On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 08:41:37PM -0500, P. J. Alling scripsit: > On 1/17/2010 7:15 PM, Graydon wrote: >> Especially for what, exactly, you consider the "medieval warm period". > The period around 1000 AD when the Vikings were settling Greenland and > Wine grapes were growing in Scotland.
Not global; these were mostly confined to Europe, not even the whole North Atlantic basin. Best available evidence is that the global mean temperature was below the current level during that period. >>>> If it gets much hotter or much drier, nasty things happen like "the >>>> Asian monsoon rains only happen some years or shut down entirely". >>>> >>> Once again unwaranted assumption. There's no record that this ever >>> happened and it cannot be precdicted from current data. >>> >> There certainly are records of this happening; monsoons *have* >> failed. (This is the sort of thing Chinese imperial historians >> tended to write down.) >> >> For instance, this year's monsoon is considered to have failed in >> India; see: >> <http://www.indianexpress.com/news/failed-monsoon-leads-to-largescale-migration-in-kutch-tehsils/542071/> >> > > Seems it's a pattern that's happend in the past. I'm sorry I put that > poorly. There's no credence that general global warming has had any > effect on this. Why not? The mechanism relating sea surface temperature to climate is pretty well understood these days. This is why it matters if it's an El Niño or La Niña year. > I hate to say this but it is in a peer reviewed publication. I expect > that if they got their thermo wrong it will eventually be proven. > However so far not. arxiv.org is not a peer-reviewed publication! (Nor is peer-review a guarantee of correctness!) Try <http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/02/light-dawns-and-sun-sets-g.html> for a simple explanation of how the atmospheric equilibrium works. (This is the same stuff that was used to (we now know correctly) predict things about Titan's atmosphere back in the 1950s based on the observed temperature.) -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
