From EurekAlert
International Greenland ice coring effort sets new drilling record in 2009
Ancient ice cores expected to help scientists assess risks of abrupt climate change in future
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  IMAGE: Atmospheric gases trapped in ancient ice recovered during the international North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling, or NEEM, project are expected to help scientists better assess the risks of abrupt climate…
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A new international research effort on the Greenland ice sheet with the University of Colorado at Boulder as the lead U.S. institution set a record for single-season deep ice-core drilling this summer, recovering more than a mile of ice core that is expected to help scientists better assess the risks of abrupt climate change in the future.
The project, known as the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling, or NEEM, is being undertaken by 14 nations and is led by the University of Copenhagen. The goal is to retrieve ice from the last interglacial episode known as the Eemian Period that ended about 120,000 years ago. The period was warmer than today, with less ice in Greenland and 15-foot higher sea levels than present — conditions similar to those Earth faces as it warms in the coming century and beyond, said CU-Boulder Professor Jim White, who is leading the U.S. research contingent.
While three previous Greenland ice cores drilled in the past 20 years covered the last ice age and the period of warming to the present, the deeper ice layers representing the warm Eemian and the period of transition to the ice age were compressed and folded, making them difficult to interpret, said White. Radar measurements taken through the ice sheet from above the NEEM site indicate the Eemian ice layers below are thicker, more intact and likely contain more accurate, specific information, he said.
“Every time we drill a new ice core, we learn a lot more about how Earth’s climate functions,” said White, “The Eemian period is the best analog we have for future warming on Earth.”
Annual ice layers formed over millennia in Greenland by compressed snow reveal information on past temperatures and precipitation levels and the contents of ancient atmospheres, said White, who directs CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Ice cores exhumed during previous drilling efforts revealed abrupt temperature spikes of more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit in just 50 years in the Northern Hemisphere.
The NEEM team reached a depth of 5,767 feet in early August, where ice layers date to 38,500 years ago during a cold glacial period preceding the present interglacial, or warm period. The team hopes to hit bedrock at 8,350 feet at the end of next summer, reaching ice deposited during the warm Eemian period that lasted from roughly 130,000 to 120,000 years ago before the planet began to cool and ice up once again.
The NEEM project began in 2008 with the construction of a state-of-the-art facility, including a large dome, the drilling rig for extracting 3-inch-diameter ice cores, drilling trenches, laboratories and living quarters. The official drilling started in June of this year. The United States is leading the laboratory analysis of atmospheric gases trapped in bubbles within the NEEM ice cores, including greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, said White.
The NEEM project is led by the University of Copenhagen’s Centre of Ice and Climate directed by Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen. The United States and Denmark are the two leading partners in the project. The U.S. effort is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.
“Evidence from ancient ice cores tell us that when greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere, the climate warms,” said White. “And when the climate warms, ice sheets melt and sea levels rise. If we see comparable rises in sea level in the future like we have seen in the ice-core record, we can pretty much say good-bye to American coastal cities like Miami, Houston, Norfolk, New Orleans and Oakland.”
Increased warming on Earth also has a host of other potentially deleterious effects, including changes in ecosystems, wildlife extinctions, the growing spread of disease, potentially catastrophic heat waves and increases in severe weather events, according to scientists.
While ice cores pinpoint abrupt climate change events as Earth has passed in and out of glacial periods, the warming trend during the present interglacial period is caused primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning, White said. “What makes this warming trend fundamentally different from past warming events is that this one is driven by human activity and involves human responsibility, morals and ethics.”
Other nations involved in the project include the United States, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Other CU-Boulder participants in the NEEM effort include INSTAAR postdoctoral researcher Vasilii Petrenko and Environmental Studies Program doctoral student Tyler Jones. Other U.S. institutions collaborating in the international NEEM effort include Oregon State University, Penn State, the University of California, San Diego and Dartmouth College.
For more information on the NEEM project, including images and video, visit http://www.neem.ku.dk.
