This is hardly a surprise:
“In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.
“I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” “The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the “Little Ice Age” took hold in the 14th century. … The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be “gotten rid of.”
“In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the “hockey stick,” because of the shape of the temperature graph. “Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.
First of all, it’s impossible to convince anyone from Minnesota that “global warming” is a bad thing. Unless you’ve stood outside at a bus stop for 45 minutes in -40 wind chills, waiting for a school bus, you can’t fully understand that the idea of a warmer planet sounds pretty darn good. Furthermore, it’s quite obvious to every Minnesotan that the planet has been getting warmer for a very long time, considering that THE ENTIRE STATE USED TO BE COVERED WITH GLACIERS!!!!!
Furthermore, anyone with a background in medieval history is well aware of the medieval warm period… how on Earth would the Vikings have established agricultural communities in Greenland that lasted for almost 500 years if its average annual temperature was -11C then as it is now? It’s not as if they had the benefit of Dan Marino and his Isotoners, after all.
“Global warming” is little more than the latest excuse for the expansion of central government power. It has been cooked up to replace the dead concept of Marxism and the dying concept of Keynesian economics.
Whenever one considers the general “consensus” on anything, always keep in mind that most people are unthinking, maleducated idiots.