I noticed these press releases for the new “ramp up to Paris” paper at Eurekalert today. One is from Boston College, the other is from Oregon State University. The headlines seem about as far apart as the schools themselves.
You’d think that authors of the same paper could get their PR straight.
The certainty of the theory as they present it is typical of alarmist PR’s but the conclusion, trying to link boulder deposition to CO2 levels seems a bit rocky at best. They claim to be able to resolve when boulders were uncovered from ice and link that to CO2 levels, and thus prove CO2 levels caused the end of the ice age. Of course, nether press release tells you the paper title, the DOI, or links to the journal, because as we’ve seen so many times, the paper itself is just a ticket to media coverage, and isn’t important enough to be part of the story that will be foisted upon the public. I’ve posted both of them below for comparison in the sequence presented above in the screencap.
As Ice Age ended, greenhouse gas rise was lead factor in melting of Earth’s glaciers
New findings have implications for recent carbon dioxide rise and melting glaciers
BOSTON COLLEGE
Chestnut Hill, MA (Aug. 21, 2015) – A fresh look at some old rocks has solved a crucial mystery of the last Ice Age, yielding an important new finding that connects to the global retreat of glaciers caused by climate change today, according to a new study by a team of climate scientists.
For decades, researchers examining the glacial meltdown that ended 11,000 years ago took into account a number of contributing factors, particularly regional influences such as solar radiation, ice sheets and ocean currents.
But a reexamination of more than 1,000 previously studied glacial boulders has produced a more accurate timetable for the pre-historic meltdown and pinpoints the rise in carbon dioxide – then naturally occurring – as the primary driving factor in the simultaneous global retreat of glaciers at the close of the last Ice Age, the researchers report in the journal Nature Communications.
“Glaciers are very sensitive to temperature. When you get the world’s glaciers retreating all at the same time, you need a broad, global reason for why the world’s thermostat is going up,” said Boston College Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Jeremy Shakun. “The only factor that explains glaciers melting all around the world in unison during the end of the Ice Age is the rise in greenhouse gases.”
The researchers found that regional factors caused differences in the precise timing and pace of glacier retreat from one place to another, but carbon dioxide was the major driver of the overall global meltdown, said Shakun, a co-author of the report “Regional and global forcing of glacier retreat during the last deglaciation.”
“This is a lot like today,” said Shakun. “In any given decade you can always find some areas where glaciers are holding steady or even advancing, but the big picture across the world and over the long run is clear – carbon dioxide is making the ice melt.”
While 11,000 years ago may seem far too distant for a point of comparison, it was only a moment ago in geological time. The team’s findings fix even greater certainty on scientific conclusions that the dramatic increase in manmade greenhouse gases will eradicate many of the world’s glaciers by the end of this century.
“This has relevance to today since we’ve already raised CO2 by more than it increased at the end of the Ice Age, and we’re on track to go up much higher this century — which adds credence to the view that most of the world’s glaciers will be largely gone within the next few centuries, with negative consequences such as rising sea level and depleted water resources,” said Shakun.
The team reexamined samples taken from boulders that were left by the retreating glaciers, said Shakun, who was joined in the research by experts from Oregon State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Purdue University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Each boulder has been exposed to cosmic radiation since the glaciers melted, an exposure that produces the isotope Beryllium-10 in the boulder. Measuring the levels of the isotope in boulder samples allows scientists to determine when glaciers melted and first uncovered the boulders.
Scientists have been using this process called surface exposure dating for more than two decades to determine when glaciers retreated, Shakun said. His team examined samples collected by multiple research teams over the years and applied an improved methodology that increased the accuracy of the boulder ages.
The team then compared their new exposure ages to the timing of the rise of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, a development recorded in air bubbles taken from ice cores. Combined with computer models, the analysis eliminated regional factors as the primary explanations for glacial melting across the globe at the end of the Ice Age. The single leading global factor that did explain the global retreat of glaciers was rising carbon dioxide levels in the air.
“Our study really removes any doubt as to the leading cause of the decline of the glaciers by 11,000 years ago – it was the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere,” said Shakun.
Carbon dioxide levels rose from approximately 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million at the end of the last Ice Age, which spanned nearly 7,000 years. Following more than a century of industrialization, carbon dioxide levels have now risen to approximately 400 parts per million.
“This tells us we are orchestrating something akin to the end of an Ice Age, but much faster. As the amount of carbon dioxide continues to increase, glaciers around the world will retreat,” said Shakun.
###
Greenhouse gases caused glacial retreat during last Ice Age
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A recalculation of the dates at which boulders were uncovered by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age has conclusively shown that the glacial retreat was due to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as opposed to other types of forces.
Carbon dioxide levels are now significantly higher than they were at that time, as a result of the Industrial Revolution and other human activities since then. Because of that, the study confirms predictions of future glacial retreat, and that most of the world’s glaciers may disappear in the next few centuries.
The findings were published today in Nature Communications by researchers from Oregon State University, Boston College and other institutions. They erase some of the uncertainties about glacial melting that had been due to a misinterpretation of data from some of these boulders, which were exposed to the atmosphere more than 11,500 years ago.
“This shows that at the end of the last Ice Age, it was only the increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that could have caused the loss of glaciers around the world at the same time,” said Peter Clark, a professor in the OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, and co-author on the study.
“This study validates predictions that future glacial loss will occur due to the ongoing increase in greenhouse gas levels from human activities,” Clark said. “We could lose 80-90 percent of the world’s glaciers in the next several centuries if greenhouse gases continue to rise at the current rate.”
Glacial loss in the future will contribute to rising sea levels and, in some cases, have impacts on local water supplies.
As the last Ice Age ended during a period of about 7,000 years, starting around 19,000 years ago, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million. But just in the past 150 years, they have surged from 280 to about 400 parts per million, far higher than what was required to put an end to the last Ice Age.
The new findings, Clark said, were based on a recalculation of the ages at which more than 1,100 glacial boulders from 159 glacial moraines around the world were exposed to the atmosphere after being buried for thousands of years under ice.
The exposure of the boulders to cosmic rays produced cosmogenic nuclides, which had been previously measured and used to date the event. But advances have been made in how to calibrate ages based on that data. Based on the new calculations, the rise in carbon dioxide levels – determined from ancient ice cores -matches up nicely with the time at which glacial retreat took place.
“There had been a long-standing mystery about why these boulders were uncovered at the time they were, because it didn’t properly match the increase in greenhouse gases,” said Jeremy Shakun, a professor at Boston College and lead author on the study. “We found that the previous ages assigned to this event were inaccurate. The data now show that as soon as the greenhouse gas levels began to rise, the glaciers began to melt and retreat.”
There are other forces that can also cause glacial melting on a local or regional scale, the researchers noted, such as changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, or shifts in ocean heat distribution. These factors probably did have localized effects. But the scientists determined that only the change in greenhouse gas levels could have explained the broader global retreat of glaciers all at the same time.
In the study of climate change, glaciers have always been of considerable interest, because their long-term behavior is a more reliable barometer that helps sort out the ups-and-downs caused by year-to-year weather variability, including short-term shifts in temperature and precipitation.
###
Other collaborators on this research were from the University of Wisconsin, Purdue University, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The work was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.
If CO2 was the cause then how do interglacials end? Rising CO2 should beget warming which in turn causes more CO2 release from warming oceans, which causes more warming, and so on.
Yes, why do we re-glaciate with CO2 at its highest levels at the termination of each inter-glacial period if it is causing the warming?
Because CO2 is magic ! It causes warming and cooling. Glaciation is just another example of the extreme climate “weirdness” caused by rising CO2.
Please try and keep up 😉
The general public have no understanding whether either report is true or not. The lie is being hammered home. Economic train wreck in slow motion.
I remember reading and hearing that CO2 levels trailed temp changes by up to 800 years, so this paper means that the ice knows the CO2 is going to rise and therefore melts in preparation for said rise.
Now I understand???????????????
James Bull
PS CO2 is way cleverer than anyone knew!
The press release says:
Really?? Is this what the paper says or just what the unqualified jerk who wrote the press release made up out of thin air?
What “implications” does the new “finding” have exactly? Does just using the word “implications” and letting the reader’s imagination join the dots count as serious science now? This crap gets worse by the day.
The earth’s climate has two pseudo stable states, glaciation and inter-glacial. I really don’t see how this “finding” informs us about what happens once we are already in an interglacial and CO2 rises.
Conclusively until next time they “recalculate” the dates ….
“…letting the reader’s imagination join the dots count as serious science now?”
Well you gotta admit that there’s been decades of mass media propaganda and conditioning to get us to this point where the general populace just assumes that anything bad and nature-related must be somehow caused by humans and/or CO2.
Um, didn’t it start warming first, and then CO2 began to increase?
