Hockey Stick : Still Sticking

Welcome to the slightly revised and updated Hockey Stick :-

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/08/a_new_hockey_stick_mcshane_and.php

Yes, the Earth’s temperature is warming at a very fast pace. No, even though the statistical models here may be a little questionable, the graph still looks the same, more or less, to the sterling work of Michael Mann et al. (et al. = et alia = “and the others”).

Quelle surprise…pas !

(I included a little French in here because Steve McIntyre, the most infamous Global Warming septic…oops, sorry, “sceptic”…nooo, “skeptic”… is Canadian, a famously bilingual country, or rather a country with a bilingual state, but I’m not implying that “bilingual” means “speaking with forked tongue”).

http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/16/hockey-stick-paper-mcshane-and-wyner-statisticians/

The Rate of Change

I well remember the huffing and puffing over the release of James Hansen’s paper “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” :-

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

“…Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 425 +/- 75 ppm…”

The sceptic-deniers laughed and scoffed and said things to the effect that clearly there’s nothing to worry about that the current concentration of Carbon Dioxide in the air is over 390 parts per million – it won’t melt the polar ice caps.

What the sceptic-deniers haven’t understood, or pretend not to have understood, is that it is a combination of factors that caused major lasting glaciation on Earth. Yes, the level of Carbon Dioxide in the air is important. But the rate of change of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is a significant component.

If the levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere change rapidly, the heating or cooling effect is amplified, in effect. You have to take account of the relative change in levels of Carbon Dioxide, not just its level at any particular point in time.

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