A 1,200 year time series.. that's definitely in the climate area.
That's saying that since the continents and earth's currents haven't changed, we're in the same age, AMOC is a minor technicality, and the oceans would need to rise to the straight of Panama to be significant.
Plate tectonics for example shows you can’t even assume an area’s latitude is consistent, just look at the fossil history of Antarctica. Humans have dumped so much carbon and methane in the atmosphere even 100 years ago was quite different.
- The climate has *always* changed. It’s been warmer. And yes, it’s been cooler. There is nothing abnormal about the climate changing.
- There is actually very little scientific proof that the current up tick, is human-made. Yes, there’s correlation with the Industrial Revolution, but that’s all it is atm, correlation. There’s little verifiable proof. It’s speculative. It’s a theory. Yes, there’s overwhelming consensus, but that’s still doesn’t make it fact. And consensus has been off target plenty of times in the past.
- “The science” isn’t always as fact / truth based as it would like us to believe. Scientists are human too. Egos, career aspirations, groupthink, jealousy, etc. The scientific method is a stunning standard. Unfortunately, it’s implemented / executed by humans, flawed humans.
There’s three sources exemplify #3, of course there are others.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-has-there-been-so-littl...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosau...
https://longevity.stanford.edu/how-the-sugar-industry-shifte...
I say that as someone from Texas that lived in LA for several years. Texas weather changes by the hour and this time of year it is advisable to keep an eye on it. In LA, you could go weeks without checking the "weather".
This is incorrect, and is a very common misunderstanding of what the term "anecdote" means and what the actual problem with anecdotal data is.
The dichotomy is between "anecdotal evidence" and "scientific evidence," and the important distinction is not that the latter simply has more data points than the former. The critical distinction is about the methodology used to gather the data, not merely the number of data points gathered.
Not all anecdotes are scientific data points, but all scientific data points are anecdotes in isolation.
Longer time series are indeed composed of many samples/anecdotes.
Presumably the earth system isn't at anything resembling an attractor right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are trying to use related techniques to try to detect qualitative changes in the system dynamics (like bifurcations).
Maybe someone more knowledgeable could chime in on whether/how measurements at a single point on the earth's surface might be used to do that?
It doesn't prove climate change one way or the other, but that is a discussion that ceased to be meaningful decades ago. Climate change is real, it is significant, and it is caused by humans. Further arguments about that are a (deliberate) waste of time.
Having accepted that, and dismissed the time-wasters from the conversation, we can look around for things that we notice. One of them is the way it affects the times that trees bloom, giving us an opportunity to discuss the way that affects other aspects of the ecosystem.
That, in turn, helps inform conversation about just how important the consequences are. Unlike the fact of climate change, it's not obvious how much the consequences matter to us, and what should change to avoid them. That is a conversation worth having, but it has been impossible while we're still listening to people reciting decades-old falsehoods.
Seriously…
It was sad when I checked some time ago how many ancient Japanese companies have closed in tbe last 50 years.
My average comment quality is pretty terrible, but these are on par.
1200 years is a serious timescale, I think humans generally struggle reasoning about long durations or very vast distances. Which leads to them instead postulating how all these other more present, more recent and nearer things can be to blame when what you really need to do is zoom out (in space and/or time).