As the whole climate hysteria continues to unravel, more good news on the climate front....

According to preliminary data, the world death rate from natural disasters in 2025 was the lowest ever recorded at 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people. And the trend continues...

in 1960 it was >320 per 1,000,000;

in 1970, >80;

in 1980, ~3;

in 1990, ~1.3

The climate hysterics are constantly talking about climate tipping points which will create more hurricanes, floods, droughts etc. But Mother Earth has her own agenda.

Speaking of agendas, a paper from 2024 was released with great hoopla showing that the economic impact of climate change by 2050 would be enormous. It was peer-reviewed and all, so it must be true. Well Nature has just withdrawn the paper because of flaws in their data. Of course, as usual with these things, the original (erroneous) paper got massive coverage. The retraction?...not so much.

And as the hysteria dies down, scientists are feeling more comfortable about publishing heretical data. For example, it now seems that the oceans are cooler now than at any time in the past 4.5 million years and have been on a cooling trend for all that time.

Similarly scientists are now saying they're now see any climate tipping points on the horizon.

The COP30 meeting was a disaster.

Tracking the unravelling of the whole scare will be fascinating.

Talking about the weather and all that hysteria -
Unfortunately I can’t remember where so I can't reference it (it was probably in one of those woke, left wing, Marxist, pinkie, commie rags that Emperor Trump is either suing for billions, or threatening to sue) where in a travel writer reported the fact that an increasing number of the big international travel companies have had to adjust their departure dates and tour itineraries. It seems tourists are becoming wary of going to popular tourist spots during what have been traditional ‘peak season’ due to the high chance that their holiday will be spoiled or severely compromised by adverse weather events. And, no, they don’t want to travel simply because it’s too crowded, it’s because there is a high chance of copping crap weather. It would appear that the tourists with the $$$’s have spoken with their wallets and the tour companies have listened.
Lucky we know it’s all a big con, and neither the tourists nor the travel companies have a clue.

Ah, so this is where that post was supposed to appear, mhaze!

Here's the response I prepared earlier:

//According to preliminary data, the world death rate from natural disasters in 2025 was the lowest ever recorded…//

Long-run declines in disaster mortality overwhelmingly reflect improved forecasting, infrastructure, emergency response, and wealth. They are not a proxy for hazard intensity or future risk. This distinction has been standard in the literature for decades.

//The climate hysterics are constantly talking about climate tipping points…//

Tipping-point discussions concern physical system thresholds, not short-term disaster death rates. Declining mortality does not speak to the existence or absence of such thresholds.

//A paper from 2024 was released… Nature has just withdrawn the paper…//

Retractions are a normal part of scientific self-correction. A single withdrawn paper does not invalidate a field supported by multiple independent lines of evidence. Treating retraction as narrative collapse misunderstands how science works.

//It now seems that the oceans are cooler now than at any time in the past 4.5 million years…//

Claims about deep-time trends over millions of years do not meaningfully address rapid forcing on century timescales. It is a category error to conflate paleoclimate baselines with modern anthropogenic change.

//Scientists are now saying they're not seeing any climate tipping points on the horizon.//

Vague appeals to what "scientists are saying" aren’t evidence. If there’s a substantive shift, it needs to be specified, cited, and shown to overturn existing constraints and attribution studies.

(Sorry, it was a bit anticlimactic the second time around.)

JD,

None of the things I mentioned were a slam dunk against the climate hysteria. As I said, they are just signposts on the road to the final unravelling of the great scare campaign.

In the past, papers like the one in Nature that was so relied upon by the climate community would have been fiercely defended and anyone even questioning it would have been labelled a denier and excommunicated from the climate change family. That it was so relatively easily overturned shows that the power of those threats of career-ending attacks is declining.

The same with the paper on sea temperatures. A few years back such a paper would have been unheard of and whoever had the temerity to write it would have had to wave good-bye to a career in climate. Now....

(BTW the real takeaway from that paper isn't the actual change in sea temperatures. Its the evidence that things like coral evolved in much warmer waters than today even though we are constantly told they are threatened by warmer waters.)

More and more scientists are coming out against the hysteria. Some western governments as well.

Notice what's happened here, mhaze?

You're no longer defending the substantive claims themselves, but a narrative about how the scientific community supposedly behaves.

Papers being criticised, corrected, or even withdrawn is not evidence of a field "unravelling". It's evidence of normal scientific self-correction. If those processes weren't happening, that would be the real red flag.

