Years ago before there was a lot of paleo climate data, there were some rather simplistic graphs of ancient climate used to make basic points like “around this time it was warmer than around this other time when it was cooler. Maybe. One of those graphs depicts the now debunked “Medieval Warm Period.” (We now call this the Medieval Climate Anomaly, which included both warm zones and cool zones, was on average, globally, kind of warm, but not as warm as today.)
One of those graphs is shown here, but I’ve carefully labeled it so it will not be misunderstood:
This graph was shown on the Senate Floor by James Inhofe, the famous climate science denier from Oklahoma. This graph has been long discredited. Senator Inhofe should be censured for this.
You should know that this graph has a long and interesting history …
My friend and colleague John Mashey has spent a considerable effort documenting the past use and abuse of this graph, running down its likely origins, and so on. You will want to have a look at this. John’s work is most recently presented in two locations, a blog post, and a PDF of the blog post, which may be necessary because there are so many graphics in the original.
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Note, it’s not so much that it has been discredited, it was the best there was in 1965, estimated by a fine scientist to cover 21×34-mil path of England, using the best data he could get. Some people might want to think England is the world, but it isn’t, and Lamb was clear about that.
I’d say that it was an approximation to reality, that rapidly got replaced by a sequence of better approximations as people really geared up in the 1990s. TO some extent, it highlighted how little was then known
The improvements form a great science detective story, as people got more and more clever at teasing out signal from noise in challenging data records they have no time machines for. They ahve to work with the data they can get, not what they’d like to have.
Inhofe is not a scientist, although he apparently seems to think an anonymous Opinion article in the Wall Street Journal is authoritative enough to show the Senate. 🙂
Discredited may be the wrong word, you are right, in this context. It has been overturned, or more exactly, the concept has been updated.
Discredited applies more to the current use of the old, overturned idea, by US Senators!