Warming Before Global Warming Was Not Globally Coherent Warming
Do you remember, back in the good old days, just over a year ago (6 months BC – Before Covid) when the mainstream alarmist media was breathlessly reporting two studies which showed that modern global warming was truly global and unprecedented in magnitude in the last 2000 years? I doubt you could have missed it; news of this alarming and climate-sceptic-shattering discovery was literally everywhere. Raphael Neukom and fellow researchers ‘proved’ (using the ever so reliable Pages2k tree ring and assorted other proxy data) that, not only was man-made global warming the only spatially and temporally coherent warming of the last 2000 years, but that it was also the warmest warming episode over that period. This means of course that the dreaded 20th century AGW is ‘unprecedented and unparalleled’, that mother nature’s past puny attempts to warm the planet were at best patchy and relatively inefficient compared to planes, trains, automobiles and factories. That immense fusion reactor in the sky, 330,000 times the mass of earth, right on our celestial doorstep, plus the vast natural heat engine of the earth, powered by the Sun and animated via oceanic and atmospheric currents spanning the entire globe, just can’t compete with a slightly increased prevalence of the Thermageddon molecule consisting of two oxygen atoms and one carbon. It can’t. We know it can’t because they told us so: it’s settled science.
No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era
Earth’s climate history is often understood by breaking it down into constituent climatic epochs1. Over the Common Era (the past 2,000 years) these epochs, such as the Little Ice Age2,3,4, have been characterized as having occurred at the same time across extensive spatial scales5. Although the rapid global warming seen in observations over the past 150 years does show nearly global coherence6, the spatiotemporal coherence of climate epochs earlier in the Common Era has yet to be robustly tested. Here we use global palaeoclimate reconstructions for the past 2,000 years, and find no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and warm epochs. In particular, we find that the coldest epoch of the last millennium—the putative Little Ice Age—is most likely to have experienced the coldest temperatures during the fifteenth century in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, during the seventeenth century in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America, and during the mid-nineteenth century over most of the remaining regions. Furthermore, the spatial coherence that does exist over the preindustrial Common Era is consistent with the spatial coherence of stochastic climatic variability. This lack of spatiotemporal coherence indicates that preindustrial forcing was not sufficient to produce globally synchronous extreme temperatures at multidecadal and centennial timescales. By contrast, we find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the twentieth century for more than 98 per cent of the globe. This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures5, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.
“This lack of spatiotemporal coherence indicates that preindustrial forcing was not sufficient to produce globally synchronous extreme temperatures at multidecadal and centennial timescales.” They don’t have anything to say about climate changes before 2000 years ago, because Pages2k only goes back that far, but the inference is obvious – no preindustrial warming or cooling was a patch on AGW.
Those doughty climate fellows over at Carbon Brief explain why the Roman Warm Period, Mediaeval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were merely sputtering early attempts by nature to change the climate, later to be totally eclipsed by the great climate changing works of Post Industrial Man.
The study finds that no episode of past warming or cooling “shows global coherence in the timing of the coldest or warmest periods”.
For example, during the Little Ice Age, the timing of the lowest temperatures seen in the proxy data varied from place to place.
Two-fifths of the world felt cold temperatures during the mid-nineteenth century, whereas for other regions, the cold snap occurred several centuries earlier, the study says.
And during the Medieval Climate Anomaly, only 40% of the world experienced peak temperatures at the same time, the findings show.
In contrast, human-caused global warming affected 98% of the globe simultaneously at the end of the 20th century, the study says.
Science Daily is at pains to emphasise the ‘fact’ that past climate change was regional:
Climate fluctuations in the past varied from region to region
“It’s true that during the Little Ice Age it was generally colder across the whole world,” explains Raphael Neukom, “but not everywhere at the same time. The peak periods of pre-industrial warm and cold periods occurred at different times in different places.” According to the climate scientist from Bern, the now-debunked hypothesis of climate phases occurring at the same time across the globe came about because of an impression that is defined by the climate history of Europe and North America. In the absence of data from other parts of the earth, this notion was applied to the whole planet, raising expectations that relatively cold or warm periods throughout the last 2,000 years were globally synchronous phenomena. But it has now been shown that this was not the case.
