No, It’s Not About The Hockey Stick

Peter Sinclair has released another excellent video about climate change science, this time about the simplistic view some have that all global warming science has its foundation on the hockey stick.

There’s a persistent delusion out there, that you hear a lot from people who should know better – that global warming boils down to a simple minded correlation between temperature graphs and CO2 rise.  Climate deniers are sure this is true, and that if they just attack the most famous temperature graph, Mike Mann’s “Hockey Stick”, they can knock down the whole thing.

But our understanding of climate is, of course, based not on a graph, but on the radiative properties of greenhouse gases – which have been well known for 150 years, and got seriously nailed during the 1950s when the US government was working on building heat-seeking missiles that had to pick out long wave radiation at all altitudes in the atmosphere.  We realized that CO2 was blocking heat – and as Richard Alley points out here, that means something.

What The Ice Cores Tell Us, And How Deniers Distort It

“Sceptics” often cite ice core data to make a point along the lines that current warming isn’t a problem and is within normal climate variability. And often they cite research papers and data to prove this point.

However almost every single time they display temperature records out of context, and more often than not come to entirely different conclusions than are in the research paper or is held by the author(s). One of the websites that’s notorious for this is the website Watts Up With That (WUWT).

One of these examples is a research paper on the Greenland Ice Sheet by Dr Richard Alley, who has publicly said that this is not what his research shows.

Cheers for Greenman3610 for making another excellent Climate Debunking Video.