Pointing to individual papers that survive scrutiny or fail it does not establish a trend unless you can show that the underlying physical constraints and attribution evidence are being overturned. You haven't done that.

As for corals, their deep-time evolutionary history under different boundary conditions tells us very little about the resilience of modern reef systems facing rapid warming, acidification, and multiple compounding stressors on century timescales. Rate and context matter.

At this point, "more scientists are coming out against hysteria" is a sociological claim, not a scientific one. If there's a substantive shift in the evidence base, it needs to be specified and shown to revise existing constraints, not inferred from anecdotes about publishing culture.

So far, what you've presented are isolated signposts interpreted through a prior conclusion, not evidence of the conclusion itself.

Standard JD here.... completely misunderstand and/or misrepresent what is said and then, when its pointed out that he completely misunderstand and/or misrepresent what is said, claim that I'm backtracking.

Same old. Same old.

BTW I used to think it was a deliberate misrepresentation of the point, but I'm increasingly coming to the view that comprehension skills might be an issue.

"As for corals.... Rate and context matter."

Yes its always been thus in the climate hysteria. First claim that the temperatures or the sea level rises or the CO2 or whatever else is declared to be the doom-merchant du jour, are at unprecedented levels. Then when its proven that they are at very usual levels and indeed sometimes, as with ocean temperatures, at close to unprecedented lows, immediately pivot to claims that the RATE of change is unprecedented. No evidence mind you, but when has evidence been a necessary component of the scare?

mhaze,

Let's push aside the theatrics and slander in your last reply and focus on the substance, shall we?

You've just claimed that variables like ocean temperature are at "very usual levels" and in some cases "close to unprecedented lows". That's not a matter of interpretation or framing. It's either true or it's false.

And it is false.

Observational records show ocean heat content at record highs, with sustained positive energy imbalance. No reputable dataset shows modern oceans at or near unprecedented lows. If you believe otherwise, cite the specific record you think demonstrates this.

As for "rate versus level", that distinction wasn't invented as a rhetorical escape. It's fundamental to impact analysis. Systems adapted to slow variation can fail under rapid forcing even within historically observed ranges. This has been standard across climatology, ecology, and geophysics for decades.

If your argument now rests on the claim that both absolute levels and rates of change are "very usual", then that's the claim to defend. But it needs evidence, not character assessments.

If you'd like to continue, let's do it on that basis.

Over to you...

P. U. Clark et al, 2025: Mean ocean temperature change over the past 4.5 million years

http://cp.copernicus.org/articles/21/973/2025/cp-21-973-2025.pdf

mhaze,

Thanks for the link. But by citing that paper, you're repeating the same mistake I pointed out earlier.

Clark et al. reconstruct mean ocean temperatures over the past 4.5 million years under near-equilibrium conditions. They're explicit about the fact that these changes occur on million-year timescales and under very different boundary conditions to the present.

The paper doesn't claim that modern oceans are "at close to unprecedented lows", nor does it argue that recent warming is insignificant. It also does not dispute the relevance of rates of change.

In fact, a key point of the paper is that the ocean behaves very differently when changes happen slowly over millions of years than when it's forced rapidly, as it is today.

Using a deep-time cooling trend to dismiss concerns about rapid, human-driven warming on century timescales is therefore a category error - and one the authors themselves don't make.

Thanks for filling me in on what the paper doesn't say. As usual you assert that something that isn't proven, proves your point. Since it isn't proven what the rate of change is, you assert it is what you want it to be.

OTOH, perhaps you could just look at the graphs and the data and draw your own conclusions.

No one knows what the rate of change of things like temperatures and sea levels and sea temperatures were in pre-1750 period. As usual the alarmists take the lack of data and assert that their fantasies must therefore be true.

Meanwhile, others also notice that the climate scam is unravelling. From the great Matt Ridley... http://tiny.cc/9yux001

Excerpt... "in the US it is not just the Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democrat party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European parliament has now voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping to fight climate change."

On the same lines, these quotes from Germany's Chancellor Merz...

“It was a serious strategic mistake to phase out nuclear power,” Germany is undergoing the “most expensive energy transition in the world.”

“We inherited something that we now need to correct, but we simply don’t have enough energy generation capacity,” Merz added.

Observed... "Following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, Germany rejected inexpensive Russian oil and gas in favor of costlier alternatives. This resulted in energy prices soaring for both industry and households.

