To the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
And so it goes with these tree-ring climate reconstructions: no matter what,
you get a Hockey Stick, and somehow the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm
Period (and the Holocene Optimum and Roman Warming) are relegated to climatic
mythology.
That's when I seek clarity and open my volumes of Dr. H H
Lamb, in particular "Climatic History and the Future." There I find
that indeed these climatic periods had global existence; lives prospered where
later they were devastated, crops were introduced during warm periods which
failed during cold, glaciers retreated, advanced, and retreated again, tree
lines and sea levels rose and fell, and all of this in the brief 10,000-year
period following the Ice Age.
Worldwide, scientists have examined and documented thousands
of studies that illuminate natural climate change. The chronicles of our
ancestors, through such means as records of weather, population growth and
decline, tax rolls, commodity prices, deserted cities and ports, famine and
plague, and in many other ways, show that the flat Hockey Stick shaft does not
depict the reality of the climate of the past 1,000 years (or before and
beyond), and yet all this is lost in unending debate about the significance of
tree-ring sample selection.
And after all this, nothing is settled, and the debate rages
on: the tempest in a tea pot. Sound and fury signifying nothing (Lamb was
British, so the Shakespeare is a small tribute to British genius). All sides
claim victory, but continue the fight as if victory achieved nothing. And that
is the reality of this debate. The tree rings left out of the debate speak as
much to the problem of climate reconstruction as the ones included. They tell
no tale, because they are as incapable of telling one as are the ones selected.
But all that is heard is the yammering of the hammering.
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