Or was Al Gore right?
It’s nothing new is it- just that the initial warming of unknown origin causes ice wherever it is to melt and that initial T rise causes a rise in CO2 800 or more years later- the loss of ice baring the rocks – decreasing the albedo which in turn causes more heat to be absorbed- more warming- more rise in CO2 -the global warming as earth emerges from the Ice Age or LIA.
But at least they show that rising CO2 is not man made!
If warming was caused by rising CO2 pre industrial, then it happens due to natural causes. We can’t control it.
Or is it: Retreat of glaciers linked to rise in CO2 ? Chicken or the egg?
More land exposed means more chance for microbes to fertilise the ground up surface – More methane.
Or more grass grows sucking CO2 down. It’s far too complex to say either way.
Although the journal Nature Communications has better credibility than Nature Climate Change.
which really is the point…CO2 correlated with this that or something else is not proof of any thesis. Such correlation is possibly a clue. Where was this increasing CO2 coming from?
MCourtney,
Based on the small 13C/12C changes during a deglaciation, most of the extra CO2 comes from the (deep) oceans. If it was from the biosphere, the 13C/12C changes would be huge and anti-correlated with the CO2 increase.
What I miss in the stories is the lag of the CO2 rise after the temperature rise: about 800 +/- 600 years in ice cores. It seems to me that the temperatures did rise first, releasing CO2 and melting more and more glaciers with some lag. That both CO2 and ice melting coincide doesn’t show that CO2 was the cause of the ice melt as the temperature increase was leading…
Exactly what I was wondering…What caused the CO2 levels to increase from 180ppm to 280ppm or by 100ppm or 155% to bring about the end of the last Ice Age.
In comparison the current increase from 280ppm to 400ppm which is 120ppm or 142% increase.
Wait a minute, So the last “Dramatic Increase” of CO2 is less by percentage than the “Ice Age Ender” increase?
I wonder, If they were to Core down to the bottom of the remaining glaciers, How old would the Surface Time measurements be for their specific Beryllium-10 isotope covering? would it indicate that at a prior point in time, the area was de-glaciated?
The link to the article in Nature Communications:
Regional and global forcing of glacier retreat during the last deglaciation.
More science fiction masquerading as science. This period (1970-?) will be regarded as the dark ages of modern natural science. This paper is simply more evidence that the climate models do not work, instead, they conclude that the models have revealed that CO2 ended the last glacial period because other factors (insolation, ocean circulation, etc.) could not account for it.
What causes CO2 to briefly increase from 180 to 300 ppm roughly every 100,000 years and stay that way for roughly 12,000 years before again naturally lowering to 180 ppm? They don’t say.They might as well say ancient aliens.
Ferdinand Engelbeen, I agree about the primary source not being the biosphere.
But I think the lack of lag may be due to the biosphere. It takes in and releases CO2 so much quicker than the larger, dominant reservoir of the Oceans.
Yes, the total atmospheric CO2 is dependent on the absorption of the Oceans – in the long term.
But in the short term I can’t see how the biosphere isn’t the controller of the concentration of atmospheric CO2 trends over a decadal – 500 year period..
Bryan A
August 21, 2015 at 11:32 am
Exactly what I was wondering…What caused the CO2 levels to increase from 180ppm to 280ppm or by 100ppm or 155% to bring about the end of the last Ice Age.
In comparison the current increase from 280ppm to 400ppm which is 120ppm or 142% increase.
***
The best information I can find (e.g. James R. Ehleringer, Thure Cerling, M. Denise Dearing 2005) indicates that plants really don’t do well – or at all – below about 180 ppm. So, the increase could have been caused in part by fewer plants fixing carbon, enough fewer that atmospheric levels began to improve. And, since the CO2 doesn’t increase until the planet starts to warm, the warmer ocean’s would have been major contributors to the increase. I’m unconvinced that bolders can “pin point” anything much less a change in atmospheric CO2.
News release- “Pope says CO2 is the Devil’s Gas” CO2 Exorcism date to be set!
The end is nigh!
Massive amounts of Co2 will be expelled in Paris – 30 November-11 December 2015. In addition Methane release due to the fine foods rear exhalation. Paris could be a the start famous tipping point . Private Jet traffic jams and endless streams of elongated limos idling 24 hours a day.
This is definitely an worrisome time period for a possible climate collapse. We will know on 13 December 2015, I hope it isn’t a Friday!
The end is double nigh!
Ted,
Have no fear.
13 December 2013 was a Friday, so 13 December 2015 will be a Sunday.
Well, not on the triskaidekaphobia fears, anyway.
A cooling Earth – something to be very afraid of, I fear.
Auto
Auto
Our elder son managed to get triskaidekaphobia into one of his English homework essays along with macro cephalic and some others on different occasions. He would scour the dictionary looking for them.
James Bull
“””””….. “Glaciers are very sensitive to temperature. ”
Well that is news.
It seems like Antarctic glaciers see Temperatures from around zero deg. C to perhaps as cold as -94 deg. C, and they don’t seem to mind that one bit.
I would say glaciers are quite tolerant of Temperatures over a wide range.
Now near or above 100 deg. C where water boils at standard atmosphere, I would not think glaciers would like that, but they clearly survive over a wide range of Temperatures.
Different materials, such as Mercury for example, are also sensitive to temperatures over a certain range. The comfortable Mercury range, overlaps the comfortable glaciers range, but they are not identical.
g
From what I saw while climbing the Himalaya, the glaciers there were more sensitive to insolation than temperature. The top layers melted and ablated while the air temperature was still near freezing, leaving a rubble-strewn surface that looked like the Moon.
R
I’m waiting for Stokes to tell us how this isn’t one of those papers gaming the system. Obviously this paper is very similar to the recent bio-med papers that were retracted. Pal Review in this case and self review in the bio-med journals. Correlation does not mean causation unless Pal Review turns a blind eye.
The lag in the rising CO2 level may be easily explained by the leaking of CO2 from active faults in the earth’s crust. The crust is not just solid rock but contains numerous fissures and cracks, many of them are discharging magmatic gases. Geologists even use the CO2 concentration as an indicator for fault mapping. Over active faults the concentration of CO2 can be in the percentage range.
During glaciation CO2 from active faults gets trapped under the ice cover and when the ice retreats the accumulated CO2 is released into the atmosphere subsequently.
“Our study really removes any doubt as to the leading cause of the decline of the glaciers by 11,000 years ago – it was the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere,” said Shakun.”
There it is………..because “the science is settled”, “the debate is over” and anyone that questions it is a “Denier” and we now have evidence to remove even a shred of doubt during a time frame 11,000 years ago, that just yesterday(or before this study) had tremendous doubt and many other possible factors in play.
It’s been a while since I last published a paper, but I don’t recall putting out a press release about it. Or, indeed, any of my papers. (And the one which showed that, if the Ontological Argument was sound, it would imply an infinite number of gods was a cracker. It certainly deserved press attention.)
More than one perfect thing?
How very imperfect.
I believe perfectness is not universally definable nor measurable. And I think gods are uncountable.
That subtlety escaped him.
I think spheres are perfect; more or less.
But then, there are no spheres anywhere to study, so maybe they do have blemishes and we would never know it. But since spheres don’t exist, it really doesn’t matter if they aren’t perfect, or if they are.
g
One of the points I made in the paper was that perfection is an indeterminate notion. This is a general flaw in Ontological argument. Assuming that argument is sound, it implies aleph-naught perfect beings. They would all have all the same characteristics (perfection) but be individuated by each having their own first person point of view. I also pointed out that, if we deny that fpv is a basic distinction, then the argument implies pantheism. Pretty stunning stuff, eh?
And yet no press release.
So why do these universities put out press releases for other papers?
What? We’d still be iced up without CO2? Spread the glorious news of this wonder molecule.
=========
So, increased CO2 may be natural?
That was my question. So what caused the (apparently natural) rise in CO2? And is there enough temporal resolution to determine which came first, the rise in temps or the rise in CO2?
Maybe alien SUVs and coal-fired UFOs?
Slywolf–“Maybe alien SUVs and coal-fired UFOs?” That is silly. Everyone knows that they feed off wheat. That is why we have crop circles.
The meme is that vegetative matter was reduced to the point where it was insufficient to convert CO2 to plants and O2. All that rotting plant life at the terminal moraines helped increase the CO2. Apparently the rise in life near the beginning of the Cambrian caused snowball earth too! Never mind that whole Milankovitch thing.
That´s a sly question.
So, what caused the CO2 to rise in the first instance, they don’t say! Reading from that I would suggest something caused warming first leading to rising CO2!
An environmental public relations firm is working on that question right now. Following confidential market research (to determine public acceptability) they will forward the answer to a university research team in the near future.
only “confidential”? Not “secret” or “top secret” research?
