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Big Controversy
Tue Sep 02, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook’ Climate Change series.
Climate Change has been a contentious issue since it was first presented in the 1930’s. This
month, we are going to examine a current debate over this issue. A recent paper by Drs. Willie
Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, claims that the
present period of rapid climatic warming may not be unusual in the last millennium. This view
has set off a, shall we say, lively banter among climate researchers.
Here’s Dr. Soon.
What we [eventually] have done is to look, without any pre-bias viewpoint, at climate
indicators that would be able to tell us historical changes as far back as, let’s say, a
thousand years. That would means indicators like from tree ring, how fat or how slender the
tree width is, and then let’s say even isotopic measurement, you know, the concentration in
ice core or even sea sediment.
So, what we found is that while indeed from the time let’s say 800 AD to 1300 AD or so, there
was a period of general warmth, [ok?] And that period is known in climatology as the Medieval
Warm Period, [ok?] And then from 1300 to 1900 or so there is a period called the Little Ice
Age which mean all temperature appear to be cooler.
And then you see that on all these individual location, all this climate indicators. You see
that the 20th century is not so unusual in the sense of unusually warmth or even its
precipitation or its rainfall to be very extreme one way or another. And then we are working
on, of course, how to explain all this.
Next week, we look at response to the paper. The Weather Notebook is funded by The National
Science Foundation, and Subaru.
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