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This is incorrect by your use of "in the blip of man's existence". Even your "credible" scientists agree it is the hottest humans or human-like ancestors have ever experienced, by some way; this is going back tens of thousands of years.

False. Study, study, study.

Oh how I wish people would stop quoting skepticalscience as if a blog is a scientific resource.

It's kind of sad that you can make so many errors in one sentence. I referenced Skeptical Science because they have articles explaining in more detail exactly what I was explaining. I quoted one of the authors of the paper used by the parent to that post explicitly contradicting the view presented based on that's author's paper. How I wish you wouldn't ignore things that were inconvenient to you.

You only ever linked to Skeptical Science. Your italicized quote of Ljungqvist has no reference to anywhere to prove he stated, or more importantly backed it up with anything. In Ljungqvist's peer reviewed published article that your opponent linked the article declares:
Our two-millennia long reconstruction has a well defined peak in the period 950–1050 AD with a maximum temperature anomaly of 0.6 C.
The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions

Sorry, I must forgive the person you responded to for thinking the science suggested that the MWP warming in 950-1050AD equalled or exceeded mid-20th century warming, seeing as it says exactly that in the scientific journal article he linked to!

For those that read this and wonder how Ljungqvist can write this in a paper yet still post the quote you gave to a blog some place, it's because he's pulling on Michael Mann's stunt of comparing apples to oranges. You use a thermometer to measure temperatures since 1900AD and you use proxy records to estimate the temperature from before and declare that the thermometer measurements are an unprecedented trend change... Or maybe, like statisticians corrected Mann on, the proxy records lack the sensitivity and precision of thermometers and comparing the two is dishonest so you save that part for your blog postings...

Skeptical science says exactly would you did, and most of what they say is sourced against another blog(RealClimate.org) which was at least started by a pair of actual scientists, but is still itself not subject to peer review either and really does not belong in your exhibit of evidences.

Isn't this just an ad hominem attack?

No just stating science is about evidence and data, not votes or opinions...

It's interesting, but I don't see the relevance here. It does not address the actual issue which is that no actual reconstructions show warming to actually have been higher in the past

Maybe because you can't be bothered to read the journal article I already linked. It's even written by Michael Mann, a very vehement AGW activist in addition to being a scientist so you should like him. I'll save you the trouble of reading the whole thing and note you can skip to Figure 3. As I pointed out, Mann chose note to plot the SH because the data wasn't as good. But even he acknowledges the best reconstruction(EIV) shows peaks around 1000AD, as did Ljungqvist's work...

That applies to both sides.

Potentially, but not as much as you seem to think

When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation."

The problem is those responses are actually reasonably true. In a noisy data set like yearly temperatures, we expect there to be periods of slow temperature growth and periods of fast temperature growth due to short term variability so "that's not climate, that's weather" is true, 30 year averages are generally used to minimize year-to-year variability that can drown out the long term trend. We have had a confluence of natural factors working together to slow the surface air temperature growth over that period. Perhaps more importantly it's important to look at more than just the air temperature since the atmosphere only contains a small fraction of the heat content the earth can store.

Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today, it will be derisively dismissed.

That's a northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction, so it only covers half the world, and one of the authors of that paper, F. C. Ljungqvist, doesn't agree with your analysis:

Since AD 1990, though, average temperatures in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere exceed those of any other warm decades the last two millennia, even the peak of the Medieval Warm Period”

But then there are those on the same side who will mention a 20-100 year period because it suits their argument.

Potentially, but those are periods that are long enough to cancel out year-to-year variability, though, I can't actually remember seeing anyone use a period that was longer than 30 years. Maybe it's not that the period suits the argument but that when you look at periods longer than 20 years, the evidence strongly supports one side in this debate? If that's the case, then the people who look at and accept the evidence have little choice but to end up on the same side of this debate?

Oh how I wish people would stop quoting skepticalscience as if a blog is a scientific resource.

Skeptical science says exactly would you did, and most of what they say is sourced against another blog(RealClimate.org) which was at least started by a pair of actual scientists, but is still itself not subject to peer review either and really does not belong in your exhibit of evidences. This is is what is WRONG with the whole 'debate'. Way too many folks believe themselves to be protecting and promoting the science while waving their hands at blogs and re-hashing the summaries from them. :(

One of the scientists that started RealClimate is Michael Mann, here is his latest article on historic temperatures. Mann is (in)famous for the hockey stick graph. In his latest work here he's gone a long ways to trying to improve upon his original paper and although he only graphs the NA trend(citing that the SA data is of much lower quality), it very clearly shows temperatures as measured by proxy records matched or exceeded todays temperatures on multiple occasions in the last 2k years. He tries to down play this, but the data speaks for itself. Mann even notes himself that However, in the case of the early calibration/late validation CP

When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate

An oldy but moldy, taken straight from the "How to Lie with Statistic" playbook: cherry pick your baseline to produce the trend (or lack of trend) you want.

