Besides that, I’ve often seen AGW cheerleaders citing studies with starting points in the 1970’s – when the same types of alarmists were worried about an impending ice age. It certainly wasn’t as cold as the 1850’s, but the winter of 1977-78 had several of the worst snowstorms I’ve seen in my life – which includes about 33 years in Minnesota and northern Michigan. Now, when it’s satellite infrared temperature readings, you’ve got to start in the 1970’s because the first satellites were launched then, and when it’s ground-level thermometer readings, you can’t go back further than the Little Ice Age because that’s when thermometers were invented, but I’ve also seen especially cold starting years picked for no apparent reason.

Aside from the obvious one, that is…

Good point about the Vikings in Greenland.

a great deal of the warming trend currently debated has to do with the choice of the starting point around 1850. this choice has more to do with the spread of reliable thermometers than with and good scientific rationale. it also happened to coincide with the deep part of the so called “little ice age” which was the coldest period in the last 9000 years. is using that point to anchor a mere 150 years of data reasonable? probably not. it skews the results significantly.

we are now approximately 1 degree below the levels of medieval times, a generally prosperous time when civilization progressed rapidly due, at least in part, to agricultural plenty and a stable climate. the same was true of the roman warming of 200bc to 600ad, which had similar temperatures. neither one attained the high temperatures of the Holocene maximum (when the arctic was 5 degrees C warmer than currently), which persisted for 3000 years.

there is conspicuous evidence that the “unprecedented shrinkage of glaciers” on Greenland and in Europe has ample precedent within fairly recent periods. how else can one explain the ruins of Viking villages emerging from beneath the Greenland ice sheets as they pull back around the edges of the landmass? surely no one is arguing that the Vikings built churches in ice caves… there are many analogous finds in Europe where farms and mines have been emerging from the ice around the edges of some retreating glaciers.

if we go back further, the downtrend in temperature becomes more pronounced. 5 million year temperature is in a clear downtrend. the same is true of 65 million year temperature. paleoclimatologists speak of a “gradually intensifying ice age”. the antarctic reglaciated about 13 million years ago. ice at the poles deepens ice ages. so the ice age deepens.

looked at in a truly long timeframe of 550 million years, we are currently experience temperatures within the lowest 5% of all those experienced since the emergence of multi-cellular life on earth.

and we are worried about it getting too hot?

we are at a temperature cooler than that experienced by the medieval kings and roman emperors. it is much cooler than the 3000 year climate optimum that saw the emergence of civilization as we think of it. many historians have argued that the higher temperatures were what allowed this to happen.

many of those proclaiming the urgency of the need to address current warming seem to believe that climate never changed before we started messing with it 150 years ago. nothing unusually is going on here. climate is constantly in flux. we are well within historical patterns here. wine was grown in london. northern greenland was covered in boreal forest.

surely, we must have something more important to worry about.

Not trying to be a wise guy, but I write for the local paper and intend to write about this.