This is bound to send the Warminists into a frenzy.

Now I just though it would be a good idea to pre-empt my warminist friends, who are bound to cite this report, and look at some of what it says with particular emphasis on how much this is conjecture and speculation.

1. It’s likely the southern hemisphere is also warmer than ever although data is sketchier, claim US and British scientists.
2. While the new research also concluded that the so-called Medieval warmth from 950-1100 was hotter than previously thought, the last decade was hotter still.
3. “The findings deeply reinforce the incontrovertible conclusion that we are warming rapidly outside natural variability,” said climiate(sic) scientist Andy Pitman, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW.
4. The new findings come from a team led by Michael E. Mann, director of the Environmental Systems Institute at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
5. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they reported that they’d pulled together the largest ever set of climate data, enabling them to assess changes on decadal and centennial scales.
6. Associate Professor Mann and his colleagues used “natural climate archives” like tree-rings, corals and ice cores, along with historical documentary records and recently updated instrumental data to reconstruct the climate of past centures(sic) in unprecedented detail and compare it with existing conditions.
7. “Our results extend previous conclusions that recent northern hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context,” they claimed.

I have added number points to the quote above for clarity in my response and I will address each in turn.

1. This is of course conjecture based upon no empirical evidence at all when they say the data is sketchier what they really mean is that there is NO DATA AT ALL.
2. While those of us who are sceptical about the claims of the warminists often cite the existence of a medieval warm period which is derived from the historical record. Very little data exists about just how much warmer it actually was exists. That can only be speculated and guessed at from very unreliable sources. This is why the warminists were able to suggest that the MWP could be excluded from their climate reconstructions when it’s very existence was an impediment to their graphs used to argue that GHG were responsible for global warming. The Irony of this piece is that it is about new research by Michael Mann( who was the creator of the now infamous Hockey stick graph which deleted the “inconvenient” MWP). Now he is suggesting that it was hotter than he thought.
3. If a conclusion is “incontrovertible” this means that it is beyond challenge, yet here we have a scientist who is telling us that the theory needs to be “deeply reinforce(d)” i do wish that those who purport to deal in empirical truth would pay more attention to the language that they use when making claims about the science
4. Does this report from Michael Mann now mean that he acknowledges the existence of the Medieval Warm Period, an existence that he so (dare I say it) hotly denied in his infamous hockey stick graph?
5. This sounds very impressive doesn’t it? but when you come to the next sentence you will see that it is not really that substantial after all.
6. We are back to our old friend PROXY DATA and that is very problematic indeed when it comes to empirically measuring what the weather was like in the past this is all rather like trying to work out a recipe for a grand banquet from the washed plates that are neatly stacked in the back of the caterers van many years after the event the room for doubt about the result is very large indeed at best it is conjecture based on a few hints from the size and type of plates in the van , but we just don’t even know for if they are the very same plates used at the great feast. In the modern sciences we are blessed with sensitive instruments, satellites and machines that can “crunch the numbers” which is good for describing what we are seeing NOW in the chaotic maelstrom that is our planets climate but we have only the vaguest idea of what the paelo-climate was actually like by comparison.
7. The word I emboldened here is one that will be missed or ignored by the most ardent warminists because it functions as admission that this claim is all speculation based upon conjecture which is based on some tiny snippets of very second-hand empirical information that may or may not mean what they think it means. In other words that they really do not know with any substantial level of surety at all.

As anyone can see this report is very big on conjecture and very poor on measurable fact but then that is the warminist liturgy all over.

Cheers Comrades