German Public Television Stuns Its Readers, Concedes Medieval Warm Period May Have Been 0.5°C Warmer Than Today!

In Germany climate science used to be considered completely settled.

Global temperatures had been pretty much steady for a thousand years before skyrocketing upwards as soon as man really started industrializing about 150 years ago, Germans were told again and again.

But today Germany’s major media are beginning to realize that this view is perhaps quite naïve after all. Though most major media outlets here do think man is responsible for global warming, many seem to be having second thoughts and coming out to say: Gee, looks like natural factors may be important after all.

Source: www2.tu-berlin.de/

Germany’s version of the BBC is ARD television and at the ARD website we find an unusually semi-sober report on the history of the earth’s climate.

First off the ARD presents its version of the above chart, thus acknowledging that climate has been changing naturally throughout the Holocene and that there have been warmer periods than today.

Old towns bear names related to wine-making

The ARD piece even goes on to say that the Medieval Warm Period from the years 800 to 1300 was similarly as warm as the “last climate normal period of 1961 to 1990, whose mean temperature is used as the reference value.” The ARD writes further:

 Using alternative reconstructions that period was even about 0.5°C warmer than today.”

As evidence that this was probably the case, the ARD writes that many towns and villages that were founded during the Medieval Warm Period actually bear names related to wine-making: “places that are too cool for this today“.

The ARD then describes the ensuing Little Ice Age as a time of harsh winters, crop failures, starvation and witch hunts. All this, the ARD claims, was caused by “fluctuations in solar radiation and a series of especially powerful volcanic eruptions,” citing Tambora in 1815 as an example.

Of course anyone with a half knowledge of climate science knows that solar radiation is not the real culprit for climate change over the last 1000 years, but some other solar mechanism involving solar magnetic fields, cosmic radiation and cloud seeding. We’re just going to remain patient and wait for the ARD to get up to speed on this. In the meantime we can take heart that progress is being made.

Finally, I find that little tail they’ve added to the Modern Warm Period on their chart to be very amusing (see figure below, circle). That’s the warming all the panic and hysteria has been about?

ARD chart

 Circle around little tail indicates recent warming that has caused worldwide panic and mass hysteria.

18 responses to “German Public Television Stuns Its Readers, Concedes Medieval Warm Period May Have Been 0.5°C Warmer Than Today!”

  1. DirkH

    Notice how Tim Staeger decries the terrible fate of “millions of climate refugees today” in the last sentence. A nod to Agenda21 and UNEP to be able to ship this article through the Iron Wall.

    Good luck in the re-education camp, Mr. Staeger.

    1. Bernd Felsche

      Where are those millions of climate refugees fleeing global warming?

      Without a thermometer, you’d be unable to feel the 0.5⁰C of temperature difference from one generation to the next.

    2. John F. Hultquist

      I agree that that sentence about climate refugees seems oddly unexplained in the report. The following came to mind:
      In North America, “climate refugees” have long been known as “Snow Birds.” I know a similar exodus exists in Europe but do not know what term is used.

      ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
      I don’t think I communicated clearly the other day – thus getting a reply from you suggesting a disagreement. On my part, I think it was just short and poorly worded.

  2. John B

    And here’s me thinking Germans were far too sensible to have anything resembling the BBC.

    1. DirkH

      John, Germans are forced by law to pay about six times the amount per head for our state media as the Brits have to pay for the BBC; we are, since 1945, the country with the most expensive brainwashing program; with a reason. Brits and US could never afford an independent Germany. Since the Lisbon treaty 2009 the supression of information got even worse. There is no sensible debate in our media about anything anymore; it’s ALL distraction and at least half-lies if not fully so.

  3. pep

    Well, this is Germany after all, home of the original deniers / perpetrators. (sarc)

  4. RobM1981

    OK, so towns have “wine-making” names. That’s hardly the same as satellite accuracy.

