Little Ice Age (Conterminous United States) -- Summary
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>>This intriguing study of the periodic establishment and demise of
oyster beds in the Hudson River estuary and elsewhere along the east
coast of the United States paints a clear picture of alternating
multi-century warm and cold intervals over the past two millennia
that is vastly different from the 1000-year-long "hockeystick"
temperature history of Mann et al. (1999) and the 2000-year-long
temperature history produced by Mann and Jones (2003), wherein
Northern Hemispheric and global mean temperatures experience
essentially no low-frequency variability until the advent of the 20th
century, when temperatures are portrayed as rising dramatically,
allowing them to claim that 20th-century warming was driven by
anthropogenic CO2 emissions. With respect to this contention,
however, they are most certainly wrong, as papers that tell
essentially the same climatic story as that of the Carbotte et al.
study are published almost weekly in the scientific literature, as
one can readily verify by perusing our website archives; and this
ever-growing mountain of real-world evidence clearly shows that late
20th-century warmth was by no means unique over the past two
millennia, having been equaled, and often surpassed, at various times
throughout both the Medieval Warm Period of a thousand years ago and
the Roman Warm Period of two thousand years ago, during both of which
epochs the air's CO2 concentration was fully 100 ppm less than what
it is today, signifying that the Modern Warm Period is nothing more
than the most recent high-temperature phase of this natural
non-CO2-driven millennial-scale oscillation of earth's climate.<<