A lot of “gassing,” all right!
Per Leif : “The use of 10Be and 14C proxies is fraught with pitfalls. The production rate may be set by solar activity [the current paradigm says the Heliomagnetic Field. HMF], but the deposition rate in the ice and wood depends on terrestrial factors, climate, geomagnetic field, and volcanic eruptions [as 10Be attaches to aerosols]. …”
I would think this pertains to boulders also.
Boulders are the new tree rings, Tom.
They are called geodes, which is also some kind of poetry.
g
george,
Good catch. Yes, geodes are a particularly earthy form of poetry and not suitable for a family-friendly blog ;o)
P.S. My locale is littered with geodes from the last glacial retreat. It was popular in the ’50s and ’60s to get a couple of them, paint them white, and then at the foot of the driveway, put one on each side. I still see them guarding the driveways on older houses out in the country.
So correlation now equals causation as definitive proof in the science community. How low have they sunk!
Exactly! How did that get past an honest peer review by actual scientists?
If 280ppm was enough to end an ice age, why are there ANY glaciers left when it’s now at 400ppm?
“why are there ANY glaciers left when it’s now at 400ppm?”
Obviously thermal lag. The oceans eat up all of the warming until they’re full, ending an ice age and warming starts When the ocean begin eating again we begin cooling, that is unless our extra Hiroshima bombs per second prevents it? I just knew CO2 could warm AND cool.
Thanks, Paul (I think).
Paul,
I have it on good authority, from the Quai D’Orsay – no less – that CO2 can also walk the dog.
Methane tends to be a result, it is noted.
Auto
PS – the Quai D’Orsay is in a city where there will be snow this year end – the Gore Effect.
PPS – Mods – yeah – /sarc.
Quai D’Orsay is also where Air Liquide’s head office is (they make industrial gasses, including CO2). Coincidence or suspicious? Hmmm.
Right. It takes 80 calories to melt one gram ice, and that’s not instantaneously available from a little lukewarming, especially if the oceans eat up all the warming they want first.
Extra tough glaciers.
Here is the actual paper:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150821/ncomms9059/full/ncomms9059.html
Correlation, causation, etc…
So once again they’ve ‘corrected’ previous data to get the answer they want and also…“Combined with computer models, the analysis eliminated regional factors as the primary explanations for glacial melting across the globe at the end of the Ice Age. “. There you go. 100% certainty. Well, I’m glad that’s solved. Seems they’ve been improving these methods for two decades now,too. What a grand coincidence that they finished just in time for Paris 2105! Something doesn’t smell right here.
I will bet that there is a good correlation with the number of these silly papers and CO2 rise. Graph lovers help me out.
I hope they might stop before Paris 2105.
I predict there’ll be a pause after November.
So if you eliminate “regional factors” can we have lots of glaciers in the tropics ?
Seems like regional factors are mandatory for glacier existence.
Since when is increased insolation due to changes in the earth’s orbit and orientation only a “regional factor” and therefore unable to drive global change?
And what caused the increase in CO2 back then?
“And what causedthe increase in CO2 back then?
A frozen ice bound NH unable to remove the slow but steady accumulating CO2 being released from insolation-driven ocean warming and volcanoes.
Insolation changes were the driving factor of course, not the following CO2. But the alarmists now seek to rewrite the scientific narrative for consumption by a science illierate public.
illiterate (my spelling needs another cup of coffee this Friday am)
>>Insolation changes were the driving factor of course,
But far from being the only factor. You will note in the image below that during the ice age before last, insolation rose by 10% and yet the ice age continued to deepen. Not saying that the unknown factor is CO2, of course, because the high CO2 at that same time should also have been melting the ice age.
My guess is that the unknown extra factor that modulates ice ages is a blanket of cloud cover. Not just Wilis’ tropical thunderstorms, but a great worldwide swathe of stratus. Now that would keep things decidedly cool.
http://s16.postimg.org/63v3fs8xx/Last4_Ice_Ages_Milankovitch.png
Mammoths began eating legumes.
In other words, the study is missing a crucial factor. CH4 released the CO2.
Only regions of the Earth must’ve changed orbits whereas other regions of the Earth must not have changed orbit.
I can see you understand how environmental science works 😉
This is just another one of the Shakun and Marcott type studies where they try to adjust the historical temperature and CO2 timelines to meet their climate change prophesy beliefs.
These are not the timelines of CO2 and temperature from the ice cores. All the dates are smoothed/moved by several thousand years and the amount(s) are exaggerated.
This IS another Shakun study. His last one was a statistical abomination. Essay Cause and Effect deconstructed it. Should never have gotten past peer review.
Sadly the damage is already done. The believers will be shouting this from the rooftops.
So, after adjusting recent temperatures to match CO2 levels, they are now going back to also adjust historical timelines to match CO2 levels. Is there no scientific abomination these people won’t stoop to to support their religion?
No, there is no abomination they won’t stoop to. After all, they’re demanding that several hundred million people travel back in time and accept poverty and deprivation.
Tom J…
Respectfully, I think you’ve missed the mark a bit. It seems most environmentalists want about 5 billion people gone from the earth completely, not just several hundred million doing without present creature comforts and accepting poverty and deprivation.
http://iceagenow.info/2015/08/do-you-believe-in-climate-change/
The problem as this study and countless others have shown is CO2 follows the temperature which puts the conclusions put forth in this article dead in their tracks.
That’s because this one uses models to get the correct answer: “We use transient simulations with a coupled global climate model (TraCE simulation21, 22, 23) to test the hypothesis that greenhouse gas forcing was the primary driver of global glacier retreat during the last deglaciation, modulated by regional variability associated with other forcing mechanisms.”
circularly tuned to CO2 models to support their premise that CO2 drove temperatures during Pleistocene to Holocene transition…. let’s disregard that pesky Y-D thingy though.
Let me get this straight, they used models that assume that CO2 is the primary driver to prove that Co2 is the primary driver?
The alarmists see a world being overly warmed by CO2 at some continually sliding rightward future date.
The realists see a world being saved from another LIA by CO2. Some small fraction of which is anthropogenic CO2 and would itself be gone in 10 half-lives of decay, ~70-100 yrs if manmade emissions suddenly went zero (like the genocidal environmental movement wants).
CO2, the molecule of plant life. Water is the solvent. And our stable sun is the energy source.
The whole global warming premise is rooted in runaway global warming…
..they just said it doesn’t exist
Here´s linkt to the paper:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150821/ncomms9059/full/ncomms9059.html
The work was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.
The word test was used just once in the paper. And as we could guess. Testing was done with a Global Climate Model.
“We use transient simulations with a coupled global climate model (TraCE simulation21, 22, 23) to test the hypothesis that greenhouse gas forcing was the primary driver of global glacier retreat during the last deglaciation, modulated by regional variability associated with other forcing mechanisms. The simulations are driven by variations in individual forcing factors—greenhouse gases (GHG), insolation (ORB), ice sheets (ICE), and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC)—as well as by all of these factors (ALL; Fig. 3). TraCE has been shown to replicate many key features of regional and global climate evolution during the last deglaciation21, 22, 24.”
Words containing: deduce*, falsify* or predict* was not ever used.
I call it fiction. Next please!
This is what Karl Popper called a scientific method:
1 A hypothesis is proposed. This is not justified and is tentative.
2 Testable predictions are deduced from the hypothesis and previously accepted statements.
3 We observe whether the predictions are true.
4 If the predictions are false, we conclude the theory is false.
5 If the predictions are true, that doesn’t show the theory is true, or even probably true. All we can say is that the theory has so far passed the tests of it.
The study removes any doubt that increasing atmospheric CO2 is accelerating the rise in lunacy level.
truth is stranger than fiction…
“Idiocracy”, the trailer…
http://geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
How come run away global warming did not take place when early Carboniferous CO2 concentrations were 1500 ppm? Further if CO2 /global warming is a positive feedback how come not only did global warming not take place as the Carboniferous Period went on but glaciation occurred?
In addition why is it that when CO2 concentrations were 1500 ppm that CO2 concentrations fell to 350 ppm ?
The answer can only be that the climate started to grow colder as the Carboniferous Period advanced and CO2 concentrations FOLLOWED the down trend in global temperatures, which has always and still is the case.
How much clearer can it be?
300 million years ago, the output of our sun was less.
Reed Buckhart,
The rise and fall of global T happened irregardless of CO2 levels. There is no geologic corellation between icehouse earth, hothouse earth, and CO2 levels.
Only that CO2 was very high, up to 800-1200 ppm only 30 million years ago. No runaway warming, but many mammals developed.