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Geez, this White guy doesn’t sound too neutral on the whole project, that already makes it 95% sure they’ll find/interpret what they want to find!
Thanks for coming out and keeping an open mind.
I saw this earlier on Greeniewatch. As the commentator over there pointed out, the last sentence says it all:- ” What makes this warming trend fundamentally different from past warming events is that this one is driven by human activity and involves human responsibility, morals and ethics.”
This is the new meme that I am seeing from AGW supporters as well.
Did some digging on this Jim White. If he is particularly brilliant I couldnt find any references or his publications, but here are some ratings from his pupils:
“Teaches out of the book, not very helpful, and gives ridiculous, nit-picky tests”
“His class was like milk, it was good for 2 weeks. ….and lectures seem to come directly from the book. …and he is out of town all the time, leaving the terrible TA’s to teach. ENOUGH ALREADY!”
“Good teacher. Funny.”
(Yeah I think he’s funny too. Probably chosen by Hansen because he is a true believer)
http://ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=918593
On the other hand Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a lady, has been awarded the prestigious Swedish ‘Vega Medal’, has 72 peer reviewed publications, numerous honours and awards, currently Professor, at the Niels Bohr Institute and visiting Professor University of Hobart
From what I can gather is that the Eemian Period was the name of the last interglacial before our present one, from 130,000 to 120,000 years ago, that it was 5 degrees warmer then than today, that the global sea level was 4-5 m higher than at present.
Here is some of the stuff she has written:
“The deep NGRIP ice core from North Greenland (75N, 42W) is 3090m deep and reaches 125.000 years back in time….It can be concluded that the there was an significant ice sheet covering Greenland during the warm Eemian period and that the reduction of the Greenland ice sheet at most contributed with a sea level rise of 1-2 m of the observed 5 m… ice covered south Greenland during the Eemian period.”
http://cires.colorado.edu/events/lectures/dahljensen/
TA (21:40:29) :
I read the article by Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski linked by Mike Abbott (13:39:07), and it is intriguing. It is certainly relevant to the topic of ice core CO2 research. A search on the last name does not reveal anything on WUWT. His work seems pretty important, unless there’s something wrong with it….Is there?
I misspelled his last name the first time I used it in that post. It should be “Jaworski.” Try searching for that name. Also, try searching for that name on Real Climate and Tamino. If there is something wrong with Jaworski’s work, you’ll read about it there. Even if there is nothing wrong with Jaworski’s work, I’m sure they trashed it. Let us know what you find.
“When an ancient harbor settlement is now 200 feet from the shore, you know something has changed. And in other places those types of settlements are underwater. So it’s a crap shoot either way.”
Yeah. Well known Viking ports are now over a kilometer inland. Go figure.
Oops, part of the reason some of those ports are so far inland now is due to post-glacial rebound. But sea levels are currently about 2 meters lower than they were 5000 years ago.
Professor Jim White is quoted in this article as saying, “If we see comparable rises in sea level in the future like we have seen in the ice-core record, we can pretty much say good-bye to American coastal cities … .”
That is a most remarkable piece of newspeak. For years we have been assured that the sea-level during the MIS-11 (Holsteinian) interglacial was 10-20 meters than at present, but miraculously there is not the slightest trace of this in any of the ice-cores.
By the way the 15 feet sea-level rise during the last interglacial also referred to is very doubtful. The best records from the most tectonically stable areas like the Gawler Craton of Australia actually suggests something like 6-7 feet (which incidentally fits much better with the indisputable fact that there has been ice from the Eemian at the bottom of EVERY ice core that has been drilled on Greenland). So while the Greenland icecap is supposed to have largely melted then, we have yet to find a place where this actually happened. Even the small isolated Renland icecap in Eastern Greenland that is only a few hundred meters thick has Eeemian ice at the bottom (to be fair it is possible that this is only late Eemian, and that the Renland icecap actually did melt very briefly during the very warmest part of the Eemian).
Incidentally both ice-core records and fossil data from ice-free areas of Greenland agrees that temperatures there were about 5 degrees warmer than now during the Eemian.