The authors of the study in Nature see the explanation for that as being that regional climates in pre-industrial times were primarily influenced by random fluctuations within the climate systems themselves. External factors such as volcanic eruptions or solar activity were not intense enough to cause markedly warm or cold temperatures across the whole world for decades, or even centuries.
The researchers relied on a database from the international research consortium PAGES, which provides a comprehensive overview of climate data from the last 2,000 years, for their investigation of five pre-industrial climate epochs. In addition to tree rings, it also includes data from ice cores, lake sediments and corals.
It’s clear from this that they only consider that radiative forcing from solar variability or volcanic aerosols, not internal variability, has the potential to change climate on a global scale and that over the past 2000 years, this hasn’t happened because changes in aerosols and solar radiance have been too weak. They thus assign the cause of the RWP, MWP and LIA climate change episodes to internal multidecadal variability which they claim was a regional forcing, not of comparable magnitude to 20th century AGW and not temporally coherent across the globe. Bear that in mind please in the light of new research just published.
An international team of scientists have connected a number of rapid climate change events from the last glacial period in new research that may help future work in climate chronology.
Their findings link 25 major rapid cycles of warming and cooling recorded in Greenland’s ice cores during the last glacial cycle, which occurred 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, to other known climate changes in the Asian Monsoon, South American Monsoon, and parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. Those 25 abrupt changes are known as the Dansgaard-Oschger events, or D-O events.
“Each of these events were characterized by very abrupt warming over Greenland, of up to 16 degrees Celsius, sometimes within decades,” said Ellen Corrick, a researcher at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Science. “These warmer conditions lasted for several hundred to several thousands of years before a more gradual cooling occurred.”
Climate change across the globe was synchronous and spatially coherent with the D-O events:
During this period, Corrick said, Europe experienced temperature and rainfall changes in sync with the D-O climate events. The tropics’ monsoon systems also saw changing rainfall patterns associated with the fluctuating temperature over Greenland.
“We found that abrupt climate changes during Dansgaard-Oeschger events occurred simultaneously across a region extending from the Arctic to the southern sub-tropics, within decades in some cases,” Corrick said in an interview. “We have also determined exactly when the abrupt changes occurred, much more precisely than ever before.”
Phys.org says:
Abrupt climate changes during the Last Glacial Period, some 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, happened at the same time across a region extending from the Arctic to the Southern Hemisphere subtropics, new research has revealed.
The study, led by University of Melbourne Ph.D. student Ellen Corrick and published today in the journal, Science, found that rapid warming events over Greenland were linked to simultaneous temperature increases across continental Europe, and changes in rainfall in the Asian and South American monsoon regions.
Greenland ice cores recorded more than 25 abrupt warming episodes during this period. These so called ‘Dansgaard-Oeschger events’ were associated with increases in air temperature over Greenland of up to 16°Celsius, sometimes in a matter of a few decades.
Co-author, University of Melbourne Associate Professor Russell Drysdale, said: “Demonstrating synchrony in the climate response across such a broad region marks a major advance in the study of Dansgaard-Oeschger events. It allows scientists to improve understanding of how the events are propagated globally via the ocean and atmosphere system.“
“They provide confirmation of a persistent but, until now, unsubstantiated assumption that climate changes between the tropics and the Arctic were synchronous.”
All very well, I hear you say, but what have D-O events during the last Ice Age got to do with the RWP, MWP and LIA?
Wiki, that fount of irrefutable climate knowledge (but seriously, bear with me) says:
Dansgaard–Oeschger events (often abbreviated D–O events) are rapid climate fluctuations that occurred 25 times during the last glacial period.
The comparable climate cyclicity during the Holocene is referred to as Bond events.