The tragedy on contemporary times is not warming, it’s glaciation. CO2 came down 24 million years ago, but temperatures dropped mostly during the Pliocene, 3-5 million years ago, and they dropped several degrees.
http://people.earth.yale.edu/cenozoic-evolution-carbon-dioxide
By the way, how well this stuff is covered by Wikipedia? Well not well, mr Connolley makes sure any point which can be considered inconvenient is promptly removed by the left-wing right-thinkers.
Reed: How much less? How do we know this? Was the output less or was the planet farther from the sun?
300 million years ago, the output of our sun was not materially different to that of today.
The so called faint sun paradox arises in the early history of the planet. ie., say 3.5 to 4.2 billion years ago.
It was more than 97% of today’s. The sun was about one percent weaker for each 110 million years one looks back in time.
Erase the Younger-Dryas they must.
-Yoda
Erase the Younger-Dryas they will!
Not just the YD but all the other fluctuations during the transition from the LGM to the Holocene Optimum:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRxqFQoTCPDBnpCdvccCFVcriAodmhECXQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fquaternaryscience.wordpress.com%2Ftag%2Fyounger-dryas%2F&ei=C7PYVbCQNNfWoASao4joBQ&psig=AFQjCNEsdZmAbKVF0dmfgywzKdnBRvb-MQ&ust=1440351317291268
Sorry. See if this works:
http://www.climateshifts.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Greenlandtemp.png
Oops! Sorry. See if this works:
http://www.climateshifts.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Greenlandtemp.png
Now I regret the duplication. However Shakun might say that Greenland was just a regional excursion, since it shows no accelerated warming at 19 Ka.
Well, then how about Antarctica?
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/Closer_Look/IceCores2.gif
In the future when the ice begins to grow, scientists will be scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get more CO2 in the air.
Let’s ignore the fact that water dissolves less CO2 the warmer it gets and melting ice releases CO2 as it melts. Biologic activity increases as the world warms releasing more CO2. Since it was quite cold when the melting began, where did the CO2 come from? Must have been those dirty cave men building coal fired power plants. As Anthony often says, the stupid, it burns!
Neither report’s main assertions seem to match physical evidence from core samples.
Nor do the reports seem to reconcile that question.
Conclusion? the reports are more tripe from the failed idea that CO2 is *the* control knob
CO2 ha zero to do with changing the climate it is an effect of the climate no the cause.
The causes for the climate to change will be on my next post.
Here is what regulates the climate , in a brief concise nutshell. This is what keeps it within a range bound to a degree.
Land/Ocean Arrangements and Land Elevation.
Milankovitch Cycles- where earth is in regard to these cycles.
Solar Variability- primary and secondary effects..
Geo Magnetic Intensity- which moderates solar activity.
Initial State Of The Climate- how far the climate is from the glacial /inter-glacial threshold.
Ice ,Snow, Cloud Cover Dynamic – which are tied to the above to one degree or another.
Intrinsic Earth Bound Climatic Items- such as ENSO which refine the climate trends.
Rogue Terrestrial Event- such as a Super Volcanic Eruption.
Rogue Extra Terrestrial Event – such as an impact.
CO2 being a result of the climate not the cause.
Salvatore,
You did not list the the second most important parameter: The physical properties of water.
Of course the first and most important parameter being the outputs from the SUN.
I’m not a chemist or physical scientist, but I work with lags in data almost daily. So I’m taking a shot at this. I’m finding disagreements about the true half-life of Beryllium-10 that are on the order of +- 2%. Let’s also assume that our notions of measurement of CO2 in the historic record are accurate to +- 2%. Then looking back over 11,000 years we’ve got potential swings in the lead / lag of over 400 years, which is enough of a discrepancy to complete annihilate this analysis. One can say, at best, that the recession of glaciers and increased CO2 follow a similar trend, but causality is out of the question.
Dunno about the Be and other recalculations. Do know this new Shakun paper is junk. Because all the CO2 concentration/timing/temp estimates (figure 2, middle panels) come from his 2012 paper. Which is complete statistical junk. A simple, proper, parametric demonstration of how junky was provided in Essay Cause and Effect. Both Northern and Southern hemisphere ice cores make it quite clear that rising CO2 lagged temperature (and SLR as a proxy for ice retreat) by something between 400 and 1200 years, with 800 being the best estimate from several Antarctic ice cores. That is a simple consequence of Henry’s law. 800 years is not coincidentally the estimated total overturning time for complete global thermohaline circulation, which should govern how long it would take for oceans to respond completely to warming by outgassing CO2 per Henry’s law.
ristvan,
Totally agree on this one! They first removed the CO2 lag after temperature increase and now couple the ice melt, which follows temperature, with the CO2 increase as cause, while CO2 is the result of the temperature increase of the (deep) oceans…
Yup.
So if they are trying to claim that increases in CO2 ended the ice age, will they also be claiming that the big swings in temperature in Greenland and the Northern Atlantic during the ice age were also caused by large swings in CO2 levels during the ice age?
Or would that make their ideas sound like BS?
“…most of the world’s glaciers will be largely gone within the next few centuries, with negative consequences such as rising sea level and depleted water resources,” said Shakun.”
Maybe Shakun can explain how a frozen glacier that never melts and is an available water resource is conceptually different from a melted glacier that flowed to the sea ten years ago. There is no water available from either.
This is a repetition of the nonsense from the Moonbat that if the Himalayan glaciers melt, the Mekong River will dry up – i.e. that it will stop raining in SE Asia because the trickle at the source will run all year instead of in spring.
If it rains and there is no glacier, it goes into the river. Duh.
The study finds a correlation between rising CO2 and glacier retreat over a period of 7,000 years. Can they really pinpoint which is cause and which effect over such a long timespan? Antarctic ice core data indicate that changes in global temperature precede changes in natural CO2 emissions by hundreds of years (http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N28/EDIT.php; http://www.co2science.org/articles/V6/N26/EDIT.php). The study does not even mention the Vostok ice core.
There is no substantial difference between the press releases.
so, rather than wasting skeptical brain power on PR analysis ( nobody here has a clue how to do that )
why not look at the actual argument.
“Here we use recently improved cosmogenic-nuclide production-rate calibrations to recalculate the ages of 1,116 glacial boulders from 195 moraines that provide broad coverage of retreat in mid-to-low-latitude regions. This revised history, in conjunction with transient climate model simulations, suggests that while several regional-scale forcings, including insolation, ice sheets and ocean circulation, modulated glacier responses regionally, they are unable to account for global-scale retreat, which is most likely related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Argument #1. An improved dating process has been developed.
A dumb skeptic will just ‘doubt’ this. you can doubt anything. A smart skeptic
will show and demonstrate that the new dating process is wrong.
There is an old process and a new process. the skeptical job is to prove that
the new process is not improved.
Argument #2. Regional scale forcings (insolation, ice sheets, ocean circulation ) are unable
to account for the Global retreat.
A) this argument relies on models. You model what you know about the climate
and see if regional forcings Alone can explain the global retreat.
B) The assumption here is that all regional forcings are accurately modelled.
C) the strongest counter argument will be a demonstration that SPECIFIC regional
forcings are missing from the models and a demonstration that these forcings are
significant
D) the weakest argument is this “I think their models are missing something”
Argument #3. We can explain the global retreat if we include a GHG effect.
A) this is an argument to the best explanation. simply A, and B and C cannot explain
“X”. A, B, C and D can explain “X”. Therefore our best evidence suggests that D
is needed as a cause to explain “X” but for D, there is no “X”.
B) in general we can see this as a form of Abduction.. an inference to the best explanation
A simple example: I walk outside. I see that the grass is wet. I reason that it has rained.
I notice that the street is dry and my neighbors grass is dry. I reason
that someone turned on my sprinklers last night. I am reasoning to the best explanation.
That explanation will hold until a better one comes along
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning
By inductive reasoning you can convince yourself of anything.
No so. I cant convince myself that you know popper or the history of the philosophy of science.
Apparently dew is missing from your model of what makes grass wet.
May I again suggest that you have some Popper?
It might hurt a little bit the first time, thereafter it will do you good the rest of your life.
Chapter 1 is called: “The problem of induction”
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/popper-logic-scientific-discovery.pdf
Karl Popper was the mastermind behind the modern scientific method; Poppers empirical method.
Popper was wrong.
Later he would admit it.
In building a philosophy of empirical sciences it is important to be empirical.
to wit, science uses abduction. Any theory of science which fails to account for this
is falsified
Steven Mosher:
Though some model builders use abduction others use optimization. Optimization works better.
The word “abduction” alone should give you a hint that this kind of reasoning isn´t sound within science.
From the link you provided:
“As such, abduction is formally equivalent to the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (or Post hoc ergo propter hoc) because of multiple possible explanations for b.”
keep reading.. google abduction and the philsophy of science.
