Meanwhile today while CO2 is increasing, the Antarctic ice cap is also increasing.
Bill Illis writes about it:
Ice sheets formed in Antarctica about 35 million years ago when CO2 was about 1,200 ppm. Ice sheets also formed in Antarctica about 350 to 290 million years ago when CO2 was about 350 ppm. Ice sheets also formed in Antarctica about 450 to 430 million years ago when CO2 was about 4,500 ppm. The more common denominator is when continental drift places Antarctica at the south pole.
Below, Antarctica today.
New data illuminates Antarctic ice cap formation
From a Bristol University Press release issued 13 September 2009
A paper published in Nature
New carbon dioxide data confirm that formation of the Antarctic ice-cap some 33.5 million years ago was due to declining carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A team of scientists from Bristol, Cardiff and Texas A&M universities braved the lions and hyenas of a small East African village to extract microfossils from rocks which have revealed the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere at the time of the formation of the ice-cap.
Geologists have long speculated that the formation of the Antarctic ice-cap was caused by a gradually diminishing natural greenhouse effect. The study’s findings, published in Nature online, confirm that atmospheric CO2 started to decline about 34 million years ago, during the period known to geologists as the Eocene – Oligocene climate transition, and that the ice sheet began to form about 33.5 million years ago when CO2 in the atmosphere reached a tipping point of around 760 parts per million (by volume).
The new findings will add to the debate around rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere as the world’s attention turns to the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen which opens later this year.
Dr Gavin Foster from the University of Bristol and a co-author on the paper said: “By using a rather unique set of samples from Tanzania and a new analytical technique that I developed, we have, for the first time, been able to reconstruct the concentration of CO2 across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary – the time period about 33.5 million years ago when ice sheets first started to grow on Eastern Antarctica. “
Professor Paul Pearson from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who led the mission to the remote East Africa village of Stakishari said: “About 34 million years ago the Earth experienced a mysterious cooling trend. Glaciers and small ice sheets developed in Antarctica, sea levels fell and temperate forests began to displace tropical-type vegetation in many areas.
“The period culminated in the rapid development of a continental-scale ice sheet on Antarctica, which has been there ever since. We therefore set out to establish whether there was a substantial decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as the Antarctic ice sheet began to grow.”
Co-author Dr Bridget Wade from Texas A&M University Department of Geology and Geophysics added: “This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
“Our study is the first to provide a direct link between the establishment of an ice sheet on Antarctica and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and therefore confirms the relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global climate.”
The team mapped large expanses of bush and wilderness and pieced together the underlying local rock formations using occasional outcrops of rocks and stream beds. Eventually they discovered sediments of the right age near a traditional African village called Stakishari. By assembling a drilling rig and extracting hundreds of meters of samples from under the ground they were able to obtain exactly the piece of Earth’s history they had been searching for.
Further information:
The paper:Atmospheric carbon dioxide through the Eocene–Oligocene climate transition. Paul N. Pearson, Gavin L. Foster & Bridget S. Wade. Nature online, Sunday 13th September.
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Smokey says:
So, exactly how long are you expecting the planet to continue to warm because of “recovery from the LIA” and what is the mechanism causing this? Furthermore, since you are seem to be so big on the notion that the planet is now cooling for the last 10 years or so, it seems like it ought to be easy money to take a bet based on a flat line!
Besides which, there are lots of people here or mentioned here who, citing PDO or solar effects, are also arguing that cooling is expected over the next few decades…In fact, some are being positively alarmist about the potential for upcoming cooling trends! So, if anything, maybe you ought to be giving Tom P some favorable odds if the bet is on the basis of a flat line!
Joel,
If you think your proposals are money makers like you say, go ahead and invest. Let us know how it works out.
REPLY: I know a place in Chicago where you can invest a lot of money for a big return, though likely a negative one. 😉 – A
Smokey,
You seem to have the same weak grasp on reality as morality. It was Ron de Haan who first suggested a bet:
“…if I am aloud [sic] to gamble, I say we will continue to cool.”
I came back to him with a wager based on exactly that, but he did not respond. Your accusations that I somehow stacked the deck are pathetic.
They are also irrelevant, for it was you who then laid down the challenge:
“I’d be willing to bet that within the next ten years we will never reach the UN/IPCC’s AR-4 projections. But Tom won’t take that bet, because he can’t stack the deck.”
I accepted with a precise formulation so as to leave no doubt as to the terms:
“I take you are therefore willing to bet that the monthly UAH lower troposphere temperature anomaly for the next ten years will never reach the equivalent ensemble average time series anomaly for any of the three scenarios outlined in IPCC AR4 figure 10.5.
“You pay up if and when any of the projections is reached. I pay up if after ten years the projections have never been reached.
“How much do you want to bet? We can start next month.”
You then certainly appeared to back out of it. But now you say:
“…the wager is extremely vague: should it be for a dollar? For bragging rights? For ten thousand dollars? For two hundred thousand dollars? Would you have the ‘trousers’ for that bet? And who holds the cash? And the interest? And who decides if there is a dispute? These things have to be agreed on beforehand. Or do you disagree?”
