Face off; enuf sticks for a whole league.
Mike Mann: First Look at AR5 September 27, 2013
As some readers may know, the conclusion that modern warming is unique in a long-term context came to prominence with the temperature reconstruction that my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s. The resulting “Hockey Stick” curve, which demonstrates that the modern warming spike is without precedent for at least the past 1,000 years, took on iconic significance when it was prominently displayed in the “Summary for Policy Makers” of the 2001 Third IPCC Assessment report. Thus, the “Hockey Stick” curve, as I describe in my recent book, “ The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars,” became a focal point of the attacks by industry-funded climate-change deniers.
So, it might not come as a surprise that one of the most egregious misrepresentations of the IPCC’s latest report involves the Hockey Stick and conclusions about the uniqueness of modern warming. [ 4 Things to Know About the IPCC's Climate Change Report]
An urban legend seems to be circulating around the echo chamber of climate-change denial, including contrarian blogs and fringe right-wing news sites. The claim is that the IPCC has “dropped” or “trashed” the Hockey Stick conclusion regarding the unprecedented nature of recent warmth.
A good rule of thumb is that the more insistent climate-change deniers are about any particular talking point, the greater the likelihood is that the opposite of what they are claiming actually holds. The IPCC has, in fact, actually strengthened its conclusions regarding the exceptional nature of modern warmth in the new report. A highlighted box in the “Summary for Policy Makers” states the following (emphasis mine):
In the northern Hemisphere, the period 1983-2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years (medium confidence).
The original 1999 Hockey Stick study (and the 2001 Third IPCC Assessment report) concluded that recent Northern Hemisphere average warmth was likely unprecedented for only the past 1,000 years. The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment extended that conclusion back further, over the past 1,300 years (and it raised the confidence to “very likely” for the past 400 years). The new, Fifth IPCC Assessment has now extended the conclusion back over the past 1,400 years. By any honest reading, the IPCC has thus now substantially strengthened and extended the original 1999 Hockey Stick conclusions.
Only in the “up is down, black is white” bizarro world of climate-change denial could one pretend that the IPCC has failed to confirm the original Hockey Stick conclusions, let alone contradict them. [ How Words Affect Climate Change Perception]
The stronger conclusions in the new IPCC report result from the fact that there is now a veritable hockey league of reconstructions that not only confirm, but extend, the original Hockey Stick conclusions. This recent RealClimate piece summarizes some of the relevant recent work in this area, including a study published by the international PAGES 2k team in the journal Nature Geoscience just months ago. This team of 78 regional experts from more than 60 institutions representing 24 countries, working with the most extensive paleoclimate data set yet, produced the most comprehensive Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction to date. One would be hard-pressed, however, to distinguish their new series from the decade-and-a-half-old Hockey Stick reconstruction of Mann, Bradley and Hughes.
Conclusions about unprecedented recent warmth apply to the average temperature over the Northern Hemisphere. Individual regions typically depart substantially from the average. Thus, while most regions were cooler than present during the medieval era, some were as warm, or potentially even warmer, than the late-20th-century average. These regional anomalies result from changes in atmospheric wind patterns associated with phenomena such as El Niño and the so-called North Atlantic Oscillation. [ U.S. Will Warm Dramatically By 2084, NASA Model Shows (Video)]
Colleagues and I, quoting from the abstract of our own article in the journal Science a few years ago (emphasis mine), stated:
Global temperatures are known to have varied over the past 1,500 years, but the spatial patterns have remained poorly defined. We used a global climate proxy network to reconstruct surface-temperature patterns over this interval. The medieval period [A.D. 950-1250] isfound to display warmth that matches or exceeds that of the past decade in some regions, but which falls well below recent levels globally.
These conclusions from our own recent work are accurately represented by the associated discussion in the “Summary for Policy Makers” of the new IPCC report (emphasis mine):
Continental-scale surface-temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950-1250) that were, in some regions, as warm as inthe late 20th century. These regional warm periods did not occur as coherently across regions as the warming in the late 20th century(high confidence).
However, never underestimate the inventiveness of climate-change deniers. Where there’s a will, there is, indeed, a way: A meme now circulating throughout the denialosphere is that the IPCC’s conclusions about regional warmth contradict our findings, despite the fact that those conclusions are substantially based on our findings.
One could be excused for wondering if climate-change deniers have lost all sense of irony.
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