TRIGGER OPTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE !

Actually, I've been blogging all this month that AWG ( Anthropogenic Global Warming ) is a disinformation scam designed to panic people into an international tax system. Dec 4 opitslinkfest.blogspot.com is where I started, and I thought the Global Research site I previously posted would add much more.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=newsHighlights&newsId=24

Yep, not sure people would be inclined to shag something like this ;)

… and ice ages have a better claim on being the natural state of Earth’s climate than interglacials. This next graph, for the longest period, we have to go to an Antarctic core...

From the perspective of the Holocene as a whole, our current hockeystick is beginning to look pretty dinky. By far the possibility I would worry about, if I were the worrying sort, would be the return to an ice age — since interglacials, over the past half million years or so, have tended to last only 10,000 years or so. And Ice ages are not conducive to agriculture.

In fact for the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean. If it lasts.

Well, no — over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.

Yes, Virginia, there was a Medieval Warm Period, in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that — that’s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all. And the following Little Ice Age is what killed them off, and caused widespread crop failures (and the consequent burning of witches) across Europe. But was the MWP itself unusual?

Well, whaddaya know — a hockey stick. In fact, the “blade” continues up in the 20th century at least another half a degree. But how long is the handle? How unprecedented is the current warming trend?

Hockey stick through ice core data OK

One thing that Climategate does is give us an opportunity to step back from the details of the AGW argument and say, maybe these are heat-of-the-moment stuff, and in the long run will look as silly as the Durants’ allergy to Eisenhower. And perhaps, if we can put climate arguments in perspective, it will allow us to put the much smaller nano arguments (pun intended) into perspective too.

So let’s look at some ice.

I’m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.

So what does it tell us about, say, the past 500 years? (the youngest datum is age=0.0951409 (thousand years before present) — perhaps younger snow doesn’t work so well?):

MEANWILE BACK AT MINDFUCK INC. CENTRAL...

1.5% – Percentage of overall coverage devoted to the environment in 2009
http://mediachannel.org/blog/2009/12/global-warming-generates-little-heat-in-the...

The period from November 30-December 6, 2009, produced one of the largest weeks of environmental coverage since PEJ began tracking it in January 2007. And it wasn’t that big a number.

The topic accounted for 2.5% of the newshole, with attention focused on the UN Climate Summit and emails from the research center that some contended pointed to possible manipulation of climate data and generated an outcry from global warming skeptics.

The next biggest spikes in coverage in the past three years included the week of April 1-6, 2007, (5.3% of the newshole) when the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had the authority to regulate car emissions, and the week of January 28-February 2, 2007, when a UN climate report found that humans were very likely the cause of climate change (4.9%).

Still, it’s worth noting that in no single week, has the environment generated the level of attention (6.4% of newshole) that the Tiger Woods scandal attracted last week.

“A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.” - Umberto Eco