One of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult lies was revealed last month and yesterday we saw another one exposed.  From a recent NPR story we see that there is a new paper published in Nature that shows prior warming in the Antarctic Peninsula equivalent to what we see today. 

“Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. But a new study finds that the story isn’t quite so simple.”

“There’s no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice. But a lingering question is whether these events can be attributed to human-induced global warming.”

“To probe that question, Robert Mulvaney and colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey drilled down 364 meters (more than 1,000 feet) and collected an ice core that tells the story of heating and cooling along the Antarctic Peninsula over the past 50,000 years.”

“Mulvaney says the sharp warming trend we’re seeing now is quite unusual but not entirely unique.”

“In the last 2,000 years there was another period around about the 1500s where we also saw a warming about similar to the rate of today,” he says, but the temperature cooled again. “And then at about 400 A.D., we also saw not quite as great a warming there as well, but then it cooled again.”

Remember that the AGW cult has said that Antarctic Ice sheets falling off into the ocean was due to human caused global warming.

“The western chunk of Antarctica is losing 23 feet of its floating ice sheet each year. Until now, scientists weren’t exactly sure how it was happening and whether or how man-made global warming might be a factor. The answer, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is that climate change plays an indirect role — but one that has larger repercussions than if Antarctic ice were merely melting from warmer air.”

“Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, said research using an ice-gazing NASA satellite showed that warmer air alone couldn’t explain what was happening to Antarctica. A more detailed examination found a chain of events that explained the shrinking ice shelves.”

“Twenty ice shelves showed signs that they were melting from warm water below. Changes in wind currents pushed that relatively warmer water closer to and beneath the floating ice shelves. The wind change is likely caused by a combination of factors, including natural weather variation, the ozone hole and man-made greenhouse gases, Pritchard said in a phone interview.”

But this recent paper shows that similar Antarctic melting occurred over the past 2000 years so our ancestors must have been driving around in SUV’s when the Roman Empire fell and during the time when Europe was awaking from the Dark Ages.  How else could global temperatures have risen to the point where massive ice sheets were breaking off in Antarctica?

The Mulvaney paper isn’t the first global temperature reconstruction to show prior instances where Earth warmed to similar temperatures that we observe today.  In 2008, Loehle and McCulloch assembled a temperature reconstruction for the past 2,000 years for the northern hemisphere.

“Loehle and McCulloch (LM, submitted to Energy and Environment as a correction to Loehle 2007) construct a Global Temperature Reconstruction for 16AD – 1935 AD based on 18 peer-reviewed published non-treering proxy series.”

Here is the graph from their reconstruction showing annual temperature anomalies (The blue line shows the average of the data and the red lines show the 95% confidence intervals):

The high temperature anomalies between 900 and 1200 AD occurred during the medieval warming period when Vikings migrated to Greenland and cultivated farms in that area that is currently engulfed in ice and this period was followed by the Little Ice Age which we are still exiting. 

So one must come to the conclusion that there must be forces driving the Earth’s climate other than the mighty CO2 molecules that comprise roughly 400 parts per million in our atmosphere.  Maybe it’s that large yellow orb in the sky.