It may be a caricature of climate science to speak of stable temperatures from the end of the last glaciation until the 20^th century. But if so it is a self-portrait, as big-league alarmists from Al Gore to Michael Mann have all made that claim repeatedly and vehemently. Mann’s hockey stick is the most famous instance. But we are told in all sorts of forums and in all sorts of ways that “science says” that after it warmed up at the start of the Holocene there was essentially a flat temperature “handle” for millennia until the Industrial Revolution and then with a variable delay around 1900 or 1950 temperatures shot up the “blade” in an unprecedented way to unprecedented levels. And all the bickering over things like the Medieval Warm Period really amount to critiquing or defending this picture. Which is why Kenneth Richard puts together a compilation over at No Tricks Zone of 148 scientific papers from last year alone that show it to be a caricature. Like the paper that shows that the average temperature for the French Central Massif in the Holocene was 11.3°C, fully 4.1°C above present values, that it maxed out 7.8 thousand years ago, hit its minimum 1.7 thousand years ago and that for the last 200 years it has been cooling.

Given the state of the debate, the first point to be made here is not how dramatic such findings are for the supposed consensus. It is that even in the overheated rhetorical atmosphere of 2020 over 100 papers could be published disputing the consensus. And again let us be clear that these are scientific papers not advocacy. They say things like “Branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) have provided new perspectives on continental temperature reconstructions” not “Charles Koch paid me a lot of money to deny the obvious.” And they will be refuted, if they are refuted, by disproving the assertion that “Through the Holocene, the ΣIIIa/ΣIIa ratio showed a general decreasing trend (from 1.2 to 0.6, Fig. 2A, Sup Table 4) while the MBT, MBT′, MBT′_5me and CBT indices increased through the Holocene (from 0.17 to 0.29, 0.17 to 0.3, 0.26 to 0.39 and 0.52 to 0.71 respectively, Fig. 2B−D)” or by showing that this trend does not prove what the authors think it does, not by some variant on the inane gibe “Nyah nyah, how much did Charles Koch pay you to say ‘The ΣIIIa/ΣIIa values indicate a gradual change of brGDGT sources through the Holocene from lacustrine to terrigenous origins’?”

The other papers present a kaleidoscopic variety of methods and conclusions about a wide range of places from the western tropical south Atlantic to Subantarctic Georgia to Greenland and a time span from three interglacials back to the present. But what put them all in Richards’ list, and now brings them to you via us, is that they all break the hockey stick. Some break Mann’s stick, focusing on the period from around 1000 AD to 1900. Others break Al Gore’s stick that spanned the Holocene. Others look more at the time after the Holocene Climatic Optimum or even at variations within the 20^th century.

Science being complicated, as is climate, some show recent warming while denying that we are anywhere near MWP levels. Others emphasize that what we know, or think we know, about temperature patterns in the long and short run do not support the hypothesis that CO2 is the main driver. If for instance it is true that northwest China has seen no warming since the 1600s, and cooling since 1950, surely it requires at the very least that alarmists, and any scientists who aspire to the label reputable, should cease to tell us everyone who is not a fool or a knave knows the “settled science” tells us temperatures fluctuated within a narrow band for thousands of years before 1900 and since then have risen steadily around the planet in a phenomenon called “global warming.”

The debate seems not to be over after all.