The exact cause of D-O events is still a matter of scientific debate but it’s likely that a rapid slowdown of the Atlantic Merdional Overturning Circulation is involved with attendant complex feedbacks in atmospheric circulation.
Although climate scientists have worked hard to determine the ultimate trigger of abrupt climate change during the last ice age, it is likely that a combination of ocean and atmospheric circulation changes were involved. For example, a subtle shift in atmospheric circulation to a more meridional jet stream flow would encourage the transport of warm, salty water into the sub-polar North Atlantic, which in turn could lead to the reestablishment of strong AMOC and enhanced oceanic heat transport to the high-latitude North Atlantic. In this case, ocean circulation changes associated with AMOC may have amplified small changes initiated in the atmosphere on the transition into warm interstadials. Conversely, a sudden reduction in AMOC due to an influx of freshwater into the high-latitude North Atlantic region has the potential to trigger a regional cooling that can significantly alter tropical atmospheric circulation around the globe. Although we still do not know which happened first, interactions between both the ocean and the atmosphere must have played an important role in driving the dramatic climate oscillations of the last ice age. This paper only discusses two hypotheses to explain the abrupt climate shifts of the last ice age.
For our purposes here, we need only note that D-O events are (were) regional fluctuations whose knock-on effects involved synchronous climate change from the Arctic to the subtropics, extending into the southern hemisphere, which may have been forced by internal or external variability, or a combination of both. Given that there were 25 of them throughout the last glacial period, this implies that internal variability of the system may have played a significant part and that some cyclicity was involved. Now, as it happens, D-O events didn’t just go away when the last Ice Age ended; they weakened and became known as Bond Events or abrupt Holocene climate changes, which also happened to manifest as regional climate fluctuations (abrupt warming followed by cooling) which were implicitly connected with AMOC and the North Atlantic. The cool periods are often known as North Atlantic Cold Events and the last one was probably the LIA. There are 9 notable such events at 11.1 kyr, 10.3 kyr, 9.4 kyr, 8.1 kyr, 5.9 kyr, 4.2 kyr, 2.8 kyr, 1.4 kyr, and 0.4 kyr, the last being the LIA minimum, roughly coincident with the Maunder Minimum. The cold events were preceded by warm periods where warming was often rapid, proceeding over the course of decades.
Back in 2003, even climate alarmist Jonathan Overpeck was researching the links between natural abrupt climate changes in the Holocene and the more pronounced abrupt climate changes during the last glacial:
During the last ice age, the Indian Ocean southwest monsoon exhibited abrupt changes that were closely correlated with millennial-scale climate events in the North Atlantic region1,2,3, suggesting a mechanistic link. In the Holocene epoch, which had a more stable climate, the amplitude of abrupt changes in North Atlantic climate was much smaller, and it has been unclear whether these changes are related to monsoon variability. Here we present a continuous record of centennial-scale monsoon variability throughout the Holocene from rapidly accumulating and minimally bioturbated sediments in the anoxic Arabian Sea. Our monsoon proxy record reveals several intervals of weak summer monsoon that coincide with cold periods documented in the North Atlantic region4—including the most recent climate changes from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age and then to the present. We therefore suggest that the link between North Atlantic climate and the Asian monsoon is a persistent aspect of global climate.
Now, there’s plenty of peer-reviewed studies which, in contrast to Neukom last year, suggest that the LIA/MWP/RWP were in fact global climate events, that they were temporally coherent and that, moreover, they were of comparable magnitude to recent global warming. So let’s ‘follow the inconvenient science’ and see where it leads us. If we do that, it leads us to speculate (with justification, backed up by data and research) that modern global warming, far from being unique, far from being ‘unprecedented and unparalled’ as claimed by Neukom and others a year ago, is just one of a number of abrupt Holocene climate fluctuations mediated via internal cycles operating in the North Atlantic region, connected perhaps to AMOC and maybe also initiated or reinforced by solar variability. The North Atlantic region then is seen to drive global climate change, which is exactly what Tsonis was saying in 2017. This is at least as viable an explanation for a large part or even the majority of late 20th century rapid warming as is GHG emissions. But of course, climate science is not normal science, it’s post normal science, hence alternate, evidence-based explanations for modern global warming must be either ignored or censored.
