Review paper finds the Medieval Warm Period was worldwide and warmer than the present

A new review paper from SPPI and CO2 Science concludes "that earth's current level of warmth need not be attributed to the current high level of the air's CO2 content; for the peak warmth of the global Medieval Warm Period was even greater than it has been over the past couple of decades, and at a time when the air's CO2 concentration was approximately 100 ppm less than it is today, which suggests that whatever phenomenon was responsible for the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period could also be responsible for the [current warm period]."

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[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Excerpts:



Climate alarmists have long contended that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was not a worldwide phenomenon, primarily because that reality would challenge another of their major claims, i.e., that late 20th-century temperatures were the warmest of the past millennium or more. Thus, it is important to know what has been learned about this subject in different parts of the world; and in this summary attention is focused on Asian countries other than China, Russia and Japan, which are treated individually in other MWP Summaries.

Off the coast of Israel … they found evidence for the MWP centered around AD 1200. In discussing their findings, they make particular mention of the fact that there is an abundance of other well-documented evidence for the existence of the MWP in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Once again, there is additional evidence for solar forcing of climate at decadal and multi-decadal time scales, as well as for the millennial-scale oscillation of climate that likely was responsible for the 20th-century warming of the globe that led to the demise of the Little Ice Age and ushered in the Current Warm Period.

Modern-day warming on the Korean peninsula is only slightly greater than what occurred there back in the Medieval Warm Period. And if one looks a little further back in Park's temperature reconstruction, it can be seen that approximately 2200 years ago it may actually have been slightly warmer than it was near the end of the 20th century AD, suggesting that there is nothing unusual or unnatural about the earth's current level of warmth.



Although they do not directly say it in their paper, the findings of Kaniewski et al. thus do indeed reveal whether or not "recent climate trends are atypical or not over the last millennium." And the answer is: They are not ... at least not in the region of Syria they studied, and not in most of the other parts of the world for which there is evidence of the MWP. And this result clearly suggests that earth's current level of warmth need not be attributed to the current high level of the air's CO2 content; for the peak warmth of the MWP was even greater than it has been over the past couple of decades, and at a time when the air's CO2 concentration was approximately 100 ppm less than it is today, which suggests that whatever phenomenon was responsible for the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period could also be responsible for the warmth.

In conclusion, as ever more real-world temperature data continue to be obtained, and as more correct procedures are employed to analyze them, Asia's (and the world's) true temperature histories are becoming ever more clear; and what's beginning to take shape will ultimately spell the end of the IPCC's ill-conceived rush to judgment on identifying both the nature and the cause of the post-Little Ice Age climatic amelioration of the planet.