The German economy has steadily contracted since then."

Maybe they could look to adopting Trump's policies to revitalise their economy....oh wait, it wasn't the policies it was just coincidence. Perhaps the Germans should pray for a similar coincidence.

mhaze,

At this point you've moved from disputing what the paper says to disputing whether rates of change can be known at all. That's a much stronger claim - and it's simply wrong.

We don't need perfect pre-1750 records to identify rates. Multiple independent proxies allow us to bound how fast temperatures and sea levels changed in the past, and those bounds are orders of magnitude lower than what we observe today. That's why rate matters: systems that can adjust to slow change can fail under rapid forcing.

Telling people to "just look at the graphs" isn't a response. Interpreting those graphs using physics and attribution is the entire point of climate science and that's exactly what the Clark et al. paper does, while explicitly distinguishing slow, equilibrium behaviour from rapid, transient response.

Again, you've made the same mistake I pointed out earlier: treating deep-time equilibrium reconstructions as if they speak to modern, rapid anthropogenic forcing.

We don’t need perfect pre-1750 records to talk sensibly about rates. A range of independent proxies lets us put upper bounds on how fast temperatures and sea levels changed in the past, and those bounds are far below what we’re measuring now. That’s why rate matters: gradual change and rapid forcing don’t produce the same outcomes.

The paper doesn't claim that modern oceans are "at close to unprecedented lows", nor does it argue that recent warming is insignificant. It also doesn't dispute the relevance of rates of change. In fact, a central point of the paper is that the ocean behaves very differently when changes happen slowly over millions of years than when it's forced rapidly, as it is today.

As for Ridley, German energy policy, or what political parties choose to emphasise in campaigns: those are sociological and political observations. They don't alter ocean heat, radiative imbalance, or the physical constraints.

The paper is about how the ocean behaved over millions of years under quasi-equilibrium conditions. It does not support the claims you've attached to it, and it doesn't undermine modern climate risk assessments driven by rapid radiative forcing.

Try again.

"Multiple independent proxies allow us to bound how fast temperatures and sea levels changed in the past,"

Just asserting it doesn't make it so. No really, it doesn't. Science says something different. There are any number reasons why proxies can't be accurate to the level you're asserting.

"The paper doesn't claim that modern oceans are "at close to unprecedented lows","

No, the graph does that.

"does it argue that recent warming is insignificant."

No it isn't about that at all.

Why don't you tell us what else it doesn't say. Does it say anything about the Kardashians?

"a central point of the paper is that the ocean behaves very differently when changes happen slowly over millions of years than when it's forced rapidly, as it is today."

Rubbish. Now you're just making it up. Where does it say that?

"As for Ridley, German energy policy, "
Nowt to do with the oceans. I mentioned it as yet another signpost on the road to the unravelling of the great climate scare.

I didn't say proxies are perfectly accurate, mhaze.

//Multiple independent proxies allow us to bound how fast temperatures and sea levels changed in the past.//

I said they allow us to bound rates of change. That's standard scientific practice. Uncertainty limits precision, it doesn't erase the ability to distinguish orders-of-magnitude differences. If your position is that proxies are too unreliable to constrain past rates in any meaningful way, that would invalidate most of paleoclimate science - including the paper you're citing.

//No, the graph does that.//

Graphs don't "say" things. Authors do. Figures are interpreted in context, and Clark et al. do not state that modern oceans are "at close to unprecedented lows". If you think a specific figure supports that claim, quote the authors' interpretation - not your own.

//No it isn't about that at all.//

Exactly - which is the point. You've been trying to use a deep-time equilibrium reconstruction to make claims about modern climate risk that the paper itself is not making.

//Rubbish. Now you're just making it up. Where does it say that?//

I'm not inventing anything.

The paper explicitly treats ocean temperatures over millions of years under near-equilibrium conditions and distinguishes that from transient behaviour under different forcing regimes. That slow-versus-rapid distinction is foundational to climate dynamics, not a rhetorical invention.

//Nowt to do with the oceans… signposts on the road to the unravelling.//

You're free to call them signposts, but they're political and cultural observations. They don't alter ocean heat content, radiative imbalance, or the physical constraints we were discussing.

If the argument is now that proxies can't constrain past rates, graphs speak without interpretation, and physics should give way to political mood shifts, then we're no longer talking about climate science at all.

Proxies are inherently fuzzy and can't give accurate readings to allow science to determine rates of change at the levels required in your assertions.