They are quite right to paint a picture of doom. If all our society can muster in the the 21st century is science by consensus, then heaven help us. . .
I find it profoundly depressing that one of the senior scientists in charge of what should be a great scientific enterprise is a blithering idiot. It looks like his knowledge of climate science was obtained entirely from a viewing of An Inconvenient Truth.
.
He says: ““Evidence from ancient ice cores tell us that when greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere, the climate warms,”
As we know, the truth is the exact opposite. As other posters have said, it would be great if he could be publicly challenged on this false statement.
Chris
According to NOAA sea levels on the eastern USA have been up to two feet higher recently due to winds and currents. Has there been any flooding? I know any sea level rise would be on top of this but it shows how variable sea level is naturally.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090831132943.htm
TonyB (12:39:23) :
Coincidentally as this new thread popped up I was doing more research work on Arrhenius and Ernst Beck. Having already carried out considerable background work on co2 readings back to 1830, I am inclined to agree with Beck that co2 levels then were similar to todays.
However, this is directly contradicted by the ice cores that state that co2 levels have been constant at around 280ppm until they started gently rising in the industrial age and were at 315ppm at the start of the 20th century.
Beck’s compilation of CO2 measurements shows the great variability of CO2 values geographically. This makes sense since a lot of CO2 depends on the biota of the region.
Ice core records are records of ice cores, i.e. regions where little life can be seen. As the AIRS maps show, even high in space there is large variability in the distribution of CO2. CO2 is not a well dispersed well mixed chemical in the air.
Thus even if there are no errors in the CO2 measurements from ice cores, the values are just the values that existed at the time the ice was settling, in a region with no biological activity.
Joel Shore (19:47:58) :
How do we know that Hansen’s watt/m^2 estimates are correct?
We know the temperature record is probably correct but Hansen’s watt/m^2 estimates are “tuned” to arrive at 0.75C/watt/m^2.
Hansen’s ice sheet feedback in the ice ages increases the Planetary Albedo by 0.015 (which is too low to start with) which would then translate into reduced solar energy of -5.1 watts/m^2 going by the standard formula.
But in Hansen’s magic climate box, the ice sheet feedback (and the further negative vegetation feedback) is somehow reduced to just -3.5 w/m^2.
Sorry, that is called changing the values to match what one wants to show.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/uploads/465/cv_hansen_fig3.png
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1984/1984_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1993/1993_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
Was my question at (15:00:35) really that stupid , or is it unanswerable ? anna v ‘ s comment above was some help , but…..
Anna v
Thanks for your reply. I know we are both interested in Becks work and also the lack of mixing of co2, as shown in the AIRS maps. Can you provide a link to the most relevant of those again for the benefit of others here?
I don’t think I have ever seen a thread here on AIRS, lack of mixing and the lack of biological activity at the poles that would impact on ice cores. I must say I still remain unconvinced about these cores although Ferdinand has gone through them in great detail with me. 🙂
tonyb
the AIRS link
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003400/a003440/index.html
though it is not as good as the original
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/index.html
which is hard to find now.
P Walker (15:00:35) :
OK , This is probably a stupid question , but how do we know that co2 contained in precipitation is an accurate measure of atmospheric co2 ? I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere .
Supposedly ice cores have air bubbles trapped in the ice and it is these air bubbles that give the CO2 measurements, not the CO2 dispersed in the former liquid that became ice.
Anna. v
Thanks for the link. They do seem to have gone backwards with these. The best one I could find is here (then click the first on the list)
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/search/Series/COGlobalTransport.html
tonyb
Bill Illis (06:33:37):
What is the evidence for your claim that he has “tuned” the forcings? Why do you think the albedo estimate is too low to start with?
And, is it possible that the albedo number that you quote is a change just in ground albedo, which would not act on the full 342 W/m^2. (It seems a bit extreme to me to assume that Hansen has made an elementary math mistake or tuned the numbers and no fellow scientist has found this!)
