The wine industry has kept meticulous records of harvest dates and temperatures for centuries. This study leveraged 600+ years of data to show a noticeable increase in temperature and shortening harvest window starting in 1988.
Quickly found an online source here [1]:
> The Paris region was mostly planted with white, particularly with a variety known then under the name of Fromenteau or Fromentot, which is known today as the Pinot Gris.
I had personally gotten that info from reading this very interesting book on the history of rural France during the last 2000 years [2]
[1] https://www.wineterroirs.com/2012/12/wine_in_the_middle_ages...
[2] https://www.amazon.fr/Histoire-France-rurale-origines-1340/d...
> The Romans introduced winemaking to the UK, in a period with a relatively warm climate. Their vineyards were as far north as Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire, with others in Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire, and probably many other sites. The wines were most likely fruity and sweet, fermented with added honey, and drunk within six months.[15] Winemaking continued at least down to the time of the Normans, with over 40 vineyards in England mentioned in the Domesday Book; much of it was communion wine for the Eucharist.
> ... When Henry VIII was crowned in 1509, 139 vineyards were recorded, 11 of which produced wine for the royal household ...
> The twilight of British winemaking tradition was brought to an end with the onset of the First World War, as the need for crops and food, and the rationing of sugar, took priority over wine production. For the first time in 2000 years, English wines were no longer being produced in Britain. ...
> Viticulture was revived in the 1970s onwards ...
The Roman Warm Period (coming around Caesar era to 400s, explaining the Migration Age) The Medieval Warm Period And the inverse, the Modern Cooling Period (between 1600-1800, if I'm not mistaken).
All three explain macro population movements. Yes, the Germanic tribesmen were climate refugees. So were maybe the European colonists of the New World and other settler colonies.
Remember that the 1700s was so cold relatively, the soldiers march even in summer with thick jackets and smokepipes.
Though, there was also the introduction of potato, which led to massive demographic explosion in the Protestant Northern Europe.
But I do see your point. Still, the Germanic tribes were the first climate refugees that we know, maybe after the 8.2 kya event [0] that led to the first cities in Fertile Crescent
Not quite. Those germanic tribes were fleeing the huns. The crossing of the danube in 376 by the goths (as war refugees) and the crossing of the rhine in the winter 405/406 by the alans and vandals (as invaders) allowed them to escape the huns. There were extreme climate events recorded in the late antiquity, but that happened more than one century later. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536 The Justinian plague occurred 541-549, amplifying the problems of the byzantine empire. Returning to the germans, also in the late antiquity, there is an obscure and unexplained event, in the period 500-550 the vistula and elbe basins were depopulated. Germans migrated from those places or they perished there.
In blunt words: no wonder the temperature rises if it is measured at a place that is surrounded with concrete and stone today.
It’s also the strategy of science and anyone who wants reliable reproducible results.
Climate change denialists only look for inconsistencies in others' work - if they find any whatsoever they discard the entire idea of climate change (a foregone conclusion, they already discarded it). If they find none they manufacture them by wilfully misinterpreting what is being presented. If they are confronted by problems in their own work it is hand-waved away as if it were some conspiracy or stick their head in the sand.
That is, if there's any sort of pretense of science whatsoever. A more mainstream sort of climate change denial you will see is right-wing news outlets saying something along the lines of "it is snowing, so much for global warming" during a snowstorm.
That's giving academics a bit more credit than they deserve. This is a theoretical idea of how they should operate, rather than what they actually do.
The problem of urban heat distorting weather station readings over time is very real. It has affected the US weather station network in the past. The problems were completely ignored for decades until climate "denialists" (actually: people outside academia who care about science) physically visited many of the stations, took photos and then wrote a big report which caught the attention of Republicans in Congress. They documented thermometers that had once been in open fields but were now next to air conditioner exhausts, transformers, mobile phone towers, main roads etc. An especially big problem is weather stations that were once in farmland and are now at airports, the biggest heat sources you can imagine! In fact over time there has been a lot of dropout of stations and now many of the remaining stations that report reliably are sited at airports.
They also did some work where they found stations that were still properly sited (the US has far more weather stations than needed, so this was possible), and looked at what happened when you used readings only from them. A huge amount of the warming trend simply vanished.
