Restating the Obvious

Over a barrel

I didn't know, until today, that anybody ever paid taxes in oak barrels. And if you'd asked me to guess where that happened, I wouldn't have said Finland. There's a reason IKEA furniture is birch.

But Finland it was: "They also note that 'a study based on oak barrels, which were used to pay taxes in AD 1250-1300, indicates that oak forests grew 150 km north of their present distribution in SW Finland and this latitudinal extension implies a summer temperature 1-2°C higher than today.' "

That's right, it's our old friend the Medieval Warm Period, the one that Al Gore, Marc Hoofnagle, Michael Mann and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say never happened.

Never mind the cows in Greenland at the time, and the shrines that were being built in the high Alps that were later -- during the Little Ice Age -- buried by glaciers -- the world has never been as hot as today, never in a thousand years!

Hoofnagle, a physician in training, even wants to make disbelief in the MWP a clinical disease, he calls it "denialism."

Really, this is pathetic. It's like finding people who still believe in psychoanalysis.

Hat tip: Steve McIntyre