In opining that “more skepticism needed over climate change,” a letter writer recently asserted that the “‘hockey stick’ graph, the most iconic symbol of global warming made famous by Al Gore, was based on tree rings from two trees” and urged readers to “do your homework before you drink the Kool-Aid.”
So here’re the results of a little homework. Took about 15 minutes. “The term ‘hockey stick graph’ was popularized by the climatologist Jerry Mahlman, to describe the pattern shown by the Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1999 (MBH99)” study, which showed a relatively flat downward trend in global surface temperatures before 1900 followed by a sharp, steady increase in temperatures since then. (“Hockey Stick Graph” Wikipedia).
MBH99 was based on tree ring data from the Urals, Tasmania, Patagonia, Morocco, France (as well as ice core data from Greenland and South America) and three data sets from the “International Tree-Ring Data Bank, the world’s largest public archive of tree ring data, managed by NCEI’s Paleoclimatology Team and the World Data System for Paleoclimatology.” (See MBH99 Table 1. See also https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/tree-ring). NCEI is a federal agency that our climate-change-denier-in-chief hasn’t managed to shut down yet. (See https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov).
Bottom line: it wasn’t just two trees. Tree rings and ice cores from all over the planet confirm that the earth has been getting warmer faster since we’ve been spewing fossil fuel smoke into the atmosphere, and it’s getting worse.
So go ahead, drink the Kool-Aid while you still can. The earth is not flat, the sun and the other planets don’t revolve around it, and global warming is real. Time to #GiveAFlake like SkiCo says, and hope it’s not too late.
Barry Vaughan
El Jebel