In weighing in on Climaquiddick today, Walter Williams helpfully homes in on the Medieval Warm Period:
The e-mails involved communication among climate researchers and policy advocates around the world who brazenly discuss both the destruction and hiding of data that does not support their global-warming claims. They discuss criminally deleting data rather than comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. There’s also discussion of faking data for journals such as Nature, conspiring to keep opposing science out of peer-reviewed journals (which they controlled the editorial boards), and using statistical “tricks” to hide the cooling period of the last 10 years. One e-mail said, “The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Another said, “it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP,’ even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back.” MWP refers to the Medieval Warm Period (800 A.D. to 1300 A.D.) when the Earth was much warmer than it is now. This bothers the global warmers because they can’t blame the temperature increase a thousand years ago on SUVs, coal-burning power plants, incandescent bulbs and 60-inch TV screens.
Interestingly, Al Gore reassured Slate yesterday that the MWP was “included in the scientific consensus.” Really, Al? Which consensus is that?
Here’s an old CRU paleoclimate reconstruction from Hubert Lamb (first director of the CRU), which appeared in the 1990 IPCC report:
Of course, that was before the AGW funding frenzy. Here’s the Mann hockey stick reconstruction, which Al used in An Inconvenient Truth (a title which seems to apply to the MWP):
Of course, Al also tells Slate that all the CRU e-mails are ten years old. Uh, . . .