Climate Scepticism 
Welcome back Jaime.
I recall in 1989 soon after joining the School of Environmental Science at UEA being informed that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were now considered regional and confined to the North Atlantic Basin. So today there is little new then.
Several years later, after a detailed study with my wife of a varved Permian evaporite sequence in west Texas and New Mexico we recognised a cyclicity with durations similar to O-D cycles and almost certainly caused by changes in climate. Coincidental? All I know is that during the Permian, there was no Atlantic to cause changes now being proposed to cause O-D events.
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Welcome back!
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Welcome back indeed – it was worth the wait!
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This seems to be the same studies reported a year ago. This reaction still pertains:
Kevin Anchukaitis, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona not involved in the research, says the idea that the Medieval period and Little Ice Age weren’t eras of truly global change has been discussed in previous studies, and the authors’ recent conclusions support that earlier work. “They were broad warm and cold periods, within which different regions of the globe had their coldest or warmest periods at different times. For the Little Ice Age, we know this is linked to volcanism,” Anchukaitis says.
Despite the fact that more data is available to paleoclimatologists than ever before, Anchukaitis believes that significantly more work needs to be done if scientists are to gather a truly global picture of past climate. “To make progress in understanding the climate of the [past 2,000 years], we should move beyond applying a smorgasbord of different statistical methods,” he says via email. Instead, scientists need a renewed effort to gather paleoclimate records from places and times that are underrepresented in compilations like PAGES 2k.
“The proxy network is largely Northern Hemisphere tree-rings, tropical records (corals) decline rapidly by 1600, and there are relatively few Southern Hemisphere records outside of the Antarctic ice cores,” Anchukaitis says. “So claims about global spatial patterns prior to about 1600, particularly for the tropics and southern hemisphere, must be viewed cautiously.”
The Smithsonian article is here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/modern-climate-change-only-worldwide-warming-event-past-2000-years-180972719/
Moreover, the paleoproxies remain problematic and subject to both manipulation and biased interpretation. Steve McIntyre has extensive critques of PAGES at his blog Climate Audit. For example in Sept. 2015 he discussed The Ocean2K “Hockey Stick”, a study with very similar claims:
Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years,” said Michael Evans, second author of the study and an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC). “This study truly highlights the profound effects we are having on our climate today.”
McIntyre observed:
One of the reasons for the strange lack of interest in this newest proxy “Hockey Stick” was that the proxy data didn’t actually show “the climate was warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years”. The OCEAN2K reconstruction (see Figure 1 below) had a shape that anyone would be hard-pressed to describe as a “Hockey Stick”. It showed a small decrease over the past two millennia with the most recent value having a tiny uptick from its predecessor, but, whatever image one might choose to describe its shape, “Hockey Stick” is not one of them.
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/ocean2k_recon.png?w=768&h=251
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Jaime,
I felt in the mood to press the like button today, not because you managed to convince me that Neukom is wrong, but because you eloquently argued that it was perfectly reasonable to ask whether he was right. That’s what good scepticism is all about.
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Thank you all for the warm welcome back. The causes of rapid warming and subsequent more gradual cooling during the last Ice Age and the connection to similar, less pronounced episodes during the Holocene is definitely not settled science and a lot of puzzles remain.
For instance, there’s the ongoing debate about the bipolar seesaw, where it was originally thought that warming in Greenland was out of phase with changes in Antarctica and the reason for that was ascribed to the delay caused by the slow movement of the thermohaline circulation from one hemisphere to another. It’s not quite that simple apparently, with rapid warming in Greenland and the Nordic Sea actually being out of phase with a more gradual warming in the North Atlantic which was in phase with the gradual warming in Antarctica.