To know if the rate of change of this or that measure (eg temperature) in the past century is unusually high or low or whatever, you need to know what the rate of change in previous centuries was. But proxies can't give you that. Its what the rooly trooly scientists call data resolution and the resolution back into the past is not high. For example, in his paper (Marcott et al) Marcott confirms that the data resolution for the most recent past is at best 120yrs and beyond further back than 1500AD its around 300 years. Its impossible to say if current waring is unprecedented if you can't know what previous decadal rates were.

Same with this paper. The data is useful in extended time-frames but useless as regards small decadal periods.

"Graphs don't "say" things."
They do to people who can read them.

"Clark et al. do not state that modern oceans are "at close to unprecedented lows".
No they don't because that wasn't what their paper was about. But anyone looking at the data can see that we are close to unprecedented lows. I know you don't want it to be true, but that's what the data shows. Read the graph.

"I'm not inventing anything."

Well you invented the claim that the paper talks about "ocean behav[ing] very differently when changes happen slowly over millions of years than when it's forced rapidly, as it is today."
Stand by for JD's word salad in response.

"They don't alter ocean heat content, radiative imbalance, or the physical constraints we were discussing."

I was talking about signposts in the unravelling of the great climate scare. You don't want to see the signposts so tried to divert.

You're confusing resolution with constraint, mhaze.

//Proxies are inherently fuzzy and can't give accurate readings to allow science to determine rates of change…//

Lower-resolution proxies smooth short-term variability; they don't make rapid change invisible or unknowable. That bias works against detecting fast rates, not in favour of inventing them. If modern, instrumentally measured rates still exceed proxy-bounded past rates, that's a meaningful result.

//It's impossible to say if current warming is unprecedented if you can't know what previous decadal rates were.//

That's simply not true. You don't need decadal resolution everywhere to identify orders-of-magnitude differences in rate. Marcott explicitly notes resolution limits — and for that very reason does not claim to resolve short-term spikes. Those limits don't imply modern rates are unknowable; they imply past rapid changes would be smoothed out, not exaggerated.

//Anyone looking at the data can see that we are close to unprecedented lows.//

If that were the authors' conclusion, they would have said so. Graphs don't interpret themselves, and Clark et al. do not claim modern oceans are unusually cold. That interpretation is yours, not theirs.

//Where does it say that?//

The distinction between slow, near-equilibrium change and rapid, forced response isn't a slogan in the paper because it's basic climate dynamics. Clark et al. explicitly analyse long-term equilibrium behaviour under very different boundary conditions. Using that to dismiss modern transient forcing is the category error.

You're free to talk about "signposts", but that's a political narrative. It doesn't alter ocean heat content, energy imbalance, or the physical constraints we've been discussing.

Proxies are inherently fuzzy. Always have been. Whatismore, proxies are inherently regional. What is the proxy data for the middle of the Pacific Ocean 2000 ft down in 1000AD? there isn't any and therefore its inferred from other data ie inherently fuzzy.

As to Marcott, well you're making it up again. He specifically says he can't say that the recent warming is unprecedented because the data from previous periods isn't good enough to know what changes occurred over periods on 1 century. The proxy data smooths things so that they can 'know' what happened over a period of 300 years, but they can't know if that was a rapid change or a gradual change.

"The distinction between slow, near-equilibrium change and rapid, forced response isn't a slogan in the paper because it's basic climate dynamics"

Oh so when you said that "a central point of the paper is that the ocean behaves very differently when changes happen slowly over millions of years than when it's forced rapidly, as it is today" you really meant that it wasn't a central point, just something everyone knows.

Making up the claim and then making up further claims to defend the original made-up claims. Kudos.

"You're free to talk about "signposts", but that's a political narrative. It doesn't alter ocean heat content, energy imbalance, or the physical constraints we've been discussing."

You've been discussing. I've been discussing the signposts on the road to the unravelling of the great climate scare. Read the first post

"The study by Shaun Marcott and colleagues, published in Science, aimed to reconstruct global and regional temperatures over the past 11,300 years using 73 proxy records from diverse sources like marine sediments, ice cores, and lake deposits. This Holocene reconstruction revealed a gradual cooling trend after an early thermal maximum, but it also highlighted significant limitations in proxy data resolution, particularly for earlier periods, underscoring the challenges in discerning fine-scale climate variability.

