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Global Warming Brings Better Wine
Makarand writes "According to this article in the SF Chronicle climatologists have a found a link
between the warming environment and wine quality.
They found that
most vintages improved as vineyards' temperatures rose over the past 50 years with the quality improvement more pronounced in the cooler wine-producing regions." I wonder how wine fared during the "Little Ice Age."
Please! Keep up with the news. The Global Warming Theory has been debunked by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.
I like the National Review's comparison of Michael Mann to ex-professor Michael Bellesiles, who was striped of his tenure because of historical fraud.
"The fundamental scientific pillars of the Kyoto Accord is based on flawed calculations, incorrect data and a biased selection of climate records."
The corrected graph of Earth's thermal history http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/no-hockey.gif
QUOTE: Steve McIntyre and University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick, obtained the original data used by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia to support the notion that the 20th-century temperature rise was unprecedented in the past millennium. A detailed audit revealed numerous errors in the data. After correcting these and updating the source records they showed that based on Mann's own methodologies, his original conclusion was flawed. Mann's original version resulted in the famous "hockey stick" graph that purported to show 900 years of relative temperature stability (the shaft of the hockey stick) followed by a sharp increase (the blade) in the 20th century (see graph). The corrected version of the last thousand years actually contradicts the view promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and removes the foundation for claims of 20th-century uniqueness.
To understand the significance of the McIntyre/McKitrick announcement, it is important to consider how our understanding of long-term climate history has evolved over the past decade. In its 1990 and 1995 "Assessment Reports", the IPCC clearly identified two major global climatic events in the past millennium, as confirmed by thousands of papers written by quaternary geologists during the past century -- a "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) from about 800 to 1300 A.D. that was as much as two degrees Celsius warmer than today, and a far colder "Little Ice Age" (LIA) from about 1300 to 1900 A.D. The effects of these events were felt worldwide with convincing evidence of both the MWP and LIA found in Europe, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, Peru and even in China, Japan and Australia. As part of our emergence from the LIA, scientists agreed there had been a gradual warming throughout the 20th century, although the reasons for this were hotly contested with increasing greenhouse gases (GHG) and changes in the output of the sun being leading contenders.
In recent years, however, the case for solar variations being the 20th century's major climate driver has become much stronger, much to the consternation of Kyoto supporters. After all, if long before human-induced GHG emission became significant, temperatures were considerably higher than today, there would be little reason to think today's temperatures were anything unnatural. This was especially true since long-term solar records indicated that both the MWP and LIA were closely correlated with changes in solar activity, and the output of the sun has indeed been increasing during the past century's 0.6C warming. Supporters of the GHG-induced warming hypothesis desperately needed a "smoking gun" to prop up the need for Kyoto.
This was conveniently supplied by Mann, Bradley and Hughes in their 1998 paper (referred to as "MBH98") in which they reduced the MWP and LIA to non-events outside Europe and unveiled their "hockey stick." The paper concluded, "Our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence."
Of course, Kyoto fans were delighted. Despite being at odds with most of the scientific literature, and the fact that the MBH98 study was only one of thousands of possible millennial temperature constructions, advocates of the GHG hypothesis of climate change started to promote Mann's results as the definitive global temperature history. Within a year, with little real