…they are very harsh on anyone who disagrees with them. ie: (links to HT articles criticising NBR and cranks testifying to the ETS review)

I am harsh on people who should know (or perhaps do know) the facts misrepresenting them for political purposes. Facts is facts, what you do with them is where the politics is.

The Baliunas and Soon paper has been thoroughly discredited. Get over it. My point of view on it is irrelevant, it didn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. See Osborn and Briffa (2006) for instance :

“The most significant and longest duration feature during the last 1200 years is the geographical extent of warmth in the middle to late 20th century. Positive anomalies during 890 to 1170 and negative anomalies during 1580 to 1850 are consistent with the concepts of a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age, but comparison with instrumental temperatures shows the spatial extent of recent warmth to be of greater significance than that during the medieval period.”

This thread is going nowhere because, we already know that current warming caused by humans is anomalous in the recent historical record. That’s what the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed climate research tells us. You just happen to be in denial.

Meanwhile out in the real world the big melt continues………..

The fact of its funding aside, here’s the clincher:

Under their method, warmth in China in 850, drought in Africa in 1000, and wet conditions in England in 1200 all would qualify as part of the Medieval Warm Period, even though they happened centuries apart.

When you say authors of papers cited of course one of those is Michael Manne, whose paper they cited in order to disprove it.

Does it surprise me that Michael Manne disagrees with the paper? Well not really considering it disagrees with everything he has released. But then Michael Manne is a high priest of AGW, he runs a website specifically for the purpose of hyping up global warming fears and producing scathing reviews of any non-alarmist work, he is clearly not neutral.

The reaction also does not surprise me, global warming alarmists are aware that the argument is weak and they are very harsh on anyone who disagrees with them. ie:

http://hot-topic.co.nz/time-to-worry-nbr-editor-lacks-insight-on-climate-change/
http://hot-topic.co.nz/hows-about-telling-a-story/

As for working for big oil, give me a break. Do you think they would be funded by Greanpeace? They need to get money for there research from somewhere, and due to all the fearmongering going-on on websites like this one most organisations wouldn’t go near anything unorthodox. Sorry the study disagrees with your point of view.

Any way I’ll let you get the last word, I’m done with this thread, going no where.

You mean the Baliunas & Soon 2003 paper?. You’re relying on that?. Oh, dear. The one processed by Chris De Freitas??. Oh, dear, dear, dear. In fact the “paper” is a good example of the peer-review process working properly, it was soundly debunked by the climate science community because it was a load of old cobblers. Some reading from one of the former editorial staff of the journal Climate Research:

http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm

Note the following Wikipedia entry on the fallout from that “study”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Baliunas#cite_note-12

I highlight the following:

“With Soon, Baliunas investigated the correlation between solar variation and temperatures of the earth’s atmosphere. When there are more sunspots, the total solar output increases, and when there are fewer sunspots, it decreases. Soon and Baliunas attribute the Medieval warm period to such an increase in solar output, and believe that decreases in solar output led to the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling from which the earth has been recovering since 1890.[11]
Shortly thereafter, 13 of the authors of papers cited by Baliunas and Soon refuted her interpretation of their work.[12] There were three main objections: Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric temperature anomalies; and they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends. More recently, Osborn and Briffa repeated the Baliunas and Soon study but restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies, and came to a different result.[13]”

Whoops, sounds like r2d2 has latched on to a couple of idiots. Dude note who one of the sponsors of that study were – The American Petroleum Institute. Doh!.

Congratulations, you got something right. Church bells are ringing all over town. Geriatrics everywhere are punching their fists in the air. Baliunas is a classic example of a fossil fuel stooge.

- Between December 1998[1] and September 2001[2] she was listed as a “Scientific Adviser” to the Greening Earth Society, a group that was funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association (WFA), an association of coal-burning utility companies – (Sourcewatch)

- She serves as Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, DC, and chairs the Institute’s Science Advisory Board – (Wikipedia/Marshall Institute). She is a former board member of the institute. And it just so happens that this is one of those “think tanks” sponsored by Exxon Mobil (amongst others).

Baliunas has written climate denial articles for, and was co-host of TCS daily an online magazine owned at the time by a republican lobby firm DCI group. Once again, one of the sponsors was Exxon Mobil. (sourcewatch/neoconeurope/wikipedia ).

Willie Soon is out of the same denialist mold. Green earthing Society, Western Fuels, Exxon Mobil, yada, yada, yada.

It is the only possible explanation. – Roger Dewhurst.

Bingo!!!!!

Man, some of the comments by Baliunas in particular regarding climate are just comical.

First of all it has two temperature splices hiding the results:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/m08.jpg

Second, it only shows 20th century warming, and does not show how this compares to previous warming (The; “NH CPS without Tree Rings vs CRU series”, doesn’t actually show late 20th century warming).

http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/MannetalPNAS08.pdf

Then the study proceeds to display the standard ‘spaghetti graph’, where it takes 10 min just to work out what lines go all the way back and what ones stop half way.

When I do look closely,
- Modberg et el 2005 shows comparable warming
– Others do show warming above the MWP, but most of these don’t go back themselves. It is simply very hard to interpret these graphs. Lines over lines – spaghetti.

Show me one proxy. Or a series on different graphs that can be compared the was D’Andrea did. That is why I like it – it is easy to interpret. This is a reconstruction, I have no idea about the statistical method they used, and I’m not afraid to admit that.

But anyway, before you got off onto all sorts of topics, we were talking about the conclusions of Mann in 1999.

Maybe read this:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/1000yrclimatehistory-d/Jan30-ClimateResearchpaper.pdf

Covers ‘the science’. And gives plenty of references for you to look into.

Shows that:
a) LIA was worldwide
b) MWP was worldwide
c) Today is about the same as MWP