Borepatch links to one of his golden oldies (from 2011, no less) that’s just chock-full of fascinating stuff.
We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D. We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further – pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic records all the way back to 1250 A.D. (!). The reason is that bread is the staff of life – no bread, and people starved.
In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers. Certainly better than, say, bristle cone pine tree rings. This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the “Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia” theory.
First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years. William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this, back around 1800. When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low – harvests are good. When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.
Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years. You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.
To understand why this is so incredibly bad for the warmist crowd, you need to compare and contrast with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (Carbon Dioxide heating the planet). The theoretical underpinning of AGW predicts a warm zone in the mid-Troposphere (say, 8 miles up or so) in the tropics. Essentially, this is a heat pump that cycles captured heat from the increased Greenhouse effect down to lower atmospheric levels (rather than radiating out to space).
The only problem is that with maybe a million weather balloons looking for the hot spot, nobody’s found it.
BP carries on from there, and it’s…well, like I said, it’s fascinating. Among other notable things, the piece utterly demolishes the persistent shitlib tomfoolery insisting on CO2 as the primary cause of all climatological woes, piece by piece and bit by bit, until not a single molecule of that mythology remains viable. The Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ hoax is explained in plain, non-obfuscatory language which doesn’t require a hard-sciences doctorate to comprehend. As Borepatch so pithily puts it: The whole edifice was constructed from cardboard and tape, and anyone could see that it was wrong.
Elegantly written; brilliantly conceived; meticulously researched; reliant entirely on actual, for-real science instead of the usual shitlib Pseudo variety, with politicking left entirely out of the mix for once and a solid dollop of historical fact thrown in for additional backup—with sincere apologies to the fine folks at Watt’s Up With That, who have been doing yeoman’s work on the subject for many years now, this is without doubt the best, most comprehensive yet concise treatise on the subject I’ve ever seen. BP has an equally-stellar (of an even older vintage, namely 2009) companion piece here.
You mustn’t miss a single word of this one, folks—both the linked posts, really, they’re good, good stuff. Taken altogether, they add up to all the debunking of the AGW hoax you’ll ever need. Bravo, Borepatch, and well done indeed.
Update! Fool that I am, it just hit me like a pie in the face that Watt’s Up is in neither my browser bookmarks nor Ye Aulde CF Blogrolle. Error corrected, with further red-faced apologies to WUWT for the reconkulous oversight.
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I was in school early 70’s when global cooling was the “thing”. Among other pursuits I studied climatology and meteorology along with geological studies of the earths climate history.
Most of the professors were at least tilted left, partially as a reaction to the Vietnam business, but were at least honest. All the BS about climate cooling (the 70’s climate scam) was laughed at by them, knowing we couldn’t predict a damn thing within those time scales.
Fast forward 20-30 years and now they all* lie in perfect synchronization.
*Yes, there are some exceptions, but not many
Pick up a copy of An Inconvenient Truth. Open to the preface page and note the Date it was first published. Read all the predictions that were made in it. Subtract the publishing date from today’s date and note that ALL the predictions have far surpassed their Doomsday Date.
Anyone who can’t see that easily understood fact that “Climate Change” is a Scam is either a Liar or a Fool. Many times, both.
It’s like the guy who has stood on the corner shouting “The End is Nigh” and has been doing so for 3 decades. Everyone who doesn’t point and laugh by now is Just In On It™ either as a Con Artist or a Useful Idiot.
“he guy who has stood on the corner shouting”
Excellent analogy, one I have used myself. The only real difference between the two is the level of $$$ involved and the number of lunatic followers.