“Abduction or, as it is also often called, Inference to the Best Explanation is a type of inference that assigns special status to explanatory considerations. Most philosophers agree that this type of inference is frequently employed, in some form or other, both in everyday and in scientific reasoning. However, the exact form as well as the normative status of abduction are still matters of controversy. This entry contrasts abduction with other types of inference; points at prominent uses of it, both in and outside philosophy; considers various more or less precise statements of it; discusses its normative status; and highlights possible connections between abduction and Bayesian confirmation theory.”
“have argued that abduction is a cornerstone of scientific methodology; see, for instance, Boyd 1981, 1984, Harré 1986, 1988, Lipton 1991, 2004, and Psillos 1999. Ernan McMullin (1992) even goes so far as to call abduction “the inference that makes science.” To illustrate the use of abduction in science, we consider two examples.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was discovered that the orbit of Uranus, one of the seven planets known at the time, departed from the orbit as predicted on the basis of Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation and the auxiliary assumption that there were no further planets in the solar system. One possible explanation was, of course, that Newton’s theory is false. Given its great empirical successes for (then) more than two centuries, that did not appear to be a very good explanation. Two astronomers, John Couch Adams and Urbain Leverrier, instead suggested (independently of each other but almost simultaneously) that there was an eighth, as yet undiscovered planet in the solar system; that, they thought, provided the best explanation of Uranus’ deviating orbit. Not much later, this planet, which is now known as “Neptune,” was discovered.
The second example concerns what is now commonly regarded to have been the discovery of the electron by the English physicist Joseph John Thomson. Thomson had conducted experiments on cathode rays in order to determine whether they are streams of charged particles. He concluded that they are indeed, reasoning as follows:
As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted on by a magnetic force in just the way in which this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from the conclusion that they are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter. (Thomson, cited in Achinstein 2001, 17)
The conclusion that cathode rays consist of negatively charged particles does not follow logically from the reported experimental results, nor could Thomson draw on any relevant statistical data. That nevertheless he could “see no escape from the conclusion” is, we may safely assume, because the conclusion is the best—in this case presumably even the only plausible—explanation of his results that he could think of.
Many other examples of scientific uses of abduction have been discussed in the literature; see, for instance, Harré 1986, 1988 and Lipton 1991, 2004. Abduction is also said to be the predominant mode of reasoning in medical diagnosis: physicians tend to go for the hypothesis that best explains the patient’s symptoms (see Josephson and Josephson (eds.) 1994, 9–12).”
Steven Mosher:
Abduction is one of many rules of thumb aka heuristics that can be used in selecting the inferences that will be made by a model. However, each time a particular heuristic selects a particular inference a different heuristic selects a different inference. In this way the method of heuristics violates the law of non-contradiction and fails to solve David Hume’s problem of induction. The solution to Hume’s problem is to replace the method of heuristics by optimization of the unique measure of an inference under the probabilistic logic: its entropy. Optimization produces, for example, the second law of thermodynamics. Abduction doesn’t produce it.
SM
Odd isn’t it that to make the result become the cause, Shakun’s speciality, ie to make CO2 look like it’s driving rather than following global temperature, he always has to (a) revise / rewrite the climate data and history and then (b) combine it with model simulations. Taking this approach you could fit any answer you want to any data.
But I forgot – neither you or Shakun would see anything wrong with this since honesty is something neither of you have a clue how to do.
Steven Mosher
Ref. various replies above – and in particular:
“Most philosophers agree that this type of inference is frequently employed, in some form or other, both in everyday and in scientific reasoning.”
My perspective of the scientific method is simply put this:
1 A hypothesis is proposed. This is not justified and is tentative.
2 Testable predictions are deduced from the hypothesis and previously accepted statements.
3 We observe whether the predictions are true.
4 If the predictions are false, we conclude the theory is false.
5 If the predictions are true, that doesn’t show the theory is true, or even probably true. All we can say is that the theory has so far passed the tests of it.
I admit that you can use inductive reasoning to come up with your hypothesis – I admit that you can use abduction to come up with your hypothesis. I admit that you can dream it, guess it, overhear it on the bus, pull it out of a hat, read it in a book, get it from a misunderstanding of what you read in a book, find a correlation by statistical means, being told by your wife that it is that way it works, find the correlation by multivariate analysis, find the correlation by artificial intelligence, find that any other explanation seems absurd to you – or what ever.
All these types of reasoning are frequently employed in establishing hypothesis.
(Except from artificial intelligence – yet).
However – these kinds of reasoning only brings you to the first step of Popper´s empirical method. Putting up a hypothesis is pretty much like making a baby – it can be more or less sophisticated – but it isn´t science.
As Karl Popper phrased it:
“From a new idea, put up tentatively, and not yet justified in any way—an anticipation, a hypoth- esis, a theoretical system, or what you will—conclusions are drawn by means of logical deduction.”
Knowledge – however – starts to accumulate as you start exposing your precisely defined idea to testing. Knowledge starts to accumulate as you deduce necessary consequences of your hypothesis – and observe, in nature or experiment (not in a virtual reality, artificial nature or models), if predicted consequences are correct within derived and stated uncertainties.
The accumulated knowledge, however, is of a vulnerable type. A single and reproducible observation can be sufficient to prove that your idea, anticipation, hypothesis, theory or what you will is outside the derived and stated uncertainties of your theory. By such observations your theory has been falsified – your theory has been proven to be wrong. It has been proven that your theory cannot predict a particular outcome within derived and stated uncertainties. Some elements of your theory might still be true, but these elements has still not been merited by testing. A theory is merited by the severity of the test it has been exposed to and survived.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
Albert Einstein
PS For those interested in Poppers main work, search for: “The logic of scientific discovery pdf”
As far as I know, Popper´s empirical method has stood very well up to scrutiny.
“Realism and the aim of science” was published as late 1983. The book contains detailed replies to contemporary philosophical and scientific critics of his original work “The logic of scientific discovery”.
It is quite meaningless to state that “Popper was wrong. Later he would admit it.” without being precise and without providing relevant references.
GHG prevent deadly ice ages! Let us increase CO2 then.
The most likely reason for the ending of the recent ice age. Is the fact that it remained warm in the tropics during the ice age and that there was a long lasting increase in the variation of the weather patterns across the globe. In order to allow this warm air to flow freely across the areas covered with ice sheets. Which it was not allow to do during the ice age, because of the static weather patterns which lead to the forming of the ice age.
Having now read much of the paper (quickly) it’s logic appears to be:
1) Use a climate model that assumes CO2 is the strongest forcing agent by a factor of 4 or more on global temperatures.
2) Align their newly estimated date ranges for glacial retreats with their time frames for the (model-assumed) CO2 driven temp increases.
3) Conclude CO2 is only likely cause for glacial retreats on a global scale because it is the most significant agent forcing the temp increase.
It becomes a form of Circular Reasoning because we already know that almost all climate models grossly overestimate the effect of CO2 on temperatures.
The only thing surprising here is that many of their results (looking at the regional variations) do not exhibit the required correlation in timeframe for CO2 driven warming and glacial retreat. For some it’s too late and others it’s too early. Only a few align well.
So, naturally, it is the AVERAGE that gets used to support their correlation claims.
Causation, of course, is then assumed.
The salient point in the second press release demonstrates the absolute bias of the author: “There had been a long-standing mystery about why these boulders were uncovered at the time they were, because it didn’t properly match the increase in greenhouse gases,” said Jeremy Shakun
You see it was improper that it wasn’t linked to C02 and had to be fixed by data torture. Now: “Based on the new calculations, the rise in carbon dioxide levels – determined from ancient ice cores -matches up nicely with the time at which glacial retreat took place.”
They release nothing on their error bars for “cosmic rays produced cosmogenic nuclides, which had been previously measured and used to date the event” which it would not be a surprise to be approx. a 800+ years. You know those cosmogenic nuclides in basaltic granite doesn’t seem very accurate.
Matches up nicely – CO2 increased after warming caused the glacial retreat. Wait, that doesn’t help the warmist cause. Better leave out the dates to imply the reverse.
Uh huh – more “science by press release”. Who told them that ALL glaciers were retreating? Or that air temperature is that important in the process? Dumb stuff.
County Fair “Pecker-Pull” competition.
Ha ha
How surprising that this paper is open access! (not).
The discussion is much less certain than the press releases. For those who only read the PR the conclusion is certain. For those who dig — whom I’m sure will include journalists! (not) — the wording is much more cautious. I’ve attempted to highlight some of the words which seem to have been omitted from the PR. I also note that they’re talking about a period of 7,000 years, a period in which almost anything could happen! How they can compare over 7,000 years to the last 30-50 years I don’t know. Oh, and I see from their map that they have not looked at any glaciers in the Himalayas, which is where they predicted all would be gone by 2035. Why would that be?