“The precise reason for the differences and out-of-phase relationship between the abrupt Dansgaard-Oeschger warmings in the Nordic seas and Greenland ice cores and the gradual warmings in the south-central Atlantic and Antarctic ice cores is poorly understood. Termed the bipolar seesaw, the differences are apparently linked to perturbations in the ocean circulation pattern. Here we show that surface and intermediate-depth water south of Iceland warmed gradually synchronously with the Antarctic warming and out of phase with the abrupt warming of the Nordic seas and over Greenland.
The events are generally termed Greenland interstadials and stadials1 or Dansgaard-Oeschger events (D-O) and they are most prominent in the Greenland ice core records, where they consist of an abrupt warming to warm interstadial conditions followed by a more gradual cooling and a rapid drop to very cold stadial conditions2. The events are also recorded in the Antarctic ice cores, but the amplitudes here are smaller and the warmings are gradual in contrast to the abrupt warmings in the Greenland cores. The D-O events in the northern and southern ice cores are furthermore out of phase or even in anti-phase.
The results of this study indicate that the D-O warmings in the open North Atlantic were gradual and in phase with the gradual warmings in the Antarctic ice cores and in the southern and central Atlantic. They also indicate that the warmings were out of phase with the abrupt warmings in the Greenland ice cores, in the Nordic seas and areas in the North Atlantic strongly affected by meltwater during stadials. This implies that the hinge line between areas showing gradual warming and areas showing abrupt warming was displaced far to the north close to the Greenland-Scotland Ridge. Considering this geographical asymmetry, the term “bipolar seesaw” seems confusing with respect to marine conditions.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20535
The LIA has been shown to have occurred in West Antarctica at the same time as temperatures dipped in the Northern Hemisphere:
“The largest climate anomaly of the last 1000 years in the Northern Hemisphere was the Little Ice Age (LIA) from 1400–1850 C.E., but little is known about the signature of this event in the Southern Hemisphere, especially in Antarctica. We present temperature data from a 300 m borehole at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide. Results show that WAIS Divide was colder than the last 1000‐year average from 1300 to 1800 C.E. The temperature in the time period 1400–1800 C.E. was on average 0.52 ± 0.28°C colder than the last 100‐year average. This amplitude is about half of that seen at Greenland Summit (GRIP). This result is consistent with the idea that the LIA was a global event, probably caused by a change in solar and volcanic forcing, and was not simply a seesaw‐type redistribution of heat between the hemispheres as would be predicted by some ocean‐circulation hypotheses.
This temperature reconstruction shows a broad minimum circa 1600 C.E., the timing of which is not constrained very precisely by the data. [N.B. LIA minimum in Europe was 1645-1715 – Maunder Minimum]
The fact that WAIS Divide was colder than the last 1000 year average from 1300 to 1800 C.E. supports the idea that the Little Ice Age was not confined to the North Atlantic, and that a decrease in solar activity accompanied by persistent explosive volcanism was the cause of this event [Miller et al., 2012].”
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2012GL051260
Another study shows that the science is definitely not settled and that there is some confusion about the climate forcings associated with the D-O events and the LIA:
“The Little Ice Age (LIA) is one of the most prominent climate shifts in the past 5000 yrs. It has been suggested that the LIA might be the most recent of the Dansgaard–Oeschger events, which are better known as abrupt, large scale climate oscillations during the last glacial period. If the case, then according to Broecker (2000a, 2000b) Antarctica should have warmed during the LIA, when the Northern Hemisphere was cold. Here we present new data from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, that indicates surface temperatures were ~ 2 °C colder during the LIA, with colder sea surface temperatures in the Southern Ocean and/or increased sea-ice extent, stronger katabatic winds, and decreased snow accumulation. Whilst we find there was large spatial and temporal variability, overall Antarctica was cooler and stormier during the LIA. Although temperatures have warmed since the termination of the LIA, atmospheric circulation strength has remained at the same, elevated level. We conclude, that the LIA was either caused by alternative forcings, or that the sea-saw mechanism operates differently during warm periods.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X11002925
As we’ve seen however, it is only the abrupt warming in Greenland which is out of phase with the more gradual warming (and subsequent cooling) of the North Atlantic and Antarctica.
