Six Word Memoirs on Life Stories

Backstory

'What’s wrong with this image? Well if you are part of The Team (RealClimate and friends), it goes against everything you’ve been publishing. You want the Medieval Warm Period to disappear, and you want a hockey stick at the end showing “unprcedented” warming. The shape below just doesn’t cut it when that’s what you are researching selling.

On the left is temperature in °C, on the X axis, years, with labels from 0AD to the year 2000.

Images like the above don’t sell. With a clear MWP and no hockey stick, there’s no alarm, and no $$ coming in for “further studies”. In the Wake of the Gergis et al retraction, Steve McIntyre notes that one of the “screened out” datasets just happens to be the one with the best resolution and the greatest duration – the Law Dome Oxygen 18 data set (from Antarctica). He writes:

An annual version for two millennia was provided to Gergis (who screened it out.) delD and O18 are closely related and presumably the unarchived del D series will look somewhat similar.

For those that don’t know what this data represents, here’s a quick primer from Wikipedia.

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Oxygen isotope ratio cycles are cyclical variations in the ratio of the abundance of oxygen with an atomic mass of 18 to the abundance of oxygen with an atomic mass of 16 present in some substances, such as polar ice or calcite in ocean core samples. The ratio is linked to water temperature of ancient oceans, which in turn reflects ancient climates. Cycles in the ratio mirror climate changes in geologic history.'

In other words, it was hotter worldwide in the middle ages during the medieval warm period, before CO2 started it's modern rise. Drat, so much for Michael Mann and his famous discredited hockey stick.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/12/the-longest-most-high-resolution-most-inconvenient-paleoclimate-data-that-hasnt-been-published/#more-65583