“A reassessment of the cosmogenic-nuclide based chronology of glacier fluctuations spanning over 100° of latitude shows that glacier retreat was broadly synchronous with the increase in atmospheric CO2 and global temperature from 18–11 ka. Transient simulations with a coupled global climate model show that modulation by other forcings can explain regional variability in the glacier retreat chronology, with insolation explaining early deglaciation in the western United States, and seesaw responses to the AMOC explaining millennial variability in the Southern Hemisphere. Within dating uncertainties, onset of glacier retreat in the tropics is generally consistent with CO2 forcing, but the existing chronology cannot exclude earlier retreat, possibly identifying the influence of ENSO variability on glacier surface mass balance, or some other as yet unidentified regional forcing. While an imperfect comparison due to differences in time scales and several forcings, there is thus some similarity between glacier retreat over the last deglaciation and the last century.”
The paper has been paid for by tax payers money – the crap should be open access.
It´s about time to start saying that we have had enough of inconsistent fiction from bad fiction authors on scientists wages.
Sophisticated? maybe – Scientific method? not at all – Logical consistent? no – Knowledge? no way
There is a paper that demonstrates that, as we come out of glaciation, increased plant life actually increases atmospheric CO2 by causing it to be released from soil!
link
The Shakun paper uses cosmic ray bombardment to determine how long rocks haven’t been buried under ice. There are some types of cosmic ray that can penetrate the Earth to depths of 2 miles. Presumably they will penetrate most glaciers (with various degrees of attenuation), thereby invalidating the paper’s results.
link
Another question occurs to me. To what extent are Shakun’s results affected by the flux amplitude of the cosmic rays? Do cosmic rays correlate with the melting of the glaciers?
My gut instinct tells me that Shakun’s paper isn’t particularly ‘bullet proof’.
If a glacier melts in the forest 12000 years ago and no one is there to hear it, does it still make noise (as in sending out alarms that the world is about to come to its end because of mankind).
Apparently it does, just 12000 years later and if you are a CAGW activist with an agenda.
It is quite clear that the end of the glacial periods resulted in increase of CO2 (out-gassing of oceans, and decay of previously frozen organic material, as well as direct release from melting ice), not the other way. Those article are junk science.
I predict that the Earth’s climate will change quite a bit during the next 1,000,000 years.
Most people will think of it as ridiculous to think that the the climate will not change over 1,000 years.
A important factor in the ending of the ice age across the northern Atlantic area is the fact it remained warm in the Mid Atlantic during the ice age. lts also what explains the big swings in temperature in Greenland during the ice age and part of what convinces me that ice ages are largely caused by little change taking place in the weather patterns over many years. Because without this change in the weather patterns l can not see how the large extent in the ice sheets would have happened.
The ice had started melting back as early as 18,000 years ago. Deglaciation timeline below
CO2 did not start rising until about 16,800 years ago – the traditional lag-time of 1,200 years.
This study is just based on fake timelines.
Exactly Bill.
Back to the basics. By what possible mechanism could CO2 possibly lead temperature coming out of an ice age? The ice core data certainly shows CO2 lagging Temperature coming out of an ice age. By what mechanism does CO2 lead temperature to bring us out of an ice age? Did we repeal Henry’s Law and the laws of biology? Why doesn’t CO2 lead temperature in the ice core data? What makes this cycle repeat itself every 100k or so years? This is a smoking gun of climate change, they have no answer as to why CO2 would lead temperature. They also have no answer as to how CO2 and 13 to 18µ IR can warm the oceans, especially with only 1 to 2 W/M^2 under ideal situations.
“As the last Ice Age ended during a period of about 7,000 years, starting around 19,000 years ago, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million. But just in the past 150 years, they have surged from 280 to about 400 parts per million, far higher than what was required to put an end to the last Ice Age.”
First, NO, the change from 280 to 400 PPM is NOT greater than the change from 180 to 280PPM.
Going to 280PPM from 180PPM was a 55% increase in concentration.
Going to 400PPM from 280PPM was a 43% increase in concentration.
As has been mentioned, we still have the chicken & egg problem. What was the source of CO2 if CO2 caused the end of the ice age? Something tells me the source of the CO2 was from the global warming that was already happening.
It would be impossible to demonstrate that CO2 caused the warming which ended the last ice age, rather than the warming caused the CO2 if the two followed the same curve with minimal temporal offset. I’m sure CO2 played some role in the feedback, but the ice age warmed up by 8~11C globally to reach Holocene levels. And CO2 trailed the temperature rise, always following, very rarely leading it – or preventing it from falling again.
Unless there is some, as of yet unknown, major CO2 sink, ice ages would be impossible if CO2’s effects were strong enough that a gradual move from 180PPM to 280PPM could result in an abrupt 11C increase in global temperatures.
I would also like to state that, contrary to so many claims I see made, the current interglacial has already long outlived its expected life and the earth should be dropping back into an ice age. An ice-covered earth is normal, the last 10,000 years have been abnormally warm – and we’ve benefited tremendously as a result.
If Shakun e.a. were right, indeed there couldn’t be a new ice age, as the CO2 levels after the Eemian remained high for thousands of years while temperatures were falling (but CH4 levels closely followed temperature in the Vostok ice core, thus the timing between gas age and ice age was about right).
Only after temperatures reached a new minimum (and ice sheets a new maximum), the CO2 levels started to go down. The subsequent drop of ~40 ppmv had no measurable effect on temperature or ice sheet formation… Here for the Vostok ice core:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/eemian.gif
There is no synchronization between CO2 and temperature or ice sheet formation during a deglaciation…
Forgot to add:
Delta Ts (corr) is the corrected temperature scale according to Jouzel e.a., in an attempt to synchronize the CO2 and T changes (which didn’t help at all).
18Oatm is a proxy for ice sheet formation. It is measured in N2O of the air, which 18O/16O ratio (δ18O) is inversely correlated to ice sheet volume (or area?). In the graph already inverted and scaled to give an impression of ice sheets growth and wane.
Actual CO2 change from 18,000 years ago to 11,000 years ago –> 187 ppm to 265 ppm –> 1.86 W/m2 in forcing using the 5.35 ln formula —> and the temperature change over the period was +4.7C
Actual CO2 change in the last 250 years —> 275 ppm to 400 ppm —> 2.00 W/m2 (so it is actually a greater forcing change) — temperature change +0.7C.
As one can see, something is wrong with the basic math when a smaller forcing can have 6 and half times as much impact on temperatures.
In other words, CO2 could also have Zero impact since one needs to also know what happened to the planetary Albedo over both of those time periods and in the deglaciation timeline in order to resolve what part CO2 played. The climate science prophesy community is very cagey about releasing what Albedo estimates they are using and I can guarantee you that the Shakun study does not show what they used.
My estimate is the global Albedo went from 33.3% 18,000 years ago to 30.0% 11,000 years ago and then changed from 29.9% 250 years ago to 29.8% today. Shakun probably used 30.6% 18,000 years ago and then 29.8% for all the other times in question – completely fake numbers in order to maximize the role played by CO2.
Interesting that the author refers to the end of the last glacial maximum of the present Pleistcene-Quaternary Glaciation as the end of the present Ice Age.
Also interesting that the role of ice-albedo feedback is not identified as the primary positive feedback involved in the abrupt end of a glacial period- just a hypothetical CO2 effect.
My understanding was, that at the temperature peak at the end of the last glacial maximum, atmospheric CO2 levels (as measured in Antarctic ice cores) continued to rise, even well after the period of peak northern hemisphere summer insolation had passed.
If CO2 was the strongest feedback factor, why did its influence abruptly ‘switch off’ after the end of the glacial maximum?
Concentration of CO2 is irrelevant. What is relevant is the Δ of W/^2.
MODTRAN:
http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/
Going from 180 to 280 resulted in W/M^2 going from 293.056 W/M^2 to 290.952, or about 2.1 W/M^2
Going from 280 to 400 resulted in W/M^2 going from 290.952 to 289.288 W/M^2, or about 1.6 W/M^2
BTW, going from 0% humidity to 4% humidity (0 to 40 mbar water vapor) W/M^2 goes from 360.786 to 266.46, or about 94 W/M^2. That is why a desert gets so cold at night. No water vapor to trap the heat. The impact of H2O completely dominates anything CO2 could do, and we can have 4% humidity on a rainy day.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/SH400TropicsVsCO2.jpg
Of course GHGs caused it. The rocks are the gunning smoke.
How did these studies pass the sniff test of a good peer review? The reviewers must have plugged their noses because the stink of bullshit was so bad, and they couldn’t read them very well because they’re eyes were tearing up from the smell.
