If the hockey stick graph had been authentic in showing fairly level temperatures for 1,000 years followed by a sudden increase in global temperatures in the last 20 years of the Twentieth Century, what would that have proved? The perpetrators of the AGW hoax, Michael Mann of Penn State University, Phil Jones of East Anglia University, and other assorted true believers all have said the hockey stick shows “unprecedented” warming which had never occurred under natural conditions and thus had be caused by human activity.

Now that we know the hockey stick is a fraud created with false and manipulated data, and Phil Jones has admitted that their was a medieval warming period (MWP) from around 1000 — 1300 A.D. we know that the late twentieth century warming would not be “unprecedented” even if the hockey stick were true. The MWP was a period of significant global warming that cannot be attributed to man’s activity on the planet.

But even if the hockey stick were true, why does anyone think that would prove that global warming on even that scale would be “unprecedented” in the history of the earth’s climate? Don’t we know that the middle of North America was covered with a sheet of ice nearly a mile thick just 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, and it melted as the earth warmed. That was a warming period greater than anything that the Climategate hoaxers tried to cook up.

I guess they would say that it was too long ago and took perhaps a 1,000 years to actually warm up enough to melt the glaciers, so it doesn’t count. But how long ago was it, really?

By comparison to the actual age of the earth, 15,000 years is the blink of an eye. And 15,000 years ago the modern atmosphere had already been established for a few million years with oxygen and carbon dioxide levels nearly the same as today.

The earth is approximately 4 billion years old. 15,000 years is less than 4 millionths of that. Just divide 15,000 by 4,000,000,000. That would be the same as dividing 15 by 4 million. You will get .0000037.

To put that in a better perspective, imagine the earth to be only one 24-hour day old, beginning at midnight 24 hours ago, and that it is now midnight at the end of earth’s first day. At what time did the last ice age that wiped out the megafauna occur? Using the numbers calculated above, and knowing that 24 hours is 86,400 seconds, the ice age ended 0.31968 seconds, or 320 milliseconds ago.

We are now at midnight, the earth is warm, and the ice age ended less that one second before midnight. In the blink of a young girl’s eye, as Bruce Springsteen would say. When Jesus appeared on earth the bell tower at Big Ben had already started to ring. Well, actually it had started to ring before it even existed.

So given that the warming that occurred less than a second ago had to melt ice a mile thick, how could the measly little temperature increases the hockey stick depicts, assuming it were true, ever have been thought to be “unprecedented?”

Actually, the ice age ended even closer to midnight than I have shown because I assumed the earth to be 4 billion years old when it is actually closer to 4.6 billion years old. The beautiful chart below shows the time that mammals have been on earth with a brown line. The time since humans arose is shown by a red line. Oh wait, you can’t see it. That is because it is so short, being only 2 million years long, it is to small to see in the graph.

Click to enlarge. Then click again to enlarge more. Now you can see the tiny red line representing the time humans have been on earth. We are “statistically insignificant.” The idea that we could either destroy or save the earth is laugh-out-loud ludicrous.