World Isn’t So Hot After All

A team of Harvard researchers reviewed more than 240 studies of worldwide temperatures, focusing on indices like tree rings, ice cores and historical accounts that can be followed over many years, and concluded that the 20th century was not particularly warm by historic standards. This finding was published recently, and is now getting considerable publicity, in part due to a link off the Drudge Report.
The basic theme of the Harvard report is that claims that recent temperatures have been extraordinarily high are based mostly on a comparison of modern temperatures with those of the “Little Ice Age” that began around 1300. It’s warmer now than it was during the Little Ice Age–thankfully–but it is still somewhat cooler than it was during the more normal centuries that preceded the Little Ice Age.
This is actually common knowledge among historians. In the 12th century, Greenland was really green (or much of it was, anyway.) They made wine in England and grew wheat near the Arctic Circle. And the polar ice caps don’t seem to have melted to any significant degree. The earth may someday get as warm as it was a thousand years ago, but it hasn’t yet.
One of the first articles that the Trunk and I published, in 1992, was called “The Global Warming Hoax.” Alas, it is not available anywhere on the web. If there were enough demand, maybe we could put it up on a web page of our own and link to it.