Entropic Man, thank you for this:

"Note that humanity survived the last glacial period (5C cooler than the 20th century) with hunter-gatherer technology and various native peoples continue to live at high latitudes. Cold is survivable for people with the right skills.

Surviving warming is harder. A healthy person dies when the temperature goes over 35C wet bulb for more than a day. This is already happening in India during pre-monsoon heat waves and people are dying as a result."

I'm genuinely interested. If the last glacial period was 5C cooler than the 20th century, and if we've been cooling for 5,000 years, then the immediately post-glacial period must have been (considerably?) warmer than now. Agreed?

So humanity must have survived worldwide variations in temperature of at least 5C and possibly 6,7, or 8C (i.e. between the last glacial period and the immediately post-glacial period)? In other words, we're an adaptable bunch. The thing is, the human population was much, much smaller then, with fewer competitors for increasingly limited resources when it was 5C colder than now, and they would be able to inhabit an area around the equator and current tropics to survive, without having to fight for limited resources. What say you to the catastrophic impact of the Little Ice Age, when populations were much bigger (but by the same token, very much smaller than now)? Millions of people during the Little Ice Age, who died as a result of the cold - directly or indirectly - would take issue if they could with the idea that "Cold is survivable for people with the right skills."

And even during the "Beast from the East" period, we had headlines every day saying things like "UK weather: Big freeze death toll could rise above 2,000 as it emerges Met Office warned ministers a month ago":

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/04/uk-weather-big-freeze-death-toll-could-rise-2000-emerges-met/

It seems to me that your confidence that warming would cause more harm to human health than cooling is probably misplaced, but that's just my perception. I don't suppose either of us are in a position to prove our beliefs on that subject are correct.

It's an interesting discussion, though.

EM: "Cold is survivable for people with the right skills."

The right skills including being able to burn all available fuels.

The right skills including being able to burn all available fuels.

Mar 24, 2018 at 10:16 PM | rhoda

And the ability to remove and wear the best insulating fur from other animals

"Surviving warming is harder"

Rubbish. All the evidence shows otherwise.
Excess winter deaths from cold is, of course, well known and accepted in regions closer to the poles, and yes, people can die from high temperatures, in places where it gets seriously hot. But there are surprisingly few in places like India, where an enormous population of over 1 billion mostly live without modern Western comforts and technology. And even there, people die of cold in India when it comes to regions that experience it infrequently:

The long and the short of it is that humans adapt quite well to the environments they live in, especially if they are wealthier. For the poorer, surviving excess heat sometimes just means having to survive until nightfall, with the aid of copious water, shade, and maybe a large building, tree, or river.pond with thermal inertia. On the other hand, surviving lethal cold can mean finding more complex means to simultaneously feed, heat, and protect yourself from the elements continuously, possibly for months at a time.

By the by, has anyone here read either of Brian Fagan's books, which seem to be on topic? "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850" and "The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization". I haven't yet read them, but will look out for them now.

Having read it, I can recommend Geoffrey Parker's "Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century". It should give pause for thought to any, such as EM, who think that cold is easier to survive than heat (though of course, everything is relative - too hot and too cold are both bad, we are lucky to live when we do).

Mark Hodgson, i have not read any of those books but, the consequences of sudden global cooling, are very well documented:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
1816 is known as the  Year Without a Summer, because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F).[2] This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[3]

Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (the largest eruption in at least 1,300 years after the extreme weather events of 535–536), perhaps exacerbated by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines. The Earth had already been in a centuries-long period of global cooling that started in the 14th century. Known today as the Little Ice Age, it had already caused considerable agricultural distress in Europe. The Little Ice Age's existing cooling was exacerbated by the eruption of Tambora, which occurred near the end of the Little Ice Ag

"Other large volcanic eruptions (with VEIs at least 4) around this time were:

1808/1809 mystery eruption (VEI 6) in the southwestern Pacific Ocean
1812, La Soufrière on Saint Vincent in the Caribbean
1812, Awu in the Sangihe Islands, Dutch East Indies
1813, Suwanosejima in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan
1814, Mayon in the Philippines

These eruptions had built up a substantial amount of atmospheric dust. As is common after a massive volcanic eruption, temperatures fell worldwide because less sunlight passed through the stratosphere."

"According to a 2012 analysis by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, the 1815 Tambora eruption caused a temporary drop in the Earth's average land temperature of about 1 °C. Smaller temperature drops were recorded from the 1812–1814 eruptions."

"This period also occurred during the Dalton Minimum (a period of relatively low solar activity), specifically Solar Cycle 6, which ran from December 1810 to May 1823. May 1816 in particular had the lowest sunspot number (0.1) to date since record keeping on solar activity began. The lack of solar irradiance during this period was exacerbated by atmospheric opacity from volcanic dust."

Whether there are patterns to volcanic activity, and we are due a "big one" or series of large ones, I have no idea. I appreciate that not all volcanic eruptions produce the same sort of wrong/right emissions.

More about the Year Without a Summer

"Across the pond, cooler- and wetter-than-normal conditions led to the failure of the crop harvests for potatoes, wheat, and oats in Ireland and Great Britain, leading to the worst famine of the century. Frost was present throughout the summer months. Hungary saw brown snow, while Italy saw red snow, both due to the volcanic ash in the atmosphere. London also reported snow — in August.