“How did these studies pass the sniff test of a good peer review? ”
A perverse culture in climate science, called pal review, is being run by the editors at Science and Nature. History will not be kind to them. The reputations at those journals will be destroyed once the Great Climate Scam is unmasked by a few unscruplous editors.
“Science and Nature”…
Yes, but they will just rename them.
This non-scientist has two questions:
1) What’s so great about glaciers anyway?
2) If the “the exposure of the boulders to cosmic rays” caused them to “produce…cosmogenic nuclides,” couldn’t those same cosmic rays have melted the ice in the first place?
Oh, and another question…how does melting glaciers cause “depleted water resources”?
katherine009,
1) For many people glaciers provide a buffer solution for their water supply as good for drinking as irrigation. In many cases can be solved by building dams which collect the spring melt water…
2) Each cosmic particle has enormous energy, but there are too few numbers of cosmic rays to give a total energy enough to melt anything.
Quote:
“The researchers found that … carbon dioxide was the major follower of the overall global meltdown, said Shakun, a co-author of the report.”
There, fix that for them….
R
IT IS VERY EVIDENT THAT CO2 DOES NOT ! LEAD THE TEMPERATURE.
The simplistic reason being if CO2 did lead the temperature and a positive feedback is at work and if this feedback as they are claiming now is the control knob for the climate what (taken into consideration what AGW is saying now) stopped this process once it got started to not keep going? In other words what forces (which AGW theory claims apparently there are none) stopped the climate from a run a way state. In other words more CO2 warmer temperature leads to more CO2 hence an even warmer temperature.
Why once this process got going according to AGW theory did it not keep going if CO2 positive feedbacks are the control knob for the climate? What force or process has stopped this from happening in the past?
If as AGW theory claims CO2 is the all climatic control factor why then in the past when a situation similar to what we have today according to AGW did not keep going on and on?
Remember AGW says CO2 and only CO2 rules the climate.
That is another smoking gun. The AGW theory has no “off switch.” The AGW theory runs counter to 600 million years of geologic history when CO2 got as high as 7000 ppm. They also don’t seem to understand that CO2 absorption of IR isn’t linear with concentration. Large changes in CO2 from this level mean very little.
Temperatures during the last ice age were about 6 degrees lower than during interglacial periods. CO2 levels, according to ice cores, were down around 180 ppm during the glacial period. If falling CO2 caused that cooling then we should have seen an increase of global temps of about 6 degrees as the CO2 levels went from 270 to 400 in modern times, but we’ve only seen about 0.8 degrees. CO2 could not have been the main cause of the cooling at the beginning of the ice age nor the warming at the end of it as the change in CO2 could only have produced a fraction of that change.in temperature.
“Carbon dioxide levels rose from approximately 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million at the end of the last Ice Age, which spanned nearly 7,000 years.”
Why does correlation with a rise in CO2 “conclusively” prove causation? That’s a scientific no-no. And what caused CO2 to suddenly increase 7000 years into an Ice Age? I must have missed their explanation. Did it come from warming oceans? But that would mean the oceans had to warm first. Did it come from melting permafrost? But that would have the same objection. Did it come from fires, volcanoes, alien SUVs, or what?
On the positive side, this study’s conclusion means we can avoid the next Ice Age by keeping CO2 levels high. Isn’t that a good reason to resist decreasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below current levels? I think it’s a darn good reason on top of the fact that the climate seems to be quite optimum at current levels, whether it has anything to do with CO2 or not.
This study is a joke.
Yes it is. But if warmists want to insist that this study is correct, then we should insist, based on the same study, that CO2 levels be kept high to avoid the next Ice Age. Turnabout is fail play.
Seriously, how does this entire field not chew its own leg off in an attempt to escape?
Yes, they are trapped. We’ll feel sorry for them someday. There were forces far bigger than they understood at work on the science.
===============
You hit the nail on the head. Very sophisticated insight.
Yes Kim – money and power, As usual even ‘good’ scientists are trapped by a society run by greed and fear 🙁
There seems to be a lot of snow falling around Banff in Canada at the moment …. fickle weather, eh?
“There seems to be a lot of snow falling around Banff in Canada at the moment …. fickle weather, eh?”
Wellllll. Let us not forget that Banff is at about 5,000′ elevation….so of course the lower temp will cause snow instead of rain. And anyways….there are no glaciers around there to worry about! OH WAIT. (from some guy 2 hrs. east of there). But what would I know about local wx conditions compared to the climate warming science gods?
Jesus, talk about confusing cause and effect.
‘As the last Ice Age ended during a period of about 7,000 years, starting around 19,000 years ago, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million. But just in the past 150 years, they have surged from 280 to about 400 parts per million, far higher than what was required to put an end to the last Ice Age.’
Interesting how blasé these researchers are about a CO2 level of 180 ppm but then absolutely freak out about a level of 400 ppm. As I understand it 180 ppm is a mere 20-30 ppm above the level at which all life on this planet would have ceased to exist. And, compared to levels for the majority of the planet’s existence, an astoundingly low number. Why don’t they put that in their press release?
Why do these things climate things always need to be recalculated? Why can’t they calculate them correctly the first time? My Mac and PC both have calculators – I just don’t understand what is going wrong?
science advances. why couldnt galileo measure the speed of light accurately the first time
Galileo didnt have a PC or Mac – what is the excuse this time?
YOUTUBE
Tree Death in Vermont video 1..(poor audio) Just watch dead trees!
Patrice Lopatin
Patrice Lopatin
1) Correlation is not causation. (well known)
2) Temperature leads CO2 by about 1,000 years. (well known)
3) OK, I’ll humor them for a moment, but if greenhouse gasses caused the Holocene warm-up, what caused the green-house gasses to increase? It certainly wasn’t the paltry 5,000,000 humans living in caves and mud-huts! So it must have been natural! Furthermore, there has been no “runaway” positive feedback causing the earth to melt! Not this interglacial, and not the 4 previous interglacials! Paleo data says that temperatures have been higher in the past. There are no SCARY positive feedbacks! In fact, looking at the paleo data suggests very strongly that there are strong NEGATIVE feedbacks. It must be so, or the temperature would just have run away!
Sorry… we’re just not buying what they’re selling.
Temperature leads CO2 by about 1,000 years. (well known)
actually this fact was PREDICTED by AGW theory
You’re trolling, right? Or being sarcastic?
AGW boldly, and wrongly, predicts that CO2 should lead temperature… but temperature greatly leads CO2, and drives it by the nose.
What we are seeing today is MWP 2.0.
In climate science, CO2 causes hot and cold, drought and flood, at the same time. Alternative realities at the same time are not contradictions in climate science.
“But a reexamination of more than 1,000 previously studied glacial boulders”
I’m always amazed at how stupid people used to be, that reexamination produces different results.
My take, There’s an “H” of lot Man doesn’t know about Life and the world we live in. The wise one’s admit that and want to learn more. The fools don’t. They already know.
Did it ever occur to these guys that ice retreat and subsequent greening of large areas would cause an explosion of animal life, from insects on up, and that could drive rapid CO2 rise? Presumably that would stabilize as plant life took up the extra CO2, and reached a post-glacial equilibrium. I have no idea of this speculation is correct, but it seems at least as plausible as the theory in these papers…
Equilibrium without Man’s control and taxes? Not possible.
+100
Steven Mosher
August 21, 2015 at 9:53 am
So the Milankovich orbital change got us into the glacial, but its completed cycle doesn’t bring us back out of it!! Its got to be CO2!! They are saying (and you supporting) that it is the only global forcing that can explain the meltback. Do thermal catastrophists think the Milankovich cycle is only a regional thing? Like they think the LIA and MWP and all the other warm and cold periods are regional? Abductive reasoning, eh?
Okay lets go with the new idea and forget about ice corps actual data. So what caused the rise in CO2 in concert with the ice meltback – surely a 100ppm rise which was not caused by humans is a bit of a heresy only a few minutes ago ”geologically”. And while we are at it, what reduced it down the 100ppm or whatever it was to 165 ppm in the first place to initiate the recent glacial? Also, if the 100ppm+ raised the temperature 4C or so and the next 100ppm added by the Industrial Rev raised it by 0.8C, can we deduce that the next 100ppm will raise by another 0.2 -0.4, and the next 100ppm raise it to 0.1 and after that we can gas ourselves with 8000ppm like in a submarine? So do they realize the same thing will come along and the CO2 is going to suddenly go down again all by itself like it did before and slip us into the next ice age? It has, after all done it time and again.
Anyway, that should close the circle on your abductive reasoning. This paper’s authors’ reasoning has been abducted by something, I’m sure.
There is one very clear and simple reason why climate related science has ceased to be science.
In scientific investigation there is needs to be some uncertainty and degree of freedom as to what will be found, what answer will be obtained.