Climate deniers like to say "there has been no significant warming since 1998", although strictly what they mean is "there has been no significant warming *compared to* 1998." Why 1998? BECAUSE 1998 WAS BY FAR THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER ON THE INSTRUMENTAL RECORD. It's like saying, "My income hasn't gone up significantly since 1998," when 1998 was the year your hit the PowerBall. If you use five year moving averages the "stabilization" effect disappears.

Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today,

FTW: two other forms of cherry picking in one assertion. First, there's the kind of geographic cherrypicking that says "If Europe was warm in the middle ages it was warm everywhere," or "if there's snow in Washington DC it's cold everywhere", or "If there is unseasonal summer pack ice in western Hudson Bay then there must be unseasonable ice everywhere in the Arctic," all of which are trivial to refute but rely on the fact that most people won't bother to look up what's happening elsewhere.

Second form is cherry picking papers that sound like theysay what you want to hear. It's not that papers aren't important but science isn't like theology; it deals in contradictory evidence, which is abundant if you're trying to extrapolate global climate from local climate. That means you can prove anything by picking the right paper; you need to read the literature in a field as a whole. Since most of us don't have time to do that, let me suggest a more convenient way to get yourself up to speed on a topic: find a review paper in a journal that is (a) relevant to the question and (b) in the top quartile of journals in that field by impact factor.

What a review paper does is summarize all the significant and contradictory evidence that has been published on a question. It's a convenient and highly efficient way to go straight to the horse's mouth on a question, rather than relying on scientifically illiterate reporters. Choosing a top journal by impact factor eliminates what are essentially vanity press publications where authors can pay to get whatever they want into a "scientific journal". When some anti-vaxxer crackpot cites "their science" it's always in one of these pay-for-play "predatory journals".

That applies to both sides.

Potentially, but not as much as you seem to think

When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation."

The problem is those responses are actually reasonably true. In a noisy data set like yearly temperatures, we expect there to be periods of slow temperature growth and periods of fast temperature growth due to short term variability so "that's not climate, that's weather" is true, 30 year averages are generally used to minimize year-to-year variability that can drown out the long term trend. We have had a confluence of natural factors working together to slow the surface air temperature growth over that period. Perhaps more importantly it's important to look at more than just the air temperature since the atmosphere only contains a small fraction of the heat content the earth can store.

Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today, it will be derisively dismissed.

That's a northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction, so it only covers half the world, and one of the authors of that paper, F. C. Ljungqvist, doesn't agree with your analysis:

Since AD 1990, though, average temperatures in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere exceed those of any other warm decades the last two millennia, even the peak of the Medieval Warm Period”

But then there are those on the same side who will mention a 20-100 year period because it suits their argument.

Potentially, but those are periods that are long enough to cancel out year-to-year variability, though, I can't actually remember seeing anyone use a period that was longer than 30 years. Maybe it's not that the period suits the argument but that when you look at periods longer than 20 years, the evidence strongly supports one side in this debate? If that's the case, then the people who look at and accept the evidence have little choice but to end up on the same side of this debate?

"He's talking about people who deny climate changed in the past twenty years, or even in the past 100."

That applies to both sides. When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation." Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today, it will be derisively dismissed.

But then there are those on the same side who will mention a 20-100 year period because it suits their argument.

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765...

More things of interest... that's showing about 1000 years ago we had similar temps in Greenland. It also shows that the current temperature trend we're on predated the heavy burning of fossil fuels by most of the world's population. It looks like the warming trend started around 1800.

The equilibrium CO2 concentration also depends on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and as that increases, so does the acidity of the ocean.

'm sorry, but the above is a very basic result from chemistry - typically something taught in high school. It's also something you experience in everyday live - a warm coke will go flat faster, but you also need some way to get the sparkle into the coke (by exposing it to CO2 at a very high partial pressure). This is not magic, it's basic physics and chemistry.

Hmmm... CO2 concentrations in liquid, sure. But what does that have to do with PH? You indicate that it's self-evident, but it's not to me. Maybe you can explain that relationship in high-school sciencey language. There are actually 3 different ways to measure PH, one of which is specific to ocean chemistry (the PH Seawater Scale - sws).

pH measures the concentration of H3O+, or, in simpler terms, the availability of free protons for reactions. Acids are substances that like losing a proton. The acid that causes acidification of our oceans (and sparkle in sodas and sparkling water) is carbonic acid, or CO2 dissolved in water. More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more CO2 dissolved in the water, which equals more carbonic acid and a lower pH. How you measure pH is an independent question.

I'm very hard trying to avoid ad-hominem.

No, it's not, actually. Especially in science (not the scientific community that is awash in politic, but the work of science it certainly is).

I think you misread my comment. I'm trying hard to avoid an ad-hominem attack on you while pointing out that the level of understanding you exhibit does not give the impression that you understand the principles of the issue.

Above, you admit that you do not fully understand basic high-school level chemistry.

Nice try. See above.

