Categories
Ice trends

Is the Arctic melting?

The Arctic is often described as being the “canary in the coal mine” of man-made global warming, i.e., it will be the first place we will see its effects. So, the fact that there has been a fairly steady decline in Arctic sea ice “since records began” has led many people to think that we are seeing unusual global warming, and that the only explanation must be man-made global warming. However, the problem is that the records only began in 1978, i.e., just after a period of several decades of cooling in the Arctic had ended.

In this essay, we will discuss why the recent sea ice decline seems to be just part of the natural variability of the Arctic.

Categories
Consensus IPCC

What does the IPCC say?

The reports of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, for short) are widely assumed to represent the scientific consensus of thousands of top climate scientists on man-made global warming. The reports claim that man-made global warming is real, serious and will become more serious during the 21st century if nothing is done to slow down CO2 emissions.

Therefore, it is assumed that these claims represent the views of all the top experts involved in the writing of the IPCC reports. However, in this essay, we find that most of the IPCC scientists are never asked for their views on those claims, and that several IPCC scientists openly disagree with them.

Categories
Our papers Temperature proxies

Summary: “Global temperature changes of the last millennium”

In this essay, we summarise the results of our “Global temperature changes of the last millennium” paper, which we have submitted for peer review at the Open Peer Review Journal.

We reviewed the various studies which have attempted to estimate how global temperatures have changed over the last 1000 years, by using tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores, and other “temperature proxies”.

All of these studies have identified at least three climatic periods – a warm “Medieval Warm Period” (roughly 800-1200 A.D.), a cold “Little Ice Age” (roughly 1500-1850 A.D.) and a warm “Current Warm Period” (roughly 1900 A.D. on).

There has been a lot of controversy over how temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period compared to present temperatures. Some studies claim that temperatures in the Current Warm Period are much warmer than in the Medieval Warm Period because of man-made global warming, whereas other studies find that global temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period were just as warm as in the Current Warm Period.

This is an important issue for the global warming debate, because if the Medieval Warm Period was comparable to the Current Warm Period, this would suggest that much of the recent global warming has nothing to do with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. After all, the Medieval Warm Period pre-dates the Industrial Revolution.

In our paper, we discuss different ways in which this issue could be resolved.

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