If the answer is 100% known on advance, it robs the process of scientific meaning.
Climate “research” is a pantomime analogous to this well known Far Side cartoon about the horse hospital and the single prescription to every possible ailment:
Far Side
The reason that climate science is not science is that, way before any climate question is considered or posed, the answer is known; it is CO2.
Thus it is the fact that the “science is settled” (answer is always and only CO2) that means that climate science in its current form can never be real science.
Complete and utter nonsense. Carbon dioxide had nothing to do with glacier melting. First, numerous observations if Pleistocene ice melting show that carbon dioxide follows instead of leading ice melt. They claim that according to their boulder observations the reverse is true. It is quite unlikely that their re-examination of a few boulders will nullify the fact that all through Pleistocene carbon dioxide increase followed rather than preceded the occurrence of ice melting. Secondly, it is quite impossible for melting to take place then both carbon dioxide and water vapor are simultaneously in the air. According to MGT – Miskilczi greenhouse theory – these two greenhouse gases form an optimal joint absorption window in the infrared whose optical thickness is 1.87. This value comes from radiosonde measurements. If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as these fakers claim happened here water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. The result is that despite an addition of carbon dioxide no warming takes place because reduction of water vapor has lowered the absorptivity of the atmosphere. This is not just a theory but is happening right now to us and explains why we have a hiatus. Hiatus or stoppage of warming when atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing invalidates the Arrhenius greenhouse theory that is constantly touted as cause of the anthropogenic greenhouse warming or AGW. In these press releases they attempt to tell us two falsehoods: first, that carbon dioxide increase precedes instead of following ice melt. And second that the warming it creates is greenhouse warming. The latter is quite impossible according to MGT as I pointed out. The existence of the hiatus poroves it. I give them a zero for knowing climate science which they pretend to be practicing here.
“As Ice Age ended, greenhouse gas rise was lead factor in melting of Earth’s glaciers”…released after extensive Pal Review, just in time for the Paris Fest.
Roll over, Milanko.
Shakun is a criminal con artist, simple as that, I hope I live to see him behind bars.
““This shows that at the end of the last Ice Age, it was only the increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that could have caused the loss of glaciers around the world at the same time,” said Peter Clark, a professor in the OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, and co-author on the study.”
Rubbish caused by the academic requirement to publish or perish.
So the CO2 Fairy waved her magic wand, CO2 increased and glaciers melted.
Where’s temperature in this scenario?
Errrmm……as soon as temperatures started to rise, leading to an increase in CO2, glaciers started to retreat depositing moraine as they did so. So there should be a rough correlation [not causation] between moraine deposition and CO2 levels
The press releases imply there were predictions. The peer-reviewed article mentions none of them. If there were none then the alarms raised by the press releases lack bases in science.
The institutions that issued the press releases stood to gain by implying there were predictions when, it appears, there weren’t any. Will this set of facts motivate prosecution of apparently guilty parties under the Obama administration? Would they motivate prosecution of apparently guilty parties under a Hillary Clinton administration? Sorry to say, I don’t think so.
Where this is going is very clear.
With the LIA and the MWP out of the way, the next target of the AGW establishment is ice ages themselves.
“Ice ages? What ice ages?”
A BBC documentary the other night had David Attenborough talking about the glacial period as having “ended” 12,000 years ago.
Umm – David – no it hasn’t ended.
The end of the Holocene may not be very far away.
The Pleistocene glacial epoch is actually deepening in amplitude (especially after the MPR) with the latest Wisconsin glaciation being the deepest yet.
What does this mean?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:%20/normalise/plot/rss/from:2001/trend/plot/esrl-co2/normalise:1979/from:1979
Oregon State University has no climate credibility.
OS was the home of the Marcott abomination. Several years ago, OS forced George Taylor out of his position for telling the truth about Pacific NW snowpack (it was cyclical, and had nothing to do with CO2) and for being politically incorrect enough to show that natural variability had a role to play in climate change.
I say this sadly, as an OS alumnus.
At least the OSU guy throws in more of the honest qualifiers (could, ifs, in some cases) than the Boston College guy.
I took an atmospheric sciences class as an elective (for an easy A) at OSU. The professor was a pretty good. He did his weather prediction at the end of each class when time allowed (based on pressure contours at a certain elevation); he was correct almost all of the time (compared to about 50% for the T.V. guy … it was springtime in Oregon).
Too bad about George Taylor. Too bad about OSU.
I didn’t notice it at the time (long ago) but OSU pushed me from the ignorant left that most high school kids are, to a kid that started to vote republican more than otherwise.
Where is the “dueling” between press releases as claimed in the article’s headline?
The whole AGW movement is such BS!
This study is an example of where ignorance of chaos and nonlinear dynamics gets you. You have the climate ocean-atmosphere system, sissipating heat from the equator to the poles via complex emergent structures, subject to orbital, lunar and solar periodic forcings. For most normal scientists this should all be enough of a hint at the character if the dynamics involved.
Then an even bigger hint is given which should be impossible for anyone to miss. The system switches between two states, glacial and interglacial. Hello! Ding dong – anyone at home?
But all this goes over the head of dear Shakun. For him the only mechanism of moving from glacial to interglacial is linear brute force(ing). For him the system is passive, dead, only moveable by external forcing.
Ed Lorenz showed that a simple simulation of climate on a 1961 computer is able to switch between levels and states from internal dynamics and without external forcing. Everyone who uses the term “forcing” in climate “science” is just advertising his or her ignorance of chaotic nonlinear dynamics.
Does anyone have Shakun’s email address? We should gift him a copy of Lorenz 1961, Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.
@Philogiston
Your post only addresses internal dynamics of the Climate system, but does not address the external climate forcing of the greenhouse effect which restricts the outward flow of infrared thermal radiation from Earth, and raises the energy content, and thus temperature, of the Earth’s total Climate System.
As the Greenhouse effect has increased with the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 ppm since ~1800, the energy content and temperature of the Earth’s climate system has continued to increase, just as in prehistoric times when oceans gave up CO2 due to natural Milankovitch warming. The difference between now and then is that the increased atmospheric CO2 is a result of Mans burning of fossil fuels, so its no longer a warming/cooling cycle —but rather an upward-only trend, not a ‘cycle’.
Shakun has it right, but then so has entry level college science had it right, for at least a hundred years.
Warren
Thanks, but you missed the point.
Clearly neither Shakun nor your entry level college student has any grasp of the implications of chaos / nonlinearity here so I will try again.
Your use of the work “internal” here is strange, unclear and misleading. It applies to the whole climate system, particularly to most of the heat which resides in the oceans – oceans that are dynamic and not passive. Thus global warming itself is also an “internal” phenomenon. Sorry but there’s no sweeping chaos / nonlinearity hinder the carpet here, its not “noise”, it dominates the system.
I’m not saying that there may not be radiative forcing. In principle it is possible for this to exist.
For instance its quite possible that a giant Vogon spaceship flies by and a giant hair-dryer is blown at the earth to warm it us a bit.
But what is also clear is that, once you understand the scale of the dynamically chaotic ocean heat and the OHC you come to realize that ALL – 100% – of the changes in global temperature of the last century or two of the instrumental record, could EASILY have been caused by “internal” chaotic dynamics, alone an unaided by any external “forcing” and thus, the simple fact of warming actually proves little or nothing in regard to a hypothetical role of CO2.
warrenlib:
You draw your conclusion from an argument in which terms including “warming,” “trend” and “science” change meaning in the midst of this argument. That they change meaning makes of this argument an equivocation. An equivocation looks like a syllogism but isn’t one. Thus one cannot logically draw a conclusion from an equivocation. Nonetheless you draw the conclusion that “…its no longer a warming/cooling cycle-but rather an upward-only trend…” Therefore your argument is illogical.
sissipatingdissipatingC’mon now, it’s Peter Clark and OSU, alarmist empire of the west….he and Mann must be envious from the lack of attention…and wasn’t Shakun the co-author with PC on an outlandish report a few years ago? Somebody let them know, the northern hemisphere ice sheet started disintegrating 4 to 5 k years prior (remember some came out over spring claiming ocean CO2 ‘degassing’ evidence linking to such event)….these folks just can’t remove from group think and fraudulent AGW meme…..
Just wanted to ask; do they know how many times those boulders had been covered and uncovered and covered again? and would that affect the amount of Beryllium 10 they base their calcualtions on?
Can a moderator tell me please what I’m doing wrong? I very occasionally post a short uncontroversial comment but lately it never appears. Could you tell me please what the deal is -am I wasting my time trying -ever? I’d just like to not be wasting my time .
[we had some spam trouble from somebody of a similar handle, filter tweaked, see if it works better now -Anthony]