The Far East was not immune. China's rice crop suffered due to unusually low temperatures leading to famine there as well, and snowfall was reported during the summer. Snow and frost were even reported in Taiwan, which is normally tropical.

The explosion of Mount Tambora was heard up to 1,600 miles away. Ash fell over 800 miles away. The volcanic eruption has been blamed for up to 71,000 deaths. Besides the famine caused by the temporary climate change, the volcanic eruption is also blamed for the severity of the typhus epidemic in Europe and the Mediterranean in the years immediately following; and for a new strain of cholera that broke out in India because the normal monsoon season was disrupted.

The U.S. saw a migration of farmers from the New England states to the Midwest as one of the major long term effects of the eruption; and it was during that cold, rainy summer in Geneva, Switzerland that Mary Shelley began writing her most famous work: the novel Frankenstein. "

71,000 deaths in the vicinity, but how many worldwide from the Global Cooling, famines, hypothermia etc?
What about the typhus epidemic?

http://notrickszone.com/2018/03/25/alarmism-takes-a-big-hit-flood-of-new-scientific-findings-show-nothing-unusual-happening-climatically/#sthash.7fLGW6XY.dpbs

Today’s warming doesn’t stand out
"The authors write that the contemporary warming of the 20th century “does not stand out in the 2500-year perspective” and is “of the same magnitude as the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Climate Anomaly.”"

Have you read the papers? The one NTZ says demonstrates recent continental Europe warming is unexceptional (which we kinda knew already) is actually a proxy study from a Swedish Fjord. The authors threw in a continental Europe record for comparison. Here's some text from the paper:

Most of the proxy records in the North Atlantic indicate a clear warming trend for the last 100-200 years (Hald et al., 2011 and references therein) similar to our data picking up the warm 1930s and the 1990s (Fig. 8). The 500-yr long reconstruction of Stockholm winter temperatures also demonstrates that the 20th 30 century has experienced four out of five warmest decades over the last 500 years: 1905-1914, 1930-1939, 1989-1998 and 1999-2008 (Leijonhufvud et al., 2009). Gullmar Fjord temperature record shows that when considering a 3-point running mean temperature variability, the most recent warming stretching to 1999 does not stand out in comparison to the RWP and the MCA, similar to the Scottish loch data (Cage and Austin, 2010) and the North Atlantic SST composite (Cunningham et al., 2013) but in contrast to the Malangen Fjord record (Hald et al., 2011), according to which the last 100 years are the warmest in the last 2000 years

So Tricky Zone is cherry-picking his quotes, and the study missed out the last 18 years of modern warming, about 0.2C.The hilarious thing is (b) the source the paper uses as a comparison with continental Europe is none other than PAGES 2K! The most recent article to confirm the hockey stick. Here's an extract from the abstract

The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between AD 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

So the study Trick says supports 'nothing exceptional' says the exact opposite. You couldn't make it up.

The next paper points out that 'The current rate of warming is unmatched for the past 2000 years and seasonal snow cover is at a minimum'

The next only goes back to 1820, another is a 200 page+ PhD thesis which I have not read but does not seem to be focussed on climate or temperature on decadal scales.

You get the idea. No Tricks Zone is misnamed.

Radical Rodent, the terms "Medieval Climate Anomaly" or "Medieval Warm Epoch" as opposed to Medieval Warm Period, just seem to be botched attempts by the Hockey Team, including Real Climate, Skeptical Science, Mann and William M Connolley (of Green Party and Wikipedia notoriety) to admit there was a Medieval Warm Period, without admitting a mistake in Mann's Hockey Stick.

If someone is TRYING TO PROVE that manmade CO2 is the planet's only temperature control knob, there is nothing anomalous in Mann's Hockey Stick at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

So the study Trick says supports 'nothing exceptional' says the exact opposite. You couldn't make it up.

The next paper points out that 'The current rate of warming is unmatched for the past 2000 years and seasonal snow cover is at a minimum'

The next only goes back to 1820, another is a 200 page+ PhD thesis which I have not read but does not seem to be focussed on climate or temperature on decadal scales.

You get the idea. No Tricks Zone is misnamed.

Mar 26, 2018 at 10:54 AM | Phil Clarke

So why did Mann make it up?

Why is Climate Science misnamed?

ECS? Models? Maybe they are wrong, or at least beginning the walk back.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/26/remember-when-we-had-to-reduce-co2-emissions-to-zero-to-save-the-planet-ncar-says-never-mind/

"Remember when we had to reduce CO2 emissions to zero to save the planet? NCAR says – Never mind.

Anthony Watts / 3 hours ago March 26, 2018

From the NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH (home of Dr. Kenneth Trenbert) and the “backpedaling on climate, it’s a travesty” department comes this story that sure looks like they realize climate sensitivity is lower than originally thought. Or, maybe it’s because they finally realize they can’t preach for low emissions when their owncoal-power-driven supercomputing center in Wyoming has a massive carbon-footprint."

Reconciling Paris Agreement goals for temperature, emissions
New study finds two targets don’t always go hand in hand

"BOULDER, Colo. — As society faces the challenge of limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, new research finds an apparent contradiction: Achieving that goal doesn’t necessarily require cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero, as called for in the Paris Agreement. But under certain conditions, even zero emissions might not be enough.

The Paris Agreement, a global effort to respond to the threats of human-caused climate change, stipulates that warming be limited to between 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). It also stipulates that countries achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of this century. But the relationship between the two — is the emissions goal sufficient or even necessary to meet the temperature goal? — has not been well understood.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists used a computer model to analyze a variety of possible future scenarios to better understand how emissions reductions and temperature targets are connected. The study, published March 26, was led by Katsumasa Tanaka at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan and co-authored by Brian O’Neill at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research."

In a publication called Nature Climate Change.....

Climate Science has never been good at admitting that Land Level rises and falls, not just Sea Level.

http://notrickszone.com/2018/03/26/groundbreaking-new-paper-finds-global-warming-ice-melt-not-related-to-sea-level-rise/#sthash.4mYOeJjn.dpbs

"Geophysicist and tectonics expert Dr. Aftab Khan has unearthed a massive fault in the current understanding of (1) rapid sea level rise and its fundamental relation to (2) global-scale warming/polar ice melt.

Succinctly, Dr. Khan concludes the two have little to nothing to do with one another.

That’s because land height changes — subsidence (sinking) or uplift (rising) — connected to the Earth’s gravitational attraction and shifting plates assume the dominant role in determining sea level rise and fall.   The extent to which thermal expansion from rising ocean heat contributes to sea level rise is, as Dr. Khan indicates, “definitely a conjecture”."

Radical rodent

Use your search engine to research "polar amplification".

Entropic Man, do you mean this?

“Polar amplification” usually refers to greater climate change near the pole compared to the rest of the hemisphere or globe in response to a change in global climate forcing, such as the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) or solar output (see e.g. Moritz et al 2002).2 Jan 2006
Polar Amplification « RealClimate
www.realclimate.org › archives › 2006/01

Does this explain why the Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice extents both seem to expand and contract, over years, but not at the same time?

Polar Bears are doing fine, so Climate Science has to make do with lumps of sea ice "the size of Wales" snapping off Antarctica. What else is sea ice supposed to do? Keep on expanding into some of the world's most stormy seas, and not snap?

Radical rodent

Take a look at the high Arctic temperatures here.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

Compare early years and recent years and you will notice two things.

1) Winter temperatures have increased.

In Winter there is no insolation, little outward radiation and therefore no effective greenhouse effect. Temperatures tend to drop to the no GHG minimum.(Remember 255K?) What heat comes in is carried by incoming air and water. The general opinion is that the Winter warming is due to increased heat transport from lower latitudes. There is no ice melt, so all that heat goes into increasing the temperature.

2) Summer temperatures have not changed.

You may remember an old classroom experiment. Fill a beaker with ice and water. Add a thermometer and watch. The temperature settles close to 0C and stays there until all the ice has melted. The incoming heat is melting the ice, providing the latent heat to turn ice at OC to water at OC. The water only warms much above 0C once all the ice melts.

In Summer there is energy coming into the high Arctic from sunlight as well as incoming air and water. As in the experiment, that energy goes into latent heat melting the ice rather than warming the environment. Air and surface temperatures remain close to 0C.

Increasing the greenhouse effect and/or the incoming energy does not increase the Summer temperature, it just melts the ice faster. You would not expect to see warmer Summer temperatures in the high Arctic or the high Antarctic until the ice is gone.

Mar 27, 2018 at 12:39 PM | Entropic man

But do you see a negative correlation between sea ice extent in Antarctic and Arctic waters?

Is that why Climate Scientists and explorers keep getting stuck and/or obstructed by sea ice that they thought could not be there?

You would not expect to see warmer Summer temperatures in the high Arctic or the high Antarctic until the ice is gone.

Mar 27, 2018 at 12:39 PM | Entropic man

How many times have we been told to expect Arctic sea ice to be gone?

Isn't this another scarey feedback mechanism, that has not happened?

Real observations beat Climate Science Theory and Modelling again. RealClimate and the Hockey Team are going to get frozen out of funding, due to all the negative feedback from the Planet, and it's Taxpayers.

"All that aside, your explanation goes to demonstrate my own hypothesis, where the “greenhouse effect” is just the air being heated on surfaces, then being circulated around by convection, so… thank you."

Mar 27, 2018 at 3:05 PM | Radical Rodent

"You would not expect to see warmer Summer temperatures in the high Arctic or the high Antarctic until the ice is gone."

Mar 27, 2018 at 12:39 PM | Entropic man

Does this explain why summers in the UK have not got any warmer, and why Climate Science has had to report record temperatures from Heathrow Airport instead, as more people use the BBC's favourite UHI to jet off to the warmer climates they prefer?

If Global Warming just results in reduced numbers of days below freezing, where is the problem

"You may remember an old classroom experiment."

Yes but I can't remember the classroom experiment that showed CO2 heating faster at 400ppm than 280ppm.