Has anyone looked at using residential buildings as a temperature proxies?

Not to my knowledge, nor could they. The problem is that our predecessors asked much less of their homes than we do. I live in the Hawaiian uplands, where it gets quite chilly. None of the homes built here 50 years ago have any form of heat, no fireplace, nothing. All the modern homes have heat.

Does this prove that Hawaii is cooling? … Don’t think so, just that the old paniolos were tougher than I am.

w.

Mark

I think the problem would be that building styles are influenced by many factors apart from climate.

As an example, our three hundred year old farm house in the South of France is well designed for the current climate. However, this is not the case for new houses that are being built in the same area. Our thick walls, large eaves, small windows and heavy shutters mean that we stay cool in the summer while our friends in new developments swelter.

“Setting aside for a moment any debate regarding proxies such as tree rings and formanifera, from the standpoint of cultural / archeological indicators (as well as historical accounts of things such as life ways, clothing, food and drink and the like) what are the things that tend to confirm and refute a global MWP of substantial degree (that term is somewhat loaded, but by “substantial” I mean things that have impacts similar to things thought to accompany the theorized coming warm up). For example, in Europe, people wore substantially thinner and less layered clothing during the MWP timeframe, versus what they wore during the Rennaissance, Enlightenment, Neo-Classical and Industrial Revolution time frames. That indicates the shift from the warm peak to the cold valley. Cathedrals were thought to be attractants to worship because they gave respite from the heat (even though some of them were not completed in time to reap the most benefit, we must look at the times of their initial conception / early project planning.) Take as another indicator the cultivation of citrus. Etc. What, if any, similar observations and anecdotal evidence are there in the Americas, Africa, Australia and Asia? I have not studied this and welcome what folks have to say in these regards.

“Comment by Steve Sadlov”

For the Jacoby (northern) sites, the ones that tend to have hockey stick shapes were south facing sites, while sites in valleys or north facing did not have hockey stick shapes. This seems like an odd phenomenon. Of course, Jacoby has not archived all his sites, only the “good” ones.

RE: “That said, it’s also clear that glaciations (which have not been present throughout much of history, with ice-free conditions existing as recently as 30M years ago and the current severe glaciations – the Pleistocene – having kicked in just a couple of million years ago) have not been able to exist in the past whenever CO2 has been above a certain level in the atmosphere.”

It was a long time ago. I attended a talk by I believe Arawmick (again, it may have been someone else, but I think it was he) that proposed something a bit different from this. Namely, that the Pleistocene may have started with the closure of the Isthmus of Panama during the previous orogeny. Again, this was long ago and no doubt “discredited” by numerous “climate scientists.” Just thought I’d share my own experience here.