The Medieval and Roman Warm Periods in Antarctica..Reviewed 22 November 2006

[IGBT]

Text

The US, British and Italian researchers say their findings indicate "warmer-than-present climate conditions" at the times and locations of the identified presence of the southern elephant seal, and that "if, as proposed in the literature, the [Ross] ice shelf survived this period, it would have been exposed to environments substantially [our italics] warmer than present." Their data also indicate that the level of this warmth (which began with the inception of the Roman Warm Period and ended with the demise of the Medieval Warm Period) was so significant that the intervening Dark Ages Cold Period - which is readily evident in various types of paleoclimate data obtained from many places around the world - was not intense enough to drive the seals from Antarctica.

 

[Fike]

Not a very well regarded organization.

one opinion of their agenda is here:
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=24

 

[CycloWizard]

Originally posted by: Fike
Not a very well regarded organization.

one opinion of their agenda is here:
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=24

They got $90k from Exxon over a ten year period? That's not even enough to hire a grad student, let alone buy a research result. It's not unusual for companies to fund research and it doesn't imply any impropriety (unless the amount is very large, of course).

The most recent literature (at least that our environmental engineering seminars see fit to discuss) says that water, not carbon dioxide, is the primary contributor to the greenhouse effect. Of course, atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide are highly correlated, as they are the primary products of organic combustion processes. We are in effect creating more and more water from hydrogen that was previously bound up in an underground organic fossil fuel. The effects of this on the environment are pretty complicated and I'm not really in a position to speak on it, but it seems that decreasing CO2 emissions is not necessarily the real solution that people once thought it was.