27 July 2019

New Research Confirms It: The Warming is Us

Posted by Dan Satterfield

The leading climate myth going around these days (I see it a lot on social media)  is that the record global warmth is just part of a natural cycle. It’s been shown in many ways that this is not possible for quite some time, but some people (not the science community) have held onto the “Little Ice Age” as evidence that the warming planet is from only natural oscillations.

New research this week has put a sword through the heart of that myth.

From the Abstract in NATURE:

Here we use global palaeoclimate reconstructions for the past 2,000 years,
and find no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and
warm epochs. In particular, we find that the coldest epoch of the
last millennium—the putative Little Ice Age—is most likely to have
experienced the coldest temperatures during the fifteenth century
in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, during the seventeenth
century in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America,
and during the mid-nineteenth century over most of the remaining
regions…By contrast, we find that the warmest period
of the past two millennia occurred during the twentieth century for
more than 98% of the globe. This provides strong evidence
that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in
terms of absolute temperatures, but also unprecedented in spatial
consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.

Another paper, in NATURE GEOSCIENCE, is a second confirmation to research published by Dr. Michael Mann in 2009 showing that the so-called “Little Ice Age” was not a global phenomenon. If you want to claim that the warming we have seen is part of a natural cycle, you have a lot of science that says you are wrong and none that supports it. Don’t even think of claiming that the Earth is still coming out of the ice age. That one is laughably wrong as well.

Instead, perhaps you should consider that you are wanting this to be true because the science conflicts with your political or religious worldview. If you’ve never had a course in climate science and are claiming every major scientific body on Earth is wrong, then it’s something you should ponder.

Cognitive dissonance causes people to accept flimsy evidence while disregarding a mountain of high-quality documentation. Understanding this is actually one of the keys to science literacy.  If you have friends who are suffering in this regard, then I suggest a quote by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman:
“Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves”.

Yet another confirmation of Dr. Michael Mann’s famous Hockey Stick.