AGW scientists keep using that word, “Unprecedented” …

The Anthropogenic Global Warming cult thinks they have come up with the latest Earth shattering research paper that will finally convince skeptics that we should convert to the cult, worship at the altar of Al Gore and read from the holy texts consisting on Peer Reviewed literature.

The paper is behind a pay wall but the highlights of the paper can be found in this NPR story:

“It has put together a record of global temperatures going back to the end of the last ice age — about 11,000 years ago — when mammoths and saber-tooth cats roamed the planet. The study confirms that what we’re seeing now is unprecedented.”

“Shaun Marcott, a geologist at Oregon State University, says “global temperatures are warmer than about 75 percent of anything we’ve seen over the last 11,000 years or so.” The other way to look at that is, 25 percent of the time since the last ice age, it’s been warmer than now.”

“Here’s what happened. After the end of the ice age, the planet got warmer. Then, 5,000 years ago, it started to get cooler — but really slowly. In all, it cooled 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, up until the last century or so. Then it flipped again — global average temperature shot up.”

“Temperatures now have gone from that cold period to the warm period in just 100 years,” Marcott says.”

So what the AGW scientists are saying in this new paper is that global temperatures, over the past 11,000 years, have gone through a cycle of gradual cooling and then followed by a rapid warming.  According to the NPR story and the AGW scientists, this rapid increase in temperature is “unprecedented.”

Before I address the “unprecedented” claim, it’s worth noting how the scientists came to this conclusion.  Scientists can’t go back and look at temperature data kept by wooly mammoths so they had to use a proxy.  Proxies are physical pieces of evidence that can be used as substitutes for actual thermometer readings and there are many proxies in the climate scientist’s tool bag – tree rings, ice cores, fossils, coral, ocean sediments, etc.

So what proxy did the scientists use to gather this temperature data?  From the NPR story:

“The research team tracked temperature by studying chemicals in the shells of tiny, fossilized sea creatures called foraminifera.”

This is a new one for me and I find it hard believe we can reconstruct global temperatures for 11,000 years from tiny, fossilized sea creatures but since I can’t read the full paper, I’ll assume these climate scientists are telling the truth.  My issue with this paper is not the method they used but their claim that this recent, rapid warming is “unprecedented.”

Forget 11,000 years of temperature records, in 1999 there was another proxy discovered that produced over 400,000 years of temperature records for the continent of Antarctica.  That proxy is called the Vostok Ice Cores and from this link you can see how scientists can analyze these cores to determine temperatures as well as atmospheric CO2 concentrations and pinpoint when major volcanic eruptions occurred.  Fascinating stuff!  Just one of the many reasons I love science!

I grabbed the Vostok Ice Core Data and graphed the temperature history below and added a couple of annotation arrows:

You’ll notice something interesting about this data.  For the past 400,000 years the cooling trend (Blue arrow) has been gradual, encompassing about 75,000 years, and then the warming trend (Green arrow) has been steep, encompassing about 5,000 years.

Well that totally shoots a hole in the AGW scientist claim that recent gradual cooling followed by rapid warming is “unprecedented!”  I would’ve thought that these scientists would not make claims based on a small timeframe when other data is readily available over a much larger timeframe.  But then again, these AGW cult members are all about cherry picking their data to support their lies.

Also notice that the temperature deltas 125,000 and 325,000 years ago are higher than we are seeing right now!  “Unprecedented!”

I’ll leave you with a final quote from the NPR story from one of the AGW cult cardinals, Dr. Gavin Schmidt:

“The climate changes to come are going to be larger than anything that human civilization and agriculture has seen in its entire existence,” says Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “And that is quite a sobering thought.”

Hucksters like Dr. Schmidt are still being paid to push their snake oil and the State Run Media is all too willing to give them a microphone.  That is also “quite a sobering thought.”