At any rate, my original point still stands, which is that Hansen’s estimate of how much of the temperature change CO2 was responsible for is not in disagreement with yours (which you got from who-knows-where). It is basically at the upper end of your estimate.
P Walker
You will regret asking your question after you see what you have to wade through in order to unearth the secrets of fractionation of gases in ice cores.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4JCBM1K-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=997456000&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=88c979727c5b3e9e0f2ad469f0ce386e
To be honest, after reading all the literature I am not at all convinced that ice cores are able to measure co2-albeit in a very indirect and complex way.
Personally I would rather stick with what our brilliant forefathers measured directly during the period 1830 onwards-co2 concentration at similar levels to today. If joel or Ferdinand are lurking however I am sure they will have a very different opinion.
Happy reading!
Tonyb
anna v – thanks , that jogged my memory .
TonyB – thanks also . I will try to wade through this today . Like you , I prefer actual , observed data over proxies as they don’t lend themselves to speculation .
TonyB – I’m too much of a cheapskate to pay for the article , but in searching for a freebee on the web , I learned a few things about one of the co-authors . Interestingly , given his AGW positions , one of his articles was linked to another stating that co2 lagged temperature rise . Also from the abstract to your linked article , he doesn’t include co2 per se in his analysis . Apparently he specializes in inferring temperature changes from ice core samples . (Lousy sentences , but the P Walker household is is disarray this afternoon – sorry .)
Mike Abbott and TA:
More on Prof. JAWOROWSKI (right first time):
Climate Change: Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2
Statement written for the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
March 2004
Statement of Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski
Chairman, Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection
Warsaw, Poland
I am a Professor at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (CLOR) in Warsaw, Poland, a governmental institution, involved in environmental studies. CLOR has a “Special Liaison” relationship with the US National Council on Radiological Protection and Measurements (NCRP). In the past, for about ten years, CLOR closely cooperated with the US Environmental Protection Agency, in research on the influence of industry and nuclear explosions on pollution of the global environment and population. I published about 280 scientific papers, among them about 20 on climatic problems. I am the representative of Poland in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), and in 1980-1982 I was the chairman of this Committee.
For the past 40 years I was involved in glacier studies, using snow and ice as a matrix for reconstruction of history of man-made pollution of the global atmosphere. A part of these studies was related to the climatic issues. Ice core records of CO2 have been widely used as a proof that, due to man’s activity the current atmospheric level of CO2 is about 25% higher than in the pre-industrial period. These records became the basic input parameters in the models of the global carbon cycle and a cornerstone of the man-made climatic warming hypothesis. These records do not represent the atmospheric reality, as I will try to demonstrate in my statement.
Relevant Background
In order to study the history of industrial pollution of the global atmosphere, between 1972 and 1980, I organized 11 glacier expeditions, which measured natural and man-made pollutants in contemporary and ancient precipitation, preserved in 17 glaciers in Arctic, Antarctic, Alaska, Norway, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Ruwenzori Mountains in Uganda, the Peruvian Andes and in Tatra Mountains in Poland. I also measured long-term changes of dust in the troposphere and stratosphere, and the lead content in humans living in Europe and elsewhere during the past 5000 years. In 1968 I published the first paper on lead content in glacier ice[1]. Later I demonstrated that in pre-industrial period the total flux of lead into the global atmosphere was higher than in the 20th century, that the atmospheric content of lead is dominated by natural sources, and that the lead level in humans in Medieval Ages was 10 to 100 times higher than in the 20th century. In the 1990s I was working in the Norwegian Polar Research Institute in Oslo, and in the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo. In this period I studied the effects of climatic change on polar regions, and the reliability of glacier studies for estimation of CO2 concentration in the ancient atmosphere.
False Low Pre-industrial CO2 in the Atmosphere
Determinations of CO2 in polar ice cores are commonly used for estimations of the pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric levels. Perusal of these determinations convinced me that glaciological studies are not able to provide a reliable reconstruction of CO2 concentrations in the ancient atmosphere. This is because the ice cores do not fulfill the essential closed system criteria. One of them is a lack of liquid water in ice, which could dramatically change the chemical composition the air bubbles trapped between the ice crystals. This criterion, is not met, as even the coldest Antarctic ice (down to -73°C) contains liquid water[2]. More than 20 physico-chemical processes, mostly related to the presence of liquid water, contribute to the alteration of the original chemical composition of the air inclusions in polar ice[3].