In the wake of that a couple of things happened:
1. Some of the stations the report highlighted were shut down.
2. Congress can't agree on much but, spending money is an exception. They funded a brand new weather station network with ideal siting, the latest sensors etc. Really state of the art, and so well done that even the non-academics who wrote the "denialist" report were satisfied with it. This is called the US Climate Reference Network (CRN).
So, happy ending right? Unfortunately no. There are several problems that persist:
1. The US CRN output isn't actually used by climate researchers. Instead they have kept on using the old broken network which they now adjust via models to, they claim, fix the problems. This is problematic because these are the very same people who blatantly ignored their own severe data quality issues for decades until bloggers noticed what was happening.
2. The old network was never actually fixed; the government just shut down the bad stations that were highlighted in the original report. This year the people who did that original report did another one where they once again visited weather stations, and they found that basically none of them were in compliance with the siting rules (which are objective, this isn't a matter of opinion). In other words, the claims that standards were raised were deceptive, some rules were written down but aren't being enforced.
3. The US CRN shows no warming trend whatsoever. This is for the entire USA since 2005. This data appears on its face to be incompatible with the claims of runaway warming and an impending crisis/emergency.
Take a look and see for yourself. Go here:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-tempera...
and then change the graph to plot "all months" and unselect nClimDiv leaving CRN. You'll see that the temperature trend is flat.
"A more mainstream sort of climate change denial you will see is right-wing news outlets saying something along the lines of "it is snowing, so much for global warming" during a snowstorm."
I think you've been left behind by recent changes. Attributing single weather events to climate change in either direction is indeed not supposed to be valid, but the new field of "attribution studies" does exactly that by claiming that individual events can be directly connected to climate change. The rules changed and now saying e.g. "it is snowing, that's evidence of climate change" is not only not right wing denial, it's now considered denial to object to such claims!
We're constantly being asked to trust that scientists of all stripes are trustworthy, honest, and behave as model scientists should. But when people dig into the details they constantly find non-optimal behavior along with a culture that doesn't seem to care. That's the source of the replication crisis, the source of constantly shifting claims about COVID, etc. Trust is easy to lose: when people notice that scientists aren't holding themselves to the highest standards, but demand us to act as if they do, how is trust restored?
> I think you've been left behind by recent changes
No. There may be people like you who exist outside academia, but still take an interest into networks of weather stations and the like, but the vast majority of climate change deniers takes are along the lines I described - "it's snowing, ergo suck it libs"
This may sound dismissive, but "look at this graph of this measurement you never think about but ignore this dataset, ok and only look at these years, ok now squint your eyes... does THAT look like climate change!?" feels like you're trying to dupe me, not convince me. Combined with the vaguely anti-science conspiratorial tone ("don't believe the scientists, they seem to care, believe me!" - um no?) and allusions to shenanigans over COVID... I'm afraid that I'm not on board.
"they have kept on using the old broken network which they now adjust via models"
So indeed you'd expect them to follow each other closely now.
There's no attempt to dupe you - a full treatment of the problems with temperature data is a book sized topic, that's all. The reason for the selection of years is simply because that's all the data that has been collected by the new network. By all means, treat this as a good faith attempt to provoke questions and further research. The CRN is just an example - the problem I'm getting at here is what it reveals about the methodologies and culture. Specifically, how do we know that people who claim to be scientists are actually using the scientific method? That's the topic I responded to.
For decades the US data collection system was degrading in ways that created false warming, but it wasn't the people who are paid to study climate who raised the alarm. It was volunteers. That should be a serious problem for any rational person who wants to know true things; scientists are meant to care about measurement error and take steps to minimize it. So you'd want at least some sort of post-mortem process to identify the root causes of this collective institutional failure, but, it didn't happen. Instead data accuracy became politicized and now researchers refuse to use the CRN even though it was built specifically to resolve disputes over data quality!
The problem here is actually more severe than this one case. Climatologists were well aware of other problems with temperature data! Data quality problems are common in science so that's not inherently an issue. But the scientific approach is to quantify and then communicate the flaws in data through CIs/error bars, then propagate those through any statistical derivation you do, and finally be honest about what the CIs are telling you even if that's "we can't say much". That's the point you were making originally and we agree. Climatologists don't do this. Instead they think up reasons the data must be flawed, "fix" it via post-processing and then issue new dataset versions without error bars. They don't only do this for data collected long ago. Once they opened that pandora's box they couldn't stop and now temperature readings collected even just 5 years ago are subject to large scale revisions post-hoc. These revisions don't just change individual data points. Entire trends appear or disappear due to the revisions.
