Two fundamental tenets of the anthropogenic global warming narrative are (1) the globe is warming (i.e., it’s not just regional warming), and (2) the warming that has occurred since 1950 can be characterized as remarkable, unnatural, and largely unprecedented. In other words, today’s climate is substantially and alarmingly different than what it has been in the past….because the human impact has been profound.
Well, maybe. Scientists are increasingly finding that the two fundamental points cited above may not be supported by the evidence.
In 2016, an examination of the peer-reviewed scientific literature has uncovered dozens of paleoclimate reconstructions that reveal modern “global” warming has not actually been global in scale after all, as there are a large number of regions on the globe where it has been cooling for decades. Even if it was warming on a global scale, the paleoclimate evidence strongly suggests that the modern warm climate is neither unusual or profoundly different than it has been in the past. In fact, today’s regional warmth isn’t even close to approaching the Earth’s maximum temperatures achieved earlier in the Holocene, or as recently as 1,000 years ago (the Medieval Warm Period), when anthropogenic CO2 emissions could not have exerted a climate impact.
In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that the warming in recent decades is not even unprecedented within the context of the last 80 years. That’s because the amplitude of the 1930s and 1940s warm period matched or exceeded that of the warmth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in many regions of the world. Furhthermore, between the warmth of the 1930s and ’40s and the warmth of the 1990s to present, there was a very widely publicized cooling period (late 1950s to early 1970s) that was heavily discussed in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Today’s instrumental datasets curiously do not reflect this 20th century warming-cooling-warming oscillatory shape, however, as doing so would not lend support to the modeled understanding that climate is shaped by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which have increased linearly, not cyclically. In fact, not only has the high amplitude of the 1930s and 1940s warmth been “adjusted” down or depressed in global-scale representations of instrumental temperatures by NASA or the MetOffice, the substantial cooling (-0.5¬∞C in the Northern Hemisphere, including -1.5¬∞C cooling in the Arctic region) that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s has all but disappeared from today’s temperature graphs.
Scientists, meanwhile, keep on publishing their results. And their results don’t lend support to the narrative that the globe has been synchronously warming, or warming in linear fashion and in concert with the rise in anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Indeed, in many regions of the world, decadal-scale cooling has occurred since the mid-20th century.
Listed below are a collection of 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers published within the last year (2016) undermining the “consensus” position that modern warming patterns are global in extent and synchronization, and that today’s warmth is both unusual and unprecedented. The first section (1) identifies the regions of the world where there has been no net warming in recent decades. The second section (2) puts modern climate into its much larger Holocene context, revealing just how insignificant and unremarkable this current (regional) warming trend has been relative to history.