    The best any scientist has, in terms of data that’s more than 50 years old (if that) is proxy data. Who wants to speculate what the true climatic temperature was in even 1950? How many truly accurate measuring stations were there? 1,000, over the whole globe… if that? Half that? Perhaps universities and major cities had them, but what about Kuala Lumpur? What about Siberia? What about the Amazon, the Sahara, the Andes, Mongolia, the Gobe, the Australian outback, and pretty much any ocean temps outside of a few.

    Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute isn’t 100 years old yet. Who was doing the measuring of 95% of the ocean even 65 years ago?

    Aside from the urban heat-sink phenomenon, nobody wants to state the obvious: the best we can tell for temperatures earlier than 1940 – GLOBAL temperatures – is speculate and extrapolate. We can correlate events with ideas, and we can use proxies, but who is foolish enough to claim that these are accurate to even 2 degrees Celsius?

    The fact that scientists are making hard claims on such soft data is embarrassing. It’s a travesty.

    Soft claims? Sure. Go ahead. Point out that Greenland was clearly occupied in areas that are currently frozen over. That means something… but to make a hard claim beyond that? How foolish. How infantile and puerile.

    “Science,” indeed…

    1. DirkH

      What’s your point? Discarding all proxies? Living in ignorance; world might have been created the day before your birth because you didn’t experience it?

      8000 years ago most glaciers didn’t exist.
      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033589411001256

      1. Lance Wallace

        Slight correction–the article indicates the glacial minimum was about 6000 years ago. Also considers the glacial maximum to be during the Little Ice Age!

  5. Robin Pittwood

    Look at the deep blue triangle on the left. And it goes deeper still if you go further left (beyond this graph). Milankovitch cycles show an overall trend of about 10k years warm, and 100k years of cold. We are coming to the end of a 10k year warm period. It is called and interglacial. It is not the little warming we need to worry about. We should be more concerned about the cold that might soon be upon us. Repeating Harold Ambler’s book title, ‘Don’t Sell Your Coat’.

  6. Peter Shaw

    Some of the medieval abbeys in northern England ruined by Henry VIII have vine-terraces (no vines);)

    1. Graeme No.3

      On two occasions the importers of French wines approached the english king and complained that the wine from the Bishop of Durham’s vineyard was untaxed despite selling at 3 times their average price. A not so subtle hint as to where the king could raise some taxes (rather than on imports).

      Chaucer is said to have made mention of a vineyard in Scotland (sorry, no reference). Grapes were supposedly grown in Denmark, and as far north in Germany as the Baltic; not so surprising when wine is produced today in Latvia & Estonia (quality unknown to me). (There is a winery in Sweden, local micro-climate?)

      There was a mention by an Arab of vineyards in Holland, Poland and northern Germany. Claims that there were 74 vineyards around Berlin in the fourteenth century. Varieties Gouais (white) and Argant (red) were grown quite a way north of where they grow today. Both are noted for their ability to flourish in hotter areas (german speakers read Weißer Heunisch and Gansfüsser, although both have a variety of other names).

      All this makes me suspect that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today in Europe.

  7. Casper

    Do you want to go on a mushroom foray in the winter? Please visit our forests in Poland. A hint for readers, Poland borders on Germany…

    http://kontakt24.tvn24.pl/temat,grudniowe-grzybobranie-las-wyglada-jakby-miala-przyjsc-wiosna,109755,html?categoryId=499

  8. GayPatriot » 10 Safe Predictions for 2014

    […] evidence will emerge debunking the hoax of Anthropogenic Global Warming; it will be ignored by the media and the […]

  9. News of the Week (December 29th, 2013) | The Political Hat

    […] German Public Television Stuns Its Readers, Concedes Medieval Warm Period May Have Been 0.5°C Warme… In Germany climate science used to be considered completely settled. Global temperatures had been pretty much steady for a thousand years before skyrocketing upwards as soon as man really started industrializing about 150 years ago, Germans were told again and again. But today Germany’s major media are beginning to realize that this view is perhaps quite naïve after all. Though most major media outlets here do think man is responsible for global warming, many seem to be having second thoughts and coming out to say: Gee, looks like natural factors may be important after all. […]

  10. Brian H

    It’s falling-off-a-log easy to disprove CAGW. Even the media should be able to manage it.

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