Far from vague, the terms are clear.
There’s no need for anyone to hold the cash and so no issue of interest – this is a bet publicly made and we hold our own stakes. If either party reneges on it, it is their reputation that they lose.
Similarly, I expect little doubt as to whether a UAH monthly temperature falls below all of the IPCC lines of projection. Again, it is a reputation at stake if any party disputes what will be clear graphical evidence.
All that is left is to agree is the sum of money. I propose $1000 and that we start with this month’s UAH anomaly. Are you willing, finally, to stand behind your own wager?
TonyB
“The basic problem is that the SandB report was a direct contradiction of Mann’s hockey stick work and an assault on that strikes at the very heart of the AGW hypothesis (no matter that warmists would say the HS is but one strand of the evidence)”
The basic problem is that Soon and Baliunas misused other researchers’ data and that their results are irreproducible. In contrast, many independent reconstructions of past climate have been published that show that recent increases in temperature are exceptional. This includes the glacier, ice-core and borehole physical records, as well as the biological-based proxies.
“…why use proxies when we have first hand accounts from real people who kept records of fish catches or grain yields or when they planted crops or told how the climate was changing and recorded droughts or famine?”
Of course we should consider all the data. If such records are reliably and continuously made they can be used to derive a temperature record – that is just what Oerlemans did with the glacier-length logs. But you are confused – when such a record is reliable enough to be used in this way, it IS a proxy for temperature!
There are two major problem with such accounts. They mainly reflect experience in just a part of the world, mostly Europe, and it is very difficult to derive quantitative temperatures from them.
This partly explains your difficulty in coming up with any of your promised publications showing a global MWP warmer than today. The other part of the explanation is that the published physical and biological evidence indicates a MWP that was in fact globally cooler.
Tom P Read through the hundreds of papers, some of which were pre IPCC is therefore not biased or conclusion based. I’ sure you’ll have alot there to get your teeth into and digest. If anything, the period wasn’t cooler.
In fact many papers which are aggregated here:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/m/subject_m.php
Are from North America, through to Japan and around the globe back to N America.
however, Joel has a point. What we need are a calibrated series of data sets that reconstruct as much as possible specific periods. What we know is that late 900’s there was a spike in global warming, then another that went from 1100 to around 1300, although the Mediteeranean might not have showed any considerable heating compared to the rest of the planet.
I just read your note dismissing grape records. They do exist today from Northern Germany and Northern England, and of course, Arctic waters were navigable for norsemen to settle on parts of Greenland, and cultivate the land.
Tom P. you wrote
“There are two major problem with such accounts. They mainly reflect experience in just a part of the world, mostly Europe, and it is very difficult to derive quantitative temperatures from them.”
In one respect that seems a cop out, as it implies that IPCC methodology would be even more suspect than independent research, and erases many a sediment sample.
There are research papers like this to as far as the Andes peat bogs which concludes with confidence that the MWP there was warmer than the Andes today, and it arrived before the MWP in the northern hemisphere (to 500AD)
Given that the period was warmer than today for an extended period, the only aspect which needs investigation is why there is such adamance that it was cooler from the IPCC lobbyists. Its as though they are determined to prove a point. If it is because it refutes a recent span of warming then thats understandable. However, if the scientific reseach – not a consensus, as a paradigm is formed on the basis of advocating a position, then I could only ask: Is would a “global” rise in temperature be as catastrophic as is portrayed by this world paradigm?
My caveats in answering this question are only that the greenhouse efect can’t be relied on to force the climate, and the holocene optimum was even warmer and more extended in duration that the MWP
There is even a 1000 year pollen core study from Siberia that states a short dry period with temperatures “probably higher than todays” from 1100-1300. at 1200 the atmosphere became more humid…
TomP
It is you that appear confused, history is not always agreeing with what the proxies-or rather the interpretation of them- always say. Vikings, higher glaciers, higher tree lines, higher settlements, rise and fall of civilisations-is it all our imagination? Is any proxy that confirms these things automatically invalid in your eyes becuae it is the wrong sort of proxy, or are findings invalid if they are stated in the records by real people?
This whole question of proxies is fraught with problems-some are more reliable than others in certain circumstances or within certain time scales. However all are open to the authors interpretations and whatever is considered correct at any one time-history tends to reinterpret these things. As the S and B paper illustrated, if a contrary viewpoint is advanced it will be shot down, irrespective of whether that is wholly deserved. Do you think Moberg and Croxley are wholly reliable pieces of work? That Manns proxies are 100% correct in the way they were gathered and used?
Even Al Gore (Earth in the balance) and Dr Ian Stewart -(Climate wars)-buy into profoundly changing climates, indeed that is the point they make; ‘look at what has happened in the past, it may happen again if we tamper with the climate artificially.’
How many of the co2 archive of science papers have you actually examined? It is a useful library of mostly good information.
For a more intelligent and factually correct book of the science than Plimers why not read ‘Chill’ by Peter Taylor?