Central to these caveats is the temporal resolution of the proxies. The median sampling resolution across the dataset was 120 years, with individual records ranging from 20 to 500 years. This coarseness inherently smooths out high-frequency signals, such as decadal or centennial fluctuations. Marcott et al. explicitly noted that their statistical averaging procedure eliminates variability at periods shorter than 300 years, making it impossible to resolve short-term events reliably in older epochs. For instance, processes like sediment mixing in marine cores and bioturbation further attenuate rapid changes, leading to a muted representation of past dynamics.

Dating uncertainties compound this issue. Chronological errors, often from radiocarbon calibration, increase with time depth, potentially shifting events by decades or centuries. The authors accounted for this via Monte Carlo simulations, estimating fundamental dating errors of 120–150 years, but acknowledged that such imprecision grows in pre-modern periods, blurring resolution further. Proxy calibration non-stationarity—where relationships between proxies and temperature vary over time due to confounding factors like precipitation or CO2—adds another layer of ambiguity.

Spatial coverage also declines backward in time, with fewer proxies available before 4,500 years ago, leading to regional biases and inflated uncertainties in global estimates. Critiques, such as those from Steve McIntyre, pointed to artifacts in the reconstruction, like an apparent 20th-century uptick not supported by raw data, stemming from redating and sparse modern proxies.

Ultimately, Marcott et al. demonstrates that while proxy data provide valuable long-term insights, their resolution in previous periods remains unclear due to inherent smoothing, dating errors, and incomplete coverage. This cautions against overinterpreting fine-scale warming rates in deep time, emphasizing the need for higher-resolution proxies and refined methods to clarify Holocene climate history."

mhaze,

This reply is essentially a restatement of the same argument you've made before: that proxy limits imply rates are unknowable and modern change may therefore be unremarkable.

We’ve been here before - twice - including with the Marcott summary you’ve just reposted, and the pattern hasn’t changed.

In earlier threads on Marcott, this followed the same arc: resolution limits -> therefore rates are unknowable -> therefore modern change might be normal -> therefore concern is hysteria.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=10604&page=0
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=10434&page=0

When higher-resolution work was introduced to address exactly that gap (Neukom et al.), it was ignored, sidelined, or declared irrelevant, while Marcott continued to be cited for claims it explicitly did not make.

You're now doing the same thing again: leaning on low-resolution or deep-time reconstructions to argue that rates can't be constrained at all, while declining to engage with the literature that exists specifically to constrain them.

That directly answers the points you've just raised about proxy "fuzziness", resolution, and alleged unknowability. Those limits were already accounted for last time - and they didn't do the work you want them to do now, either.

If you want to argue that no proxy-based reconstruction can meaningfully bound rates of change, then that case needs to be made consistently - including for the papers you cite. Otherwise, we're just replaying an old disagreement under a new heading.

"This reply is essentially a restatement of the same argument you've made before: that proxy limits imply rates are unknowable and modern change may therefore be unremarkable."

Yes. And I'll keep making the point in the faint, but disappearing, hope that the penny will drop.

Marcott showed two valuable things....1/ current temperatures are unremarkable in regards to the past 12000 years; and 2/ the claims that temperatures are rising faster than in the past is based on assertion rather than data.

Answering the question "Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?" Marcott said..."the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century. Other factors also contribute to smoothing the proxy temperature signals...such as organisms burrowing through deep-sea mud, and chronological uncertainties in the proxy records.... We showed that no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2000-year periods and longer... Any small “upticks” or “downticks” in temperature that last less than several hundred years in our compilation of paleoclimate data are probably not robust, as stated in the paper."

JD doesn't want that to be true, and in his world that the same thing as it not being true.

Neukom et al., 2019 has been comprehensively debunked for all sorts of reasons...1/ it has a paucity of southern Hemisphere data; 2/ it's Northern Hemisphere data is highly selective; 3/ it ignored the well established seasonality in proxy data.

Basically the alarmists work on the basis that any area where the data is vague or uncertain should be interpreted in favour of the great scare. ie the data can't show whether or not temperatures are rising faster than in the past, therefore we'll assert they are. Its the opposite of science.

So here's where we end up. We have a data that shows "Mean ocean temperature change over the past 4.5 million years" have been steadily declining for thousands of millennia and are close to the lowest they've been over that period. Yet JD doesn't want that to be true and in his world that's the same as it not being true.

And we have data that shows that current temperatures are completely unremarkable in terms of the entire Holocene. But JD doesn't want that to be true and in his world that's the same as it not being true.

