At http://phys.org/print299425748.html … news that a long 900 year temperature record for the eastern Mediterranean has been built, based on tree rings. It exhibits evidence of the Medieval Warm Period (which was deleted by the IPCC hockey stick model) and the Little Ice Age (also deleted by the IPCC hockey stick model). This appears to cock a snook at climate scientists that have denied these highs and lows were global and insisted they were regional – as most of the research was done in Europe and N America. Not only that, the paper acknowledges they could see no evidence of an upturn in global climate in the late 20th century – the infamous hockey stick blade. Modern global warming may not exist – on the kind of scale projected.
All this brings to mind the furore over 'Hiding the Decline' – the pea in the thimble that Steve McIntyre discovered in his relentless investigation into how climate science operates – see www.climateaudit.org Steve's mission in life is ongoing – and he is now poking around in the cupboard of the IPCC report. Hiding the decline is a phrase that was used in the Climategate email release (a batch of emails released by a whistleblower at HADCru in Norwich) – but what did it mean. CAGW supporters skew the meaning but it was nailed down to the fact that tree rings were used to construct the hockey stick handle, especially chosen tree rings (but that is another twist in the tail), but the blade was caused by the joining at the hip in the late 20th century of a temperature record, substituting the last batch of tree rings (to the then present day, the late 1990s). Why did they use sticking plaster to glue together two different temperature records? The reason has been known for years, but is denied – the tree ring record did not show a temperature increase of note in the 1980s and 1990s. It didn't support the CAGW song sheet. Hence, it was substituted with an instrumental temperature record (that may have more to do with the urban heat cycle than anything in the real world). This is what hiding the decline means – hiding the decline in the tree ring record. What this new paper has done is bring the issue back into the limelight – so we can assume the BBC will ignore it completely, and most of the media also. The politicians will swan along in their usual fashion, completely oblivious of everything outside the bubble they live in, and the climate scientists will find something wrong with the paper, or the authors – probably both. In other words, the truth is out – for a second time. Will anyone take any notice?