Climate alarmists have been doing their best to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period lest it upset such notions as current warmth being unprecedented and CO2 driving temperature. Michael Mann high-sticked it brutally. But can you believe it? Even as the MWP was picking itself up off the ice, they turned around and saw Brutus holding a dagger. Or rather Globigerinoides ruber. Because a new study based on this particular planktonic foraminifer says the record “consistently shows the Roman as the warmest period of the last 2 kyr, about 2 °C warmer than average values for the late centuries for the Sicily and Western Mediterranean regions.” Uh, so much for unprecedented temperatures.
Now you can see at once the implications. All those polar bears you think you’re seeing? You’re imagining them. They died out at the same time Julius Caesar did, or possibly the smart-aleck Vespasian.
Now to be sure one study is not “the science”. And the Western Mediterranean is not the world. But if the Roman Warm Period was warmer even than the Medieval or the 20th century, with atmospheric CO2 dragging along at 280 ppm, we’re gonna need some new models. In togas.
Among other things, this discovery reinforces a point we’ve made before about the Medieval Warm Period and others; provided the explicit subject is not the man-made global-warming crisis, scholars and others are very open, sometimes enthusiastically so, about the fact that climate has always been variable and that present conditions are anything but unprecedented. And they blurt out other inconvenient truths as well.
For instance, in commenting on the study, the Archaeology News Network blog adds that “The climate conditions derived progressively towards arid conditions and later colder ones coinciding with the historical fall of the empire, as stated in the new study” which is interesting since we’re normally told heat brings drought, and civilizational collapse, at least in the future. And the authors themselves also incautiously observe of the warming followed by cooling, “We hypothesis the potential link between this Roman Climatic Optimum and the expansion and subsequent decline of the Roman Empire.” Warmth good for civilization, cold bad?
O Josephe, dice non ita est.