Climate change? It's all hockeysticks!

The hockey stick is back to prove beyond peradventure by analysing climate change over 13,000 years that we are definitely getting warmer.

 

Temperatures have only been recorded since 1863, so how do they know?

 

Well, it seems that they have been examining the rings of tree trunks. I didn’t know trees grew to that age but obviously they do, and to get hard evidence they must have examined thousands of them from all over the world. You learn something new every day!

 

The hockey stick , as published in the New Scientist, shows gradual warming up to medieval times then a downwards trend, what NS calls a ‘downwards drift’ .

 

From then until  about the 18^th Century the earth was cooling very rapidly. This is what the NS says:

‘The gradual drift before the 19th century was driven by changes in Earth's axis of rotation: the planet's tilt increased early in the Holocene before decreasing again. It sort of wobbles. A greater tilt leads to more sunlight at the poles in summer, and this keeps the planet warmer.

If humans had not begun warming the planet by releasing greenhouse gases, Earth would eventually return to an ice age. If we were following the orbital trend we'd still be cooling’.

 

It looks to me as if there was not ‘gradual drift’ but a pronounced drop from medieval times onwards which is borne out by history, such as constant crop failures and the Thames freezing over. Then came the Industrial Revolution which created vast amounts of atmospheric carbon which stopped the Ice Age in its tracks.

 

Latest trends show that there has been no discernible change in earth temperature over the last decade, but its seems that if the warmists have their way it is going to get very chilly out there.