An analysis of the "new hockey stick".
Era of the Pharaohs: Climate was HOTTER THAN NOW, without CO2 ? The Register
It confirmed what I was mentioning earlier, that the data has been spliced with instrument readings at the end, so it isn't a graph of the same thing all the way along - it is reconstructions at one end and instruments at the other.
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Marcott and his colleagues, published today in leading boffinry mag Science, have this to say:
Our results indicate that global mean temperature for the decade 2000–2009 has not yet exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene (5000 to 10,000 years ago)
Forget the spike at the right in this context
The graph produced by the researchers, to layman's eyes, appears to contradict this: but that's because Marcott and his crew say they produced it by bolting on the latest version of the famous/infamous "hockey stick" graph, produced partly from thermometer readings in recent times by the famous climate zealot Michael Mann, at the end. The problem with doing that is that the rest of the graph cannot and does not display any variation on scales shorter than 120 years: had there been thermometers recording temperatures globally for the last 10,000 years there may have been many such up-and-down spikes to be seen. That's why Marcott et al freely acknowledge that the world was hotter than it now is for much of the period before 5,000 years ago.
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It also looks at the predicted consequences for warming now against what actually happened in the past given the same conditions, according to this reconstruction.
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Nonetheless, according to those more realistic experts, even if we stop emitting carbon right now - so, perhaps, containing eventual warming to levels like those seen in the pre-Egyptian millennia - we could expect a metre of sea-level rise above present levels by the year 3000 AD.
And yet the ancient Egyptians, despite having lived through pretty much exactly that scenario, don't appear to have seen anything like those sort of sea levels. Respectable geologists project that sea levels just a metre above today's would see the port city of Alexandria become an isolated island or peninsula off the Egyptian coast: but that didn't happen. The Old Egyptian town of Rhakotis on the site which later became Alexandria was a major urban centre right back to 2600 BC and before. This would hardly have been the case had it been largely inaccessible from the fertile farmland of the Delta (much of whic would have been flooded and useless anyway in that scenario, as is expected in the imminent future by alarmists now).
It's interesting stuff, anyway - and doesn't really seem to support the agenda its authors might support.
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*(I'm not particularly impressed with the author's choice of language - zealot, warming, doomsayer etc. - I don't believe this adds anything of value)