What all this suggests to me is that there is a far more complex interaction of external forcings (solar and volcanic) with internal forcings (AMOC/NAO/AMO/PDO) than has hitherto been supposed.
“The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) represents a significant driver of Northern Hemisphere climate, but the forcing mechanisms pacing the AMO remain poorly understood. Here we use the available proxy records to investigate the influence of solar and volcanic forcing on the AMO over the last ~450 years. The evidence suggests that external forcing played a dominant role in pacing the AMO after termination of the Little Ice Age (LIA; ca. 1400–1800), with an instantaneous impact on mid-latitude sea-surface temperatures that spread across the North Atlantic over the ensuing ~5 years. In contrast, the role of external forcing was more ambiguous during the LIA.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948066/
Sigh! If only real climate science was as simple as AGW climate science!
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Alan, that’s interesting what you say about the Permian. The planet’s geography was obviously radically different back then, which does seem to suggest an extra-terrestrial influence on D-O type climate cycles.
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Jaime. I’m not claiming the evaporite cycles in the Permian Castile Formation were O-D cycles, only that they had similar frequencies. The evaporite cycles demonstrated a gradual increase in basin water salinity followed by an abrupt freshening and the start of the succeeding cycle. We cannot even conclude that this gradual cycle involved changing temperatures, although it is difficult to imagine a scenario where increasing basin-water salinities were not the result of increasing temperatures or decreased inflows.
Anyway when we came to publishing our results we briefly mentioned O-D events but the journal’s editor sided with our peer-reviewers and we had to remove our speculations. Pity. By that time my wife was dying and I focussed more and more on that. After she died, I just couldn’t face working on any topic we worked on together and so the possibility that there were Permian O-D cycles just disappeared.
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This may seem that I’ve gone out on a limb (again?), but bear with me, there is a point in here somewhere.
The impression I have from reading the reports of weather and famines in the 17th century, ie during the depth of the LIA, is not that the weather was universally cold, but that it became much more unpredictable. Even if seeds could be planted at the right time, there was a good chance that some weather event in the growing season, heavy rain, cold, heat, drought etc, would lead to a less than optimal crops in the autumn.
The weather record for the last few years seems to follow the same pattern, with areas of anomalous heat and cold in close proximity, both temporally and spatially. This pattern has been blamed on the present solar minimum weakening the jet-stream so that it meanders a long way from its mean track.
One of the things that ‘everyone knows’ about the LIA is that it coincided with the Maunder Solar Minimum, suggesting that the jet-stream was weak and meandering, and that, given that the minimum lasted around 50 years, the weather patterns may have even more variations than they have today.
So the question becomes: do the paleoclimate proxies for temperature have enough granularity to show the intense sub-seasonal variation that comes with a weak, meandering jet-stream?
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Bill, you’re right about the LIA which is why global or large scale mean surface temperature is a pretty blunt instrument for analysing climate change, both regional and global. Weather patterns changed markedly, particularly in northern Europe and north America and this was probably due to large scale changes in the circulation system/modification of the jet stream. The drop in temperature was much more pronounced during northern hemisphere winters than it was in other seasons and, in fact, there were some very hot summers during the LIA, particularly 1541, but 1665 and 1666 also, the years of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. The LIA stretched from about 1300 to 1850 and there were several notable solar minimums throughout that period, the Maunder being the second to last (the Dalton Minimum followed) and the deepest. Weather in Europe at the time was often quite extreme and unpredictable, as it was in Asia and north America. Monsoon patterns were affected further south, with alternating severe droughts and deluges. Storminess in general appeared to have increased and the worst recorded storm ever to have affected the British isles struck in November 1703, during the Maunder Minimum.
