Thursday, January 31, 2008

Medieval Warm Period

I was looking at NOAA's page on the medieval warm period today, and it suddenly struck me that I can't think of any medievalists who are skeptics about the medieval warm period. NOAA's claims about this are a little odd, carefully parsing the language to say that "there was no multi-century periods [sic] when global or hemispheric temperatures were the same or warmer than in the 20th century." How do the last few decades of the 20th Century qualify as a multi-century period? Looking at the abstract of the article they cite as their source for medieval warm period skepticism, it would appear that the authors would suggest the data is insufficient to be conclusive -- which isn't exactly how NOAA presents it.

There have GOT to be medievalists who are medieval warm period skeptics ... can anyone point me to scholarly articles that support NOAA's claim? Or is the consensus so strong that NOAA is ignoring the evidence contradicting their model that there really aren't medieval warm period skeptics among medievalists?

2 comments:

  1. They're making their claim based on the "hockey stick," which is the result of some kind of mathematical analysis of tree rings, ice cores, and other measurements believed to be proxies for temperatures.

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  2. Thanks a lot for this post. It's cool!

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