantreau - The Richelieu quote was from me, directed towards josiecki and pointing out how out of context quotes were abused by folks wishing to deny the science. 

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