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NCDC%20Jan1915%20and%20Jan...
That behavior is considered fraud in other fields and for good reason: the temptation to change the data to confirm your theory is too great if you allow that. Climatologists though, don't consider it fraud, they think it's normal and fine. Sure enough, there are problems like temperatures as measured by satellites and weather balloons not matching the modified temperature timeseries from ground based weather stations. This is the sort of thing you'd expect to see if the ground station data was corrupted but pointing out this divergence is considered "denialism" and verboten.
All this opens up lots of meta-scientific questions like, is the scientific method objective? Do the institutions attempt to enforce the usage of it? What even is the scientific method anyway, can you write it down in a way nobody will object to? Clearly here we have a major disconnect: if you did what climatologists do in a physics experiment, your papers would be retracted and you'd be booted out in disgrace. Yet both fields claim to be scientific.
the vast majority of climate change deniers takes are along the lines I described - "it's snowing, ergo suck it libs"
Sure, and that's indeed not a useful rebuttal to claims of long term trends. I don't know about "vast majority" because I don't know of any surveys that could be used to check that claim. But unfortunately it's also no longer particularly meaningful to check. Climatologists, governments and media are now all too happy to attribute individual forest fires, cold years, hot years etc to climate change. If they can do it then "it's snowing ergo suck it libs" is in fact a valid argument by the scientific institution's own standards. Hence my point: are they really scientific?
There are a lot of book sized (and larger) data sets and many people that study them.
More than a decade ago Richard A. Muller fell in with the climate deniers and studied the Urban Heat centre bias mythology to death hoping from the outset to find it true.
> When we began our study ( Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ), we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find.
> Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
> Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.
You seem to be fixated upon a long debunked point that never panned out under close study.
The BEST project you mentioned uses very similar methodologies as climatologists usually do, so it's not a surprise they replicated the results. As the quote you give makes clear, the BEST people took acknowledged-to-be corrupted data, assumed a priori that "correcting" that data is a legitimate thing to do, "corrected" it in largely similar ways and got largely similar results. That isn't really a surprise because replicability wasn't ever an issue under contention.
The issue under debate here is rather whether that's a scientifically legitimate approach to begin with, and whether it's the sort of thing people expect when they think of science. I don't see how editing observational data can ever be scientific. If you allow one field to do it you have to let them all do it and then what can be said with any confidence about what's true?
The problem is researchers usually start by saying "this question feels important, therefore, we will work with what we've got" and there's no incentive to stop and say "the data quality is insufficient for analysis". BEST claimed to address UHI effects but just like previously, when people dug into the details they found that large numbers of weather stations at airports and post offices had been classed as "very rural", for example, so the data here is just of garbage quality.
W.R.T. climatology specifically there probably is a slight rise in temperatures across the globe in the past decades - the satellite data suggests as such. But not much, certainly much less than predicted, and we only have such data stretching back a few decades so not much can be said about long term trends. By climatologist's own admission the surface temperature dataset is heavily corrupted, that's why they modify it so much. The modifications in the current era are relatively small but in the past e.g. first half of the 20th century they are much larger, effectively making the past colder than it was actually observed to be at the time. That's why all the papers and newspaper articles from the 60s and 70s discussing global cooling are now considered obsolete - they edited the data to remove the cooling but, once again, there was never any post-mortem into why their measurement methodologies failed so badly or why they collectively asserted a new ice age with so much confidence.
Finally, note that once we zoom out a bit from the question of SST reliability, there is still the problem of aggressive exaggeration and unscientific behavior elsewhere in the field. To quote Muller back at you:
"much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn't changed"
And the warmer temperatures could possibly be explained by more concrete and stone nearby. I'm not saying that this explanation is true, I'm just trying to see both sides of the picture.
The entire region is 13th century wine villages about the main Beaune centre .. with that modern stone 15th-century Hospices de Beaune.
There's a reason the area hit the 2015 UNESCO World Heritage List and concrete brutalist architecture wasn't it.
This new data set concerns Beaune. The paper says "Unlike Dijon, Beaune is still surrounded with vineyards situated at altitudes between 220 and 300 m (Fig. 2)."
Wikipedia says Beaune has a population of 20,551, which is about 2x that of 1800, and doesn't seem to be enough to have a significant regional heat island effect.