The hockey stick in perspective

This is must reading that will take you five minutes and alter your entire view of the warming issue. An article by J. Storrs Hall, presented in an abridged and easily digestible version here, looks at the hockey stick (the sharp increase in global average temperature since 1850) in a time line that extends from the year 1400 to the present. The hockey stick looks like a big deal. Then Hall expands the graph back to the year 1000, thus showing the Medieval Warm Period, and suddenly the hockey stick is not such a big deal any more; it’s dwarfed by the MWP. (You can click on each graph to get a larger version of it.) Then he expands the graph to a range of the last 4,000 years, and we realize that even the Medieval Warm Period is far from the warmest period during historical times.

The notion that global temperatures are catastrophically increasing toward some unprecedented disaster turns out to be not just mistaken, not just exaggerated, but a total lie, a transparent fraud. Yet this transparent fraud is considered a “settled truth” by the powers-that-be of the present world order, and they want to use this fraud to gain dictatorial control over our economy and impoverish us and transfer our wealth to incompetent Third World peoples.

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Jeff W. writes:

You write:

“The powers-that-be of the present world order … want to use this fraud to gain dictatorial control over our economy and impoverish us and transfer our wealth to incompetent Third World peoples.”

I would modify that somewhat:

“The powers-that-be of the present world order want to intercept and siphon off for their own use 60% to 80% of the money transferred to incompetent Third World peoples before it ever gets to them. They also, of course, want to gain dictatorial control over our economy and impoverish us.”

LA replies:

You’re right. Thank you for the revision. I actually was thinking when I wrote that sentence that it wasn’t complete, because it left out the fact that such transfer-of-wealth arrangements exist primarily for the well being of the people running them, not for the “poor.”

December 10

LA to Larry G., who sent the article:

Larry, how did you come upon that article?

Larry G. replies:

I check the main website, Watts Up With That, every day. I also get Twitter alerts each time they post a new article. I referenced the site in an earlier comment on global warming.

BTW, down in the comments there is a link to another graph showing temps over a much longer period—back to before the dinosaurs. It shows we’re in a cold period compared to earth’s normal temperature. I’ll dig it up if you like but I’m off to the dentist now but I can get it this afternoon.

LA replies:

Well, it was a great find. Thank you for sending it. Mark Richardson was also impressed by it.

But why has this hugely important and obvious point not been made more prominently by the warming critics? Shouldn’t this be front and center? For the average layman, it simply shatters the warming argument. Have there been arguments against J. Storrs Hall’s presentation by the other side , that we need to know about?

Larry G. replies:

I can’t resist pointing out that the warming alarmists, by concentrating on a few cherry-picked tree rings, have literally lost sight of the forest for the trees. You pose a good question, and I don’t know the answer. It might best be posed to the people at that blog, since the bloggers there know much more about the subject than I do.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 09, 2009 10:05 PM | Send