One of these processes is formation of gas hydrates or clathrates. In the highly compressed deep ice all air bubbles disappear, as under the influence of pressure the gases change into the solid clathrates, which are tiny crystals formed by interaction of gas with water molecules. Drilling decompresses cores excavated from deep ice, and contaminates them with the drilling fluid filling the borehole. Decompression leads to dense horizontal cracking of cores, by a well known sheeting process. After decompression of the ice cores, the solid clathrates decompose into a gas form, exploding in the process as if they were microscopic grenades. In the bubble-free ice the explosions form a new gas cavities and new cracks[4]. Through these cracks, and cracks formed by sheeting, a part of gas escapes first into the drilling liquid which fills the borehole, and then at the surface to the atmospheric air. Particular gases, CO2, O2 and N2 trapped in the deep cold ice start to form clathrates, and leave the air bubbles, at different pressures and depth. At the ice temperature of -15°C dissociation pressure for N2 is about 100 bars, for O2 75 bars, and for CO2 5 bars. Formation of CO2 clathrates starts in the ice sheets at about 200 meter depth, and that of O2 and N2 at 600 to 1000 meters. This leads to depletion of CO2 in the gas trapped in the ice sheets. This is why the records of CO2 concentration in the gas inclusions from deep polar ice show the values lower than in the contemporary atmosphere, even for the epochs when the global surface temperature was higher than now. (etc.)
—–
try also:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com for his “CO2: The Greatest Scientific scandal of the Century.”
sounds like a skeptic to me!
P Walker
You don’t think youre going to get out of your homework that easily do you? 🙂
Here is a free copy in all its glory.
http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/closeoff_EPSL.pdf
I shall be asking questions…
tonyb
Joel Shore (11:29:52) :
“(It seems a bit extreme to me to assume that Hansen has made an elementary math mistake or tuned the numbers and no fellow scientist has found this!)”
I didn’t say he accidently made a math mistake. I’m saying he “tuned” his math mistake to be what he wanted it to say. I’m saying he locked himself into a certain way of thinking about the issue long ago and he can’t get out now.
Here is another way of looking at the mistake.
Ice sheet and vegetation impact => effectively changes in the Albedo which have their effect through Solar Forcing => [240 W/m2 (today) – 3.5 W/m2 (ice age)] * 0.75C = 177.4K
Greenhouse Forcing => [150 W/m2 (today) – 2.4 W/m (ice age)] * 0.75C = 110.7K
Add together (and throw in the small aerosols impact) => voila, 288K just what it is supposed to be – so 0.75C is right after all?
WRONG.
The solar forcing is supposed to be 255K (not 177K) and the greenhouse forcing is supposed to be 33K (not 110K)
You cannot just average the two numbers with a 0.75C and get the result. That is a elementary shortcut math mistake. The solar forcing needs to be calculated with the Stefan Boltzmann equations (not an averaged “tuned” book the cooks climate model).
You can actually fit the ice age into the Stefan Boltzmann equations and get the right numbers (and a proper greenhouse component can still give you 3.0C per doubling if you want) BUT you do not have a marginal temperature impact per Watt of 0.75C.
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/6840/sbearthsurfacetemp.png
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2608/sbtempcperwatt.png
I think you have played around with this stuff enough before to see what I am saying.
And the Albedo of the Earth during the last glacial maximum was almost certainly higher than 0.330 (compared to today of 0.298 and Hansen’s fake 0.313 (which would be 0.326 if he used the Stefan Boltzmann equations properly)).
I know lots of math, and lots of places to take shortcuts and still get close to the right numbers (like Hansen did) but that still leaves a marginal Temp change per watt as a residual which is calculated wrong.