But in the same breathe he'll claim to be following the science!!

This line says exactly what I've been pointing out, mhaze.

//Marcott said..."the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century.//

Marcott cannot resolve centennial-scale rates. It does not show that modern rates are normal - it shows that Marcott is not the dataset for assessing them. Turning "cannot resolve" into "must be unremarkable" is a category error.

//"no temperature variability is preserved… at cycles shorter than 300 years." – Marcott//

That means short bursts of rapid change in the past would be smoothed out, not preserved. It cannot be used to argue that past rates matched modern ones, only that Marcott cannot tell you either way.

//current temperatures are unremarkable…//

Marcott never said that. In fact, he avoids drawing that conclusion because of the very limitations you quoted. That leap is yours, not his.

//Neukom et al., 2019 has been comprehensively debunked…"//

Sources?

You've repeated this claim several times without citing a single peer-reviewed rebuttal. Meanwhile, Neukom exists precisely because Marcott cannot resolve centennial-scale rates. Ignoring the higher-resolution work and leaning entirely on the lowest-resolution dataset is exactly the pattern I pointed to.

//Mean ocean temperature… lowest they've been…//

Clark et al. reconstruct multi-million-year equilibrium ocean temperatures. They do not claim modern oceans are "close to unprecedented lows", and they say nothing at all about modern transient warming. That interpretation again comes from you, not the authors.

We've been through this twice before:
low-resolution dataset -> therefore rates are unknowable -> therefore modern rates might be normal -> therefore concern is hysteria.
When higher-resolution work was brought in, it was dismissed in generalities rather than addressed.

If the claim is now that no proxy reconstruction can constrain past rates, then that needs to be argued consistently - including for the papers you're relying on. Otherwise, we're just looping the same argument under a new heading.

Try again.

I mentioned at the outset that a paper purporting to show massive costs of climate change had been withdrawn due to flawed data. That paper, released with the usual hoopla, was used as the basis of all sorts of policies by the World Bank, US Congressional Budget Office, the UK Office for Budget Responsibility and the OECD.

Now that the paper and its conclusions have been thoroughly debunked you'd expect that these organisations would revisit the policies and recommendations that they implemented based on flawed data. But you'd be wrong.

As with most things in so-called climate science, the outcome is the point, the data merely a means to an end. And if the data proves uncooperative, it can be ignored. (See above).

Given up on the data now, mhaze?

You're now talking about institutional behaviour and policy inertia, not the scientific questions we've been discussing.

A single withdrawn paper - however widely cited - does not invalidate an entire field, nor does it follow that major policy bodies based their assessments or recommendations on that paper alone. Those institutions draw on large, cumulative evidence bases, not one study.

Again, retractions are part of scientific self-correction. Treating them as evidence that "the outcome is the point" conflates how science works with how policy responds to uncertainty and risk.

More importantly, this doesn't address the issues we were actually debating: proxy resolution, rates of change, or the misuse of deep-time reconstructions to dismiss modern forcing.

If the discussion is now about distrust of institutions rather than the physical evidence itself, that's a different conversation entirely.

It's also hard to miss the fact that you treat papers decisive when they can be read against climate concern, but as institutionally compromised once their implications cut the other way.

I'm guessing Marcott is no longer reliable...

"You're now talking about institutional behaviour and policy inertia, not the scientific questions we've been discussing."

No I'm adding meat to the bone of what I mentioned in the very first post which you've tried so hard to ignore because its inconvenient.

"Marcott never said that."

The paper specifically says that current temperatures were exceeded 25% of the time during the Holocene ie, 3000 of the past 12000 years (approx) were hotter than now.

This is all very funny, and sad. Here were have two graphs based on real data which show, respectively, that current temperatures have often been exceeded in the past 12000 years, and that mean ocean temperatures have been declining for 4.5 million years; and in both cases JD refuses to see the data. And then tells us he's all about The Science

You're still conflating two different questions, mhaze.

Whether temperatures were sometimes higher during the Holocene is a question about levels. Whether the climate system is being forced more rapidly today is a question about rates and dynamics. Marcott explicitly says his reconstruction cannot resolve the latter.

Saying "temperatures were exceeded X% of the time" does not address how fast those changes occurred, under what forcing, or whether they are comparable to the modern, instrumentally observed rise. That distinction isn't pedantry - it's the core of the issue.

