We are told the globe is rapidly and dangerously warming, and that this rapid and dangerous warming has been predominantly caused by the steep rise in anthropogenic CO2 emissions that began about the mid-1940s.
We even have a widely-recognized “hockey stick” graph of the Northern Hemisphere — created by Michael Mann in the late 1990s and popularized by the IPCC (2001) — to “prove” that modern warming has been synchronously global in scale, as well as rapid, dangerous, and perhaps even unprecedented (“the warmest on record”).
There is a problem with this paradigm, however. An enormous problem.
That is, when scientists reconstruct sea surface temperatures (SST) and land surface temperatures and deep ocean heat content from the paleoclimate record (hundreds to thousands of years ago) using existing physical proxy evidence, and when they use this same physical evidence to reconstruct the modern temperatures, the rapid and dangerous warming trend that mysteriously forms a hockey stick shape for recent decades seems to just . . . disappear. In its place is a modern record of temperatures from locations all over the world that does not even come close to resembling a rapidly warming, dangerous, and unprecedented hockey stick. Instead, the paleoclimate record reveals the opposite. Large regions of the Earth were significantly warmer than they are now for most of the last several thousand years.
Below is a compilation of 50 temperature graphs from peer-reviewed scientific papers. Some graphs indicate that (a) post-1940s temperatures actually declined in many regions of the world rather than rose rapidly — the opposite of what climate models had predicted. All the graphs show that (b) modern (post-1940s) temperatures aren’t any warmer than the decades and centuries and millennia prior to the steep increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and in some locations even the Little Ice Age temperatures (1400s to 1800s AD) were warmer than modern. Finally, these 50 graphs clearly show that (c) the conceptualization of global-scale warming, or a globally synchronous rise in temperatures for the vast majority of the Earth’s land and oceanic locations in modern times . . . is not scientifically supportable.
In many parts of the world, today’s temperatures are still among the coldest they’ve been in the last several thousand years. Sea levels, in turn, are at some of the lowest levels of the last 8,000 years; relative sea levels were 1 to 4 meters higher than they are now just a few thousand years ago. Where warming has occurred, it’s been modest and slight, not rapid and dangerous. Perhaps this is why the “hide the decline” phenomenon became so necessary for hockey stick-favoring reconstructionists.
