I just started reading The Pursuit of Reason, a history of The Economist researched and written over a ten-year period by Ruth Dudley Edwards and published on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in 1993. It’s a great read, and James Wilson, the founding editor, has a lot to contribute on the subject of free markets and free trade.

The paper was founded with the purpose of documenting the harm done by government tariffs, restrictions and subsidies, and arguing in favour of a laissez-faire political economy. It relied heavily on statistics and clear reasoning. It was uncompromising. Wrote Wilson in the issue of 13 February 1846:

The more we reflect upon the experience of the past — the more we watch what is now going forward in this country, the more irresistibly are we brought to the conclusion that the only functions which a government can exercise with advantage to society are those connected with the maintenance of order, the peace and security of life and property, and the raising of the necessary funds for those objects; and, moreover, that whenever a government or the legislature step beyond those simple duties, they do so at the hazard of doing much more mischief than good.

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In a new paper, published in the journal Energy & Environment, Craig Loehle reconstructs the 2000-year temperature record without using tree rings as a proxy. He gets the following trend. Note the prominence of the medieval warm period and the little ice age, both of which are conspicuously absent from Mann’s hockey stick and various other reconstructions favoured by alarmists such as Al Gore.

He discusses in detail the reasons for omitting the abundant tree ring proxies. Here’s the abstract:

Historical data provide a baseline for judging how anomalous recent temperature changes are and for assessing the degree to which organisms are likely to be adversely affected by current or future warming. Climate histories are commonly reconstructed from a variety of sources, including ice cores, tree rings, and sediment. Tree-ring data, being the most abundant for recent centuries, tend to dominate reconstructions. There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data. Data in each series were smoothed with a 30-year running mean. All data were then converted to anomalies by subtracting the mean of each series from that series. The overall mean series was then computed by simple averaging. The mean time series shows quite coherent structure. The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being approximately 0.3°C warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites.

A lengthy and forthright discussion by people considerably more qualified than I am, and with participation from Loehle himself, can be found at Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit site. It’s worth reading before picking holes in the paper.

Update: Something just occurred to me. The pronounced warm period prior to the year 1000 is missing from most reconstructions I’ve seen, because they all cover only the last 1000 years. Those charts, when they haven’t been piped through Michael Mann’s hockey stick maker, include the medieval warm period around 1200-1300 and little ice age around 1700-1800. Turns out if you go back just a little bit more, you get an even higher temperature peak than the medieval warm period. One wonders if the data endpoint selection for the “usual” charts is deliberate.