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ClimateMovie Fact Check: the Holocene

17 Apr 2024 | Science Notes

Continuing our Fact Check series on Martin Durkin’s new movie (which you should watch) we turn to the part where the movie discusses the interval over the past 20,000 years in which the cold era of glaciation gave way to our present interglacial: “With milder weather humans began to emerge from their caves and, several thousand years ago, we see the rise of the first great civilisations, in a blissful period which, according to many studies, was considerably warmer than today. This is known as Holocene climate optimum.” A Holocene Climate “Optimum” (HCO) thousands of years ago? And for now never mind the implications of “optimum”. Focus only on the endless stories, especially last year, about how it’s the hottest it’s been in 125,000 years. It was a conspicuously cherry-picked number since by sheer lack of coincidence the last glaciation began… 125,000 years ago, and the previous Eemian interglacial was warmer for purely natural reasons. But it can’t be right if the HCO was warmer than today. So was it? Fact check: it was.

Geologist and “petrophysicist” Andy May has posted a nice summary of the issue here. He includes a graph combining a proxy record from Greenland with one from the Makassar strait in tropical Indonesia:

Both show a rapid warming over the interval from 9000 to 8000 BC, followed by a long slow cooling to the present. These are not the only papers reconstructing the Holocene temperature history but almost all of them show the same pattern. And as May points out, with the same temperature picture emerging from two places so far apart, it wasn’t just a local phenomenon.

And another thing. We said not to focus on the term “Optimum” while investigating the fact. But now that we know, it’s also important to note that the Holocene Climate Optimum was a key component in the development of civilization. As Steven Koonin said in the movie, “It was called an optimum because people thought that warmer was better.” As those who winter in Florida still do for some reason.

4 comments on “ClimateMovie Fact Check: the Holocene”

  1. I have been trying to get a "scientist" to tell me .
    What is the ideal temperature of the globe?
    How can humanity achieve it??

  2. Yes this new movie is a must see and there's a wake up call even for you JR. I'm referring to Dr. John Clauser's statement and I quote: "I'll come right out and say it. It has nothing to do with CO2 at all." This man has a Nobel Prize in Physics and so maybe you will believe him instead of a lowly Engineer like me, who's been telling you exactly that for the past 5 years. Wake up man and stop pretending that you can avoid the cost of the ACTS ( http://www.dextras.com/climate.html ) by playing statistical games with the enemy.
    "Many equations can prove me right but a single well designed experiment can prove me absolutely dead wrong." Albert Einstein. That's the only acceptable end game here. It's time for you to step up and simply admit it.
    Kenneth G. Dextras, B. Eng., McGill '76

  3. This article is okay. All articles here today were recommended on my blog. ......
    A previous article here complementing Climate the Movie, was awful, as was the movie itself. .....
    The Climate movie is a total embarrassent for conservatives. It is filled with myths. Most embarrassing is how conservatives celebrate it. This conclusion is from someone who has a blog strongly opposing CAGW predictions, Nut Zero and EVs, with over 750,000 lifetime page views. .......
    There is no way to be sure the HCO was warmer than 2023. There was real time HCO no global average temperature. Most LOCAL proxies do show warmer. But when averaged to create a fake global average, the HCO variations are reduced to two long warm periods within the years from 5000 to 9000 years ago. They seem warm enough (more than +1 degrees C,) to be confident they were actually warmer than 2023. Higher HCO sea levels from other proxies support that.
    None of the warm periods in the past 5000 years have accurate enough proxies to claim they were warmer than 2023. I doubt if they were. ......
    Most important about this movie is it tries to convince viewers in the first 30 minutes does nothing and much later slanders government climate scientists simply because they work for the government. That is a leftist style tactic.
    Clauser's statement on CO2 proves he is a climate science imbecile -- dumbest statement I have read from a conservative in 26 years of climate and energy reading.
    I wrote a short essay describing exactly why the Climate film was awful:
    https://honestclimatescience.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-recent-climate-movie-is-awful.html

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