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Alan, that’s sad about your wife. It must have been so hard to lose your soul-mate, your wife and your best and most trusted fellow researcher and travelling companion all at the same time.
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It seems a bit desperate for warmists to claim that climate phenomena like the MWP and LIA that lasted for a few centuries each, were not global. How could the temperature changes have been confined to one hemisphere – or less – over such long periods? Hardly credible IMO.
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Jaime. I appreciate your sympathy, but my wife died more than 25 years ago. Also it was expected and long drawn out, so we knew what was going to happen. She kept fighting the cancer for many years and colleagues at UEA were extremely supportive. That’s why I criticised, but have never joined in the blanket condemnation of them more than a decade later over Climategate.
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Forget all of that factual sciency stuff, Prince Charles is back on the case:
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4020451/decried-denigrated-denied-prince-wales-slams-climate-inaction-york-climate
“Without swift and immediate action, at an unprecedented pace and scale, we will miss the window of opportunity to ‘reset’ for… a more sustainable and inclusive future,” the Prince of Wales said. “In other words, the global pandemic is a wake-up call we cannot ignore.”
The climate crisis, he added, “has been with us for far too many years – decried, denigrated and denied. It is now rapidly becoming a comprehensive catastrophe that will dwarf the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.”
The Prince of Wales called for a “military-style” campaign to combat the climate crisis and said business and state leaders should work towards achieving net zero emissions ahead of 2050, the target set out by the Paris Agreement.
“Without doubt we must now put ourselves on a warlike footing, approaching our action from a military style campaign,” he said. “That way, working together, we can combat this most grave and urgent challenge. If we have the resolve to shift our trajectory, we must start now by bringing forward our net zero target. I’m afraid 2050 suggests we have room to delay.”
You have to wonder if this is why Boris is so unwilling to let go of Covid-19.
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The madness of Prince Charles.
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Dennis, the Great Reset, the Green Recovery etc. is becoming a nauseatingly familiar theme now, opportunistically using a ‘recovery’ from the social and economic destruction imposed upon us by the insane government response to Covid to ‘reset’ the economy in line with net zero. It can be no coincidence that the government is now thinking of bringing forward the ban on sale of petrol and diesel cars to 2030 to aid a ‘green recovery from coronavirus’. Ever get the notion we’ve been scammed?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/21/uk-plans-to-bring-forward-ban-on-fossil-fuel-vehicles-to-2030
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Thanks for the link Jaime. We have been scammed for a long time. Have you seen this amazing piece from the BBC? “How the oil industry made us doubt climate change” – By Phoebe Keane, BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-53640382
“How they made us doubt everything investigates how some of the world’s most powerful interests made us doubt the connection between smoking and cancer, and how the same tactics were used to make us doubt climate change.
The accusations against Exxon and others – which the company has called “baseless and without merit” – build on years of painstaking research by people like Kert Davies and Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and co-author of Merchants of Doubt.
Unfortunately many of the “expert scientists” quoted by journalists to try to offer balance in their coverage of climate change were – like Jerry Taylor – making arguments based on their beliefs rather than relevant research.
“Usually these people have some scientific credentials, but they’re not actually experts in climate science,” says Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes.”
Unlike herself of course…
Also covered at WUWT
Phoebe Keene: linkedin
Education
The University of Manchester
English Literature and Drama
2008 – 2011
University of Central Lancashire
Master’s Degree in Broadcast Journalism
2011 – 2012
Experience BBC
Broadcast Journalist Mar 2012 – Present 8 years 7 months
London, United Kingdom
“I’m currently working at BBC Radio Current Affairs, making programmes for Radio 4 and the World Service. From 2012-2014 I was a news reader, reporter and producer at BBC Radio Manchester. Before that I was a Meet and Greet on BBC Breakfast TV.”
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