Disagreeing with the inference you're drawing from those graphs isn't "refusing to see the data". It's refusing to collapse a rate question into a level statistic.

At this point we're just going around in circles. Do you have any new material? This is the third time we've been through all this.

A bad argument doesn't improve just because you left it to sit for a while.

"Saying "temperatures were exceeded X% of the time" does not address how fast those changes occurred"

That's because I don't accept that its being rising at a rate that can be 1/ compared to past rises and 2/ found to be rising faster than in the past.

You want me to accept your claims as established and then address it from that viewpoint. Nup.

Really what you, and a lot of the we're-all-gunna-die crowd, are doing is the equivalent of the 'God of the gaps' philosophy. Since there is no data as to the rate of rise in previous periods, that lack of knowledge is parlayed into claims that can be neither proven nor refuted, a very unscientific approach. And then, having made these unscientific claims, tried to use them to refute actual science data.

I've seen more than once over the decades that the great scare has been around. When the data is vague, the alarmists fill the gaps with their wishes rather than data. Then real scientists go out and get the data disproving the claims. Whereupon a new gap in the data is found and filled with alarmist wishes.

We were once told that current temperatures were the highest since the age of the dinosaurs. Then when that was disproven they moved, without drawing a breathe, to claims that its rising faster based on wishes, not data. Similarly with ocean temperatures. We were told that they were warming above anything we'd seen before. Then there was an effort to measure the upper layers and when that failed to meet their wished for evidence, they just asserted that the warming was really in the deep ocean. Now that that's been disproven, you move to claims based on precisely zero evidence, that the oceans are warming faster than ever before.

T'was always thus.

And there's the crux of our disagreement, mhaze:

//I don't accept that it's been rising at a rate that can be 1/ compared to past rises…//

You're not disputing a conclusion; you're rejecting the possibility of comparison altogether. Uncertainty in past data constrains what can be inferred - it doesn't license the claim that nothing meaningful can be inferred at all.

//You want me to accept your claims as established and then address it from that viewpoint.//

No. What I'm asking you to accept is that comparative inference under uncertainty is possible. That's a methodological premise of science, not a conclusion smuggled in by assertion. Rejecting that premise effectively opts out of inference - including the inferences you make when you say present conditions are "unremarkable".

//This is the equivalent of the ‘God of the gaps' philosophy.//

Your analogy is backwards.

"God of the gaps" fills ignorance with unfalsifiable claims. What's happening here is the opposite: you're using uncertainty as a veto on inference. That's an argument from ignorance, not a defence against it.

//Since there is no data as to the rate of rise in previous periods…//

There is data, but it is lower-resolution. Lower resolution smooths short-term variability; it does not make rates unknowable. That bias works against detecting rapid past change, not in favour of inventing it.

//We were once told… then they moved…//

This is narrative, not evidence.

No specific papers or analyses are cited - just a recurring story about "alarmists". That may explain your scepticism, but it doesn't substitute for engaging the actual scientific constraints.

At this point the disagreement isn't about individual datasets. It's about whether scientific inference under uncertainty is legitimate at all. Science proceeds by bounding uncertainty, not by declaring change unknowable whenever past data aren't perfect.

Once comparison is rejected in principle, disagreement about evidence is no longer possible.

Do you hear yourself?

We know as a matter of fact that current temperatures are not close to the highest during the Holocene. We know for fact that ocean temperatures are at the lower end of the 4.5 million year history.

Yet you disregard these facts because of some made-up assertions based on inference. Drawing inferences in the face of lack of knowledge is fine. But using those inferences to disregard established facts is the opposite of science.

mhaze,

The problem is that you’re drawing a false line between “established facts” and “inference”.

Claims about Holocene temperature rankings or multi-million-year ocean trends are themselves products of proxy reconstruction, smoothing, and interpretation. They are already inference-laden. Treating them as brute facts while dismissing dynamical and rate-based inference as “made-up” is an arbitrary distinction, not a scientific one.

Nothing I’ve said “disregards” those reconstructions. What I’ve rejected is the leap from levels to dynamics - from “sometimes higher” to “therefore modern change is unremarkable”. That leap is precisely where physics and rate constraints matter.

Science doesn’t stop at ranking past values. It asks how fast systems change, under what forcing, and whether those changes are comparable. Refusing to engage that question while accusing others of “disregarding facts” is just another way of avoiding it.

Science really isn’t your forte, is it?