See what above?

What makes you think that you can understand graduate-level climate science papers?

I can't understand everything, certainly, but much of it is accessible to me. Much of it because I'm good at maths. And language.

Your Junk Science link discusses and mentions only one paper. It takes the results out of context and misrepresents the paper by conflating temperature-driven processes (including e.g. seasonal changes) with CO2 driven processes (which increase the base level the pH varies around. Junk Science also take results from one inland lake in Japan and extrapolates that to the worlds ocean - talk about unjustified extrapolation.

I think you are misreading it. They are using the data from the lake in Japan to demonstrate specific relationships. For 280,000 years. It's no more an extrapolation than "More CO2 increases the greenhouse effect." Physical properties are physical properties.

Who is "they"? The authors of the original paper or the operators of Junk Science? The original paper is here, and looking at the abstract, you can see that the interpretation at Hockeyschtick parroted at Junk Science is completely misleading, and basically has nothing to do with the paper.

At your second link, Sustainable Oregon , I fail to find a single link to a peer-reviewed paper. There may well be one, but if so it's carefully hidden among links to so-called think tank publications, denier blogs, and self-published (as opposed to scientific) opinion pieces.

Most of that is a review of the ONE study on ocean acidification that keeps getting quoted. And those reviews are

Can we skip the name calling in favor of some references, please?

So what do you want the deniers to be called? Gotta have some reference name.

Mann's initial investigation was regarding the infamous Hockey stick diagram.

There was broad and general support by the science community in the year's since. I'll include some citations of freely available work:

Really long url, so I provided a tinyurl

Stalagmite records http://tinyurl.com/m2yhtgl

Reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the last 11,300 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Millenial Temperature Reconstruction. http://www.clim-past.net/3/591...

Borehole heat flux data. http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu...

There is a lot more, but you might be able to do a little research after digesting this initial stuff.

After hackers stole the emails with the University of East Anglia, Penn State made two investigations of Mann. They cleared him of misconduct, but criticized him for sharing unpublished manuscripts.

Virginia Attorney Ken Cuccinelli, then Attorney General of Virginia (before this gets too contentious, yes, the Ken Cuccinelli that wants to make oral sex illegal) demanded that the University of Virginia release documentation of Mann's work via a Civill Investigation Demand.

The first demand was overruled by a judge. Cuccinelli revised his subpoena, and appealed to the State Supreme court. He lost there also, with the judgement that he had no authority to demand the work.

Note that Mann aided in the subsequent election efforts of Terry McCauliff, who was running against Cuccinelli in the 2013 Gubernatorial election.

Mann was investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the National Science foundation in 2011, and exhonorated Mann of any professional misconduct.

http://www.science20.com/uploa...

At this juncture, I doubt that those who would deny AGW will accept any evidence, and would simply accuse Penn State and the National Science Foundation of corruption or worse. Note that there are many who likewise think of that University as a tool of the energy industry. Some interesting irony there.

Cuccinelli's failure to subpoena University of Virginia's records is probably the groundwork for claims that Mann refuses to share data with others. However, a pretty compelling case can be made that it was blatant politicizing of science.

Furthermore, Mann's campaigning for Cucchinelli no doubt really raised some hackles. Pretty much all out war. I suspect Mann would say he is just fighting back against those who have made it a mission to destroy him.

Feel free to read any one of the scientific papers on how the temperatures in Europe were equal to or higher than todays ~1000 years ago.

(And, for that matter, ~2000 and ~3000 years ago as well. You'll know these as the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period)

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.html
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/26/0959683612460791.abstract
http://www.wsl.ch/fe/landschaftsdynamik/dendroclimatology/Publikationen/Esper_etal.2012_GPC

Or just deny the science and, like the article, repeat activist mantras - no matter the factual content.

Thanks for the links filled with zero summary and loads of waffle. Now that I've read all that dreary shit, I feel like I'm in a much better position to compare the very well documented death rates that appeared nowhere in the abundance of bullshit you just linked, with the ones we experience today.

Feel free to read any one of the scientific papers on how the temperatures in Europe were equal to or higher than todays ~1000 years ago.

(And, for that matter, ~2000 and ~3000 years ago as well. You'll know these as the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period)

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.html
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/26/0959683612460791.abstract
http://www.wsl.ch/fe/landschaftsdynamik/dendroclimatology/Publikationen/Esper_etal.2012_GPC

Or just deny the science and, like the article, repeat activist mantras - no matter the factual content.

Greenland has never had significantly less ice than it has now in at least 6 or 7 thousand years

For various definitions of "significant", of course. In this context we're comparing today and the MWP.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/voyage/subset/greenland/archeo.html

I live in Scandinavia and as far as we're concerned the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period were warmer than we are currently. Thus, likely less ice in Greenland as well.

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.html

http://www.wsl.ch/fe/landschaftsdynamik/dendroclimatology/Publikationen/Esper_etal.2012_GPC

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/26/0959683612460791.abstract