This links to his blurb-
http://www.clairviewbooks.com/pages/viewbook.php?isbn_in=9781905570195
(profile at the bottom)
This link leads to lots of appendices-they do make some sense without reading the book, although they are not fully in context.
http://www.ethos-uk.com/downloads/books/chill/CHILLAppendices.pdf
best regards
tonyb
P Wilson,
“Tom P Read through the hundreds of papers, some of which were pre IPCC is therefore not biased or conclusion based.”
As you are the one who is claiming to have read papers which give evidence for a globally warmer MWP, could you please simply provide the references?
“I just read your note dismissing grape records.”
What note?
“In one respect that seems a cop out, as it implies that IPCC methodology would be even more suspect than independent research, and erases many a sediment sample.”
IPCC is a synthesis of the independent research. The IPCC doesn’t do research itself. I have no problems with considering sediment samples – I have said nothing about them at all. Is there some particular work you are referring to here?
“There are research papers like this to as far as the Andes peat bogs…”
“There is even a 1000 year pollen core study from Siberia…”
I’ve no reason to doubt they are good papers. But do these indicate a simultaneous period warmer than today?
TonyB,
“It is you that appear confused, history is not always agreeing with what the proxies-or rather the interpretation of them- always say. Vikings, higher glaciers, higher tree lines, higher settlements, rise and fall of civilisations-is it all our imagination? Is any proxy that confirms these things automatically invalid in your eyes becuae it is the wrong sort of proxy, or are findings invalid if they are stated in the records by real people?”
Please read what I wrote. I didn’t said records were wrong, only that they were necessarily local and difficult to quantify. And again, like P Wilson if there are all these proxy papers indicating a globally warmer MWP, please don’t hold back from giving the references.
“This whole question of proxies is fraught with problems-some are more reliable than others in certain circumstances or within certain time scales.”
Agreed.
“However all are open to the authors interpretations and whatever is considered correct at any one time-history tends to reinterpret these things.”
Do you work in scientific research? Well conducted research based on solid data is very rarely reinterpreted, and as I said above, I have no reason normally to question the quality of the work mentioned.
“As the S and B paper illustrated, if a contrary viewpoint is advanced it will be shot down, irrespective of whether that is wholly deserved.”
It was discredited for very specific reasons to do with misusing others data and irreproducibility.
“Do you think Moberg and Croxley are wholly reliable pieces of work? That Manns proxies are 100% correct in the way they were gathered and used?”
Both have large quoted error ranges, but that doesn’t make them unreliable. Mann’s original work was the first of its type, and certainly some of the methods lacked maturity, so, no, it wasn’t 100% correct, and it overstated its conclusions.
“Even Al Gore (Earth in the balance) and Dr Ian Stewart -(Climate wars)-buy into profoundly changing climates…”
As do I. The Earth has in the past been both considerably warmer and cooler than today. The issue is mostly whether the current change is unprecedented in its speed during the period of human civilisation.
“How many of the co2 archive of science papers have you actually examined?”
I presume you mean the MWP project papers of various local determinations of temperature over the last one thousand years or more. They look like fine individual papers. But the analysis of them by the “MWP Project” is a let down.
The “Project” have extracted the maximum temperature, sometimes in a very brief spike, from each of the papers in a very loosely defined MWP duration (200 to 1700 AD!) and then compared that to the current temperature.
For instance, to take three examples fairly globally distributed, the Lake Erie paper has the MWP peak at 1000 AD, with latter temperatures much lower. The New Zealand Cave paper has a peak at 1400, and the Northwest Spain Peat Bog has a peak at 800 AD with subsequent temperatures much lower.
On average, just from these three papers, there is no evidence of a MWP higher than today. It might be worthwhile doing a thorough job on the whole dataset, but the “Project” don’t appear to have been bothered to go even as far as I was able in 10 minutes.
I wonder why? After all if they actually produced a properly calculated global temperature series from this set of papers, they have a nice publication. That doesn’t seem to be what this “Project” is about, though.
I’ll check back on this thread to see if Smokey will make good on his bet. Also, please post references to any papers with evidence for a global MWP warmer than present. Otherwise, I think this thread has indeed “fallen off the edge of the world” and it’s time to move on.
Over 330 comments on this thread alone. Poor Gavin and Joe. But they’re bought and paid for by the convicted felon George Soros, so they have to drive people away like their handler says. Poor puppies. It’s hard on the ego being a Soros pet.
And Mr. T.P., I see you still have your dual problems of reading comprehension and gambling addiction [and you never answered if you’ll take a two hundred thousand dollar bet, Mr Trousers. We’ll let Anthony hold the money, and no one else. Pay up in advance].
Alarmists are consistently wrong, yet they can not admit even the tiniest of errors or their house of cards comes tumbling down.
So now, every skeptic is wrong about the MWP? And the Greek optimum of 1100 B.C., too, I suppose? And the Vikings colonizing Greenland for hundreds of years? And the Roman optimum of 300 A.D.? Yeah, we’re all wrong, and T.P. is right.
Ri-i-i-i-ght.
Michael Mann tried to get rid of the MWP just like TP. Here’s what Nature was forced to print:
Hmm-m. Who to believe? TP, who says, just like Michael Mann, that there was no MWP higher than today? Or