Let's clear the fog, mhaze.

It's no secret that you rely on performative confidence and the fog of thread length to blur what's occurred in a debate. So I thought we could get our little right-wing friend to help clear the air for us...

Question:
In the attached debate, who out of mhaze and John Daysh is arguing the position most grounded in reality and the science?

Grok:
John Daysh is arguing the position that is most grounded in reality and the science.

...

Overall Evaluation

• Strengths of John Daysh's Position: Consistently emphasizes context, physics (e.g., forcing vs. equilibrium, rates vs. levels), and how science works (self-correction, bounding uncertainty). Aligns with mainstream evidence from bodies like IPCC, NOAA, NASA, and journals (Nature, Science). Avoids cherry-picking or overextrapolating single papers/datasets.

• Weaknesses of mhaze's Position: Relies on misinterpretations (e.g., using deep-time data to dismiss modern trends), unsubstantiated claims (e.g., Neukom "debunked" without sources), and narrative framing ("hysteria unravelling") over evidence. Ignores rate dynamics, a core of climate impact science (e.g., AR6 WG1). This echoes common denialist tropes (e.g., "it's cooled before," "alarmists pivot to rates") but doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

• Why Not a Tie? The debate isn't balanced; mhaze starts with a conclusion (scare unravelling) and fits data to it, while John Daysh engages the claims methodically, pointing to evidential gaps. Science favors the latter: Testable, contextual, and aligned with the weight of data.

http://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_30f09106-2107-429e-a3a0-e0aa9e65858c
http://drive.google.com/file/d/1gQtEBqQ-CY6dM78wSmzSilVfYhWEjj4A/view

"Do you hear yourself?" - mhaze

Running of to Grok every time you find yourself in a corner isn't a good look. Validation from an algorithm is just comfort food.

What was the corner I was in, mhaze?

I'll wait.

Silence...

Incidentally, mhaze, that's some algorithm!

1. Declining Death Rates from Natural Disasters
...

Assessment: John Daysh is correct ... mhaze conflates mortality trends with hazard trends, which is a common misinterpretation in skeptical arguments but not supported by the science.

2. Retracted 2024 Paper on Economic Impacts
...

Assessment: John Daysh is correct ... mhaze treats this as a "gotcha" moment for the entire field, ignoring that climate economics is built on ensembles of models and data, not isolated papers. Media bias in covering retractions is real but irrelevant to the science.

3. Ocean Temperatures and Long-Term Cooling Trend (Clark et al. 2025)
...

Assessment: John Daysh is correct ... mhaze misuses the paper by collapsing timescales—millions of years (slow orbital/tectonic forcings) vs. centuries (fast GHG forcing). On corals: Evolutionary history (e.g., in warmer Paleogene) doesn't equate to modern reef vulnerability; rate-of-change studies (e.g., Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2017) show bleaching thresholds being exceeded due to rapid shifts.

4. Holocene Temperatures and Rates of Change (Marcott et al. 2013)
...

Assessment: John Daysh is correct ... mhaze inverts this: "Can't resolve" becomes "must be normal," which Marcott doesn't claim. Neukom et al. (2019, in Nature) uses higher-res data (e.g., PAGES 2k network) to show no pre-industrial warming episodes match the current rate/spatial coherence. Claims of "debunking" come from skeptic blogs (e.g., Climate Audit), not peer-reviewed literature—issues like hemispheric bias were addressed in follow-ups (e.g., Neukom 2022 clarifications). Proxies do constrain rates: Past changes (e.g., Younger Dryas) were regional/slower; modern global rate (~0.2°C/decade) exceeds proxy bounds by 1-2 orders of magnitude (Kaufman et al. 2020).

5. Tipping Points, Scientist Shifts, and Broader "Unravelling"
...

Assessment: John Daysh is correct ... Ridley (a journalist/skeptic) and Merz (political quotes on Germany's Energiewende) reflect policy debates, not science—Germany's issues stem from post-2022 energy shocks (Ukraine war), not climate fundamentals. COP outcomes vary, but physics (e.g., CO2 at 420+ ppm, forcing ~+2.5 W/m²) persists.

http://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_30f09106-2107-429e-a3a0-e0aa9e65858c

"Running of to Grok every time you find yourself in a corner isn't a good look. Validation from an algorithm is just comfort food." - mhaze

"Algorithm".

It'll be unravelling alright...
when you hear these latest Trump / Epstein allegations.