If Romans started keeping temperature records in 200BC, wouldn't the next 30 decades be the hottest on record?

For a long time I actually answered 'questions' like this, but that's because I like to write, having once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way been a newspaper reporter for a big city newspaper. Given the current times we live in that line of work seems as quaint as buggy building or changing the ribbon on a typewriter. Arrh..them were the days! What I remember most about what I admit was a relatively short career as San Francisco's answer to Clark Kent was our unofficial motto..."What they conceal, we reveal!" Which brings us to the series of nonsense questions such as the above. The facts negate this poster's premise. I will explain: Reporting facts, such as ,who, what, where, why and how requires speaking to the original players. The chain of evidence has to be followed and protected because people's reputations are at stake. A reporter has to actually speak to the mayor, or the congress critter, or the cop, or for that matter the robber. The city manager, or the fire captain, or the doctor that saved the life of the child and even the child...all of that HAS to happen and be faithfully recorded or there's no story. But there's even more. The story has to be confirmed. Several witnesses, a video tape, a hand written letter, the coroners report...all of the parts have to fit. The same thing applies to science. The data has to be collected. The people doing the collecting have to be legitimate. The scientific method has to be followed to the letter. The data has to be checked and rechecked by others, as a reporter's work is checked by an editor, and God help you if you didn't follow ALL the rules, or leave something out or worse, put something in. You can do that on the editorial page, but your immediate 'Perry White' will ream your anatomy if try to slip a smoothie into the mix of a straight news account. Science itself is 'straight news'. If it's going to appear on the front page above the fold it damn well better be exact. In the case of the 'climate change' story the data is fully factual, as the data has been checked and rechecked, no laws of physics ignored, no 'opinion' allowed. The data speaks for itself. If politics entered the picture, the 'editors', that's the entire scientific community, would be more than happy to destroy the career of any scientist who attempted to substitute fiction for fact, or opinion for observed and confirmed data. The 'deniers' have a narrative...that narrative states that science is crooked, scientists can't be trusted, science lies and in the case of climate change science works for the 'far left liberals', the socialists and the communists who want to raise your taxes and destroy 'capitalism'. The narrative includes that man cannot alter the climate and the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuels has no bearing on climate at all. I dunno, folks...my editor, now long gone to that Great Press Room in the Sky would have tossed me out a window if I came in with a fable like that...and rightly so! I don't want to suggest that 'deniers' should be heaved over the parapet, but their rants and raves when stacked up against the data amount to total nonsense, codswallop and pur,unadulterated bull @#$$ ! You can put that on page one..above the fold!

Yes indeed, if they Romans had all our tools and research they would have indeed noted warming. And, with our tools and measurements they would have identified the source: the Sun. With little infrastucture, no permanent buildings, little population and lots of land available they would have liked what the saw for their future.

Too bad it is not the same situation now. The sun has decreased irradiance and yet temperatures are rising. Just imagine if the sun should turn to a more active period as during the Roman years. We do know it is cycling up and the best guess for a solar maximum is about the year 2013 and that will add slightly to the greenhouse warming.

So, the warming then was natural. Right now, the natural direction would be towards cooling.

Now we have large permanent populations built near the coasts. We have vast infrastructure that is not easily moved. We have cities built that can't be pulled down because the area is now good for farming.

We know that rapid change will not be good for us. We have oncoming water shortages. We have Alaskan villages that already have to be moved. It is not like the early days of undeveloped Europe. And we know that the cause is us and we potentially have the choice of whether to mitigate the costs of adaptations.

Frankly, 200BC has very little to do with us now. The cost of waming is much greater now. The speed of warming is much greater now. The acidification of the ocean is a corollary problem. And these changes are not natural.

Ahh that old denier chestnut 'The Roman warm Period'

I can't really be bothered with such nonsense, it is something that seems to blow up deniers skirts, but few of you seem to look beyond the hype of what appears in denier sources.

If you did you might find it's just hot air (pardon the pun)

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/05/tony_abbot...

That denier 'experts' like Ian Plimer reference it without ever quoting their sources should tell any real skeptic that something is wrong, sadly deniers are not skeptics and like most denier theories it falls apart with a little real research. Like what areas the proxy data comes from and evidence that is as simple as "they used to grow grapes there" when you can grow grapes in 'those' same places today. But then deniers have never been very demanding about evidence as long as it deniers climate change.

I can’t quite get you to Rome, 200BC, but this is pretty close.

Have a look at the data in this speleothem temperature reconstruction.

Mangini et al. (2005) Spannagel Cave, Austria δ18O Data and Temperature Reconstruction. It is from a cave in the Austrian Tirol, about 800km from Rome. The data spans the period 90BC to 1935 AD. ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/speleothem/europe/austria/spannagel2005.txt

You’ll need to copy/paste the data to notepad, save as .txt, then import to excel to graph it... but it’s well worth the effort.

The Roman warm period, Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are all clearly visible.

This index is one of the most useful sources of Paleoclimate data. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/data.html

I totally agree, but then again, if you read the IPCC report they have said that ALL past warming periods where only regional in nature. The one at the height of the ancient Egyptian empire was also just during the summers.

Then again, they also like to use the 1950 to 1990 as an average even though we saw a large downturn in temperature during this period. Then they complain when others cherry pick data.

"Aren't modern AGW believers being a bit disingenuous with the "hottest decade on Record" term..."

I'm beginning to actually for sorry for these guys. So I'll cut them some slack and not call that disingenuous but rather unscientific. It's a PR term with no practical scientific meaning. It's rather desperate, designed to appeal to the unwashed masses. Fortunately, we live in an open society so these PR tactics have much less power than they did in the past. It's just a matter of time until the unwashed figure it out and move on the real problems, if they haven't done that already.

if the 130yrs of recording temps was all that they considered yes you would be right but its not they look all the info they can get ,ice cores mud cores , and even in roman times we had an affect on the climate and the warming coincides with the roman rio tinto mine in spain and the mass production of metals with no pollution control what so ever , it is holistic thing you can not pick one little thing out to destroy this theory and yes the earths climate does change and has changed but it always changes for a reason , volcanic action ,meteor strikes shifts in the earths axis etc ,idon'tt know if global warming is true or not but the answer isn;t in nit picking

HI,

I accept this concept really they can be doing it.

Chapter 5 from "How to Lie with Statistics"

The GEE Whiz graph.

You can use a graph to say that things are changing rapidly, or that things are stable.. you simply change the scale, and the time frame. (if you read the legend it says the exact same thing but you can make it look as impressive as you'd like.)

The honest graph from Roman times to now would look a lot more impressive than the graph concocted by the alarmunists from 1900-present.

Yes, they are being really dishonest, but they're being selective about what they call a record. As the Romans didn't have thermometers, they should be ignored -- especially because understanding what the world was like during their time makes all their crying pointless.

The interesting thing is, that the ambient temperature was higher during Roman times in Europe than it is today. There were, according to Roman account, palm trees on the cliffs of Dover.