medieval warming

817 can't beleive no node before for this or even myths, added

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Discredited climate deniers like Judith Curry, Patrick Moore, Anthony Watts, and Gregory Wrightstone, who have been vocal for decades, received renewed attention in 2023 from right-wing media figures, who seemed to be turning to views that stray further and further from established science.

Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia. She resigned from Georgia Tech in 2017 citing climate “craziness” and has been called out by other climate scientists for taking public positions reliant on debunked climate change denialarguments.

Patrick Moore is a former nuclear energy consultant and climate change denier who falsely claims he is a co-founder of Greenpeace. Anthony Watts runs a junk science climate denier blog and is a senior fellow at the fossil fuel-funded Heartland Institute. Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist who worked for the natural gas industry for 20 years, started a consulting firm for energy companies, and is now the executive director of a climate change denial non-profit.

Gregory Wrightstone – Executive Director

MS in Geology

Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist (BS Waynesburg College and MS West Virginia Univ.), bestselling author (Inconvenient Facts), and an Expert Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6).

Mr. Wrightstone has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers, publications and commentaries concerning climate change and energy. He is a popular guest for media outlets on television, radio and podcasts, having done nearly 300 interviews in 2022 alone.

He had a 35-year career in the energy industry, focused primarily on the Appalachian Basin of the eastern United States, culminating in his role as a founding partner and VP of Exploration for Mountaineer Keystone.

Four-time President of the Pittsburgh Association of Petroleum Geologists
President of the Eastern Section AAPG
Founder and President of the Pennsylvania Coalition for Responsible Government, a state-wide free market advocacy group.
Co-founder of Pennsylvanians Against Common Core

Executive Director Wrightstone is a strong proponent of the scientific process and often refers to a basic tenet of English law: Audiatur et altera pars or “Let both sides be fairly heard.”

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pix gregory Wrightstone, a geologist, sits before the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee. Wrightstone has spent most of his career working for and contracting with gas companies.

An early-morning state House committee meeting Wednesday drew an unusual number of protesters to the state Capitol — many of them unusually dressed.

The reason for their discontent was the meeting’s featured testifier, a geologist who rejects mainstream climate science, and who has spent most of his career working and consulting for natural gas companies.

The demonstrators were from the Better Path Coalition and other groups, and came dressed as mythical creatures like unicorns and leprechauns in an effort, they said, to show that while the creatures are imaginary, climate change is real.

The geologist, Gregory Wrightstone, was tapped to testify by Daryl Metcalfe, one of the most conservative members of the House and chair of the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, who said he invited Wrightstone to debunk “myths.”

Wrightstone doesn’t deny the earth is warming, or that CO2 has increased rapidly since industrialization. But he told assembled lawmakers that based on his study of geologic records, he believes warming started significantly before industrialization, in the 17^th century.

He said the warming the warming since then is natural, and he argued that it’s actually a positive thing.

He referenced the Little Ice Age — a period of unusual cold that scientists believe peaked sometime in the mid-1600s

“This cold period was marked by crop failure, famine, and mass-depopulation because of naturally-occurring global cooling,” he said. “Earth and humanity have benefited greatly from what’s been called the long, slow thaw.”

Most scientists don’t dispute that there was some natural warming after the cold snap of the 17^th century.

But Wrightstone’s broader conclusion, that current warming trends are natural and untethered to CO2 emissions, is directly contrary to the scientific consensus.

Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Penn State who specializes in ice core testing, said he doesn’t believe there is any natural explanation for the rapid warming that has been measured since the 20^th century.

“We see the warming,” he said. “And then we ask, well is it the sun? No, the sun, if anything is going the other way. Is it the oceans? Well, heat’s going into the oceans, it’s not coming out. Well, is it anything else we can find? No, it isn’t. The CO2 explains what’s happening and nothing else does.”

Michael Mann, an atmospheric science and geoscience professor, also of Penn State, agreed.

“While climate does change naturally, we are warming the planet at an unprecedented rate, putting carbon into the atmosphere a million times faster than the natural geological increases in carbon dioxide that were responsible for e.g. the warmth of the early Cretaceous period,” he wrote in an email.

Citing information gathered by the National Research Council, NASA estimates the earth has warmed by approximately 0.7 percent over the last century, which it says represents a rate of warming roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of ice-age recovery.

Climate change is already harming both human and natural systems.

Wrightstone, who has a master’s degree in geology, told the committee that while he has published papers on paleo-climatology, he hasn’t written any on contemporary climate science.

He has self-published a book on his theories.

Wrightstone spent most of his career in the natural gas industry.

After his testimony, he confirmed he worked as a geologist for the Pittsburgh-based gas company Texas Keystone for 20-odd years, but said the experience doesn’t influence his current work.

“If I was still receiving payment or being influenced by them, yes,” he said, his gas industry work might be a factor. “But that has no influence on me. That was in a past life.”

However, Wrightstone remains involved, in various capacities, with the industry.

After working for Texas Keystone, Wrightstone started his own business, Wrightstone Energy Consulting. He has frequently written and been quoted as a natural gas consultant in articles and videos for Hart Energy, a Houston-based energy industry publisher, and in ones written for or aggregated by similar industry publishers.

Asked when he had stopped consulting for gas companies, Wrightstone said he still does “a little bit when I can, but I’ve been so busy I turn down almost all my work.”

“I’ve got to make some money,” he added.

He is also on the advisory board at conservative think tank The Heartland Institute—a position for which he said he accepts no money. The organization has been known to accept considerable funding from the oil and gas industry, and has worked to sow doubt in climate science. }}}

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new spin on old bs

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/08/26/marohasy-s-machine-learning-paper-gets-schooled

gun island book medieval pop drop (1492 geno and black death led to reforestation affects climate?!

https://www.ecowatch.com/native-americans-colonization-climate-change-2627721578.html

The widespread genocide of Native Americans by European colonizers between the 16th and 17th century killed so many that it helped cool the globe, according to new research.

A study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews calculates that the 56 million indigenous deaths across the Americas caused by disease and European-led massacres led to the overgrowth and reforesting of large tracts of agricultural land, contributing to a 0.15C degree drop in the early 1600s known as the Little Ice Age.

"For once, we've been able to balance all the boxes and realize that the only way the Little Ice Age was so intense is ... because of the genocide of millions of people," coauthor Mark Maslin told CNN.

As reported by the BBC:

"The [research] team reviewed all the population data it could find on how many people were living in the Americas prior to first contact with Europeans in 1492.

It then assessed how the numbers changed in following decades as the continents were ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery and societal collapse.

It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah.

The area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France.

This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ that the concentration of the gas in the atmosphere eventually fell by 7-10ppm (that is 7-10 molecules of CO₂ in every one million molecules in the air).

'To put that in the modern context - we basically burn (fossil fuels) and produce about 3ppm per year. So, we're talking a large amount of carbon that's being sucked out of the atmosphere,' explained co-author Prof Mark Maslin,"

deeper dive:

CNN, The Guardian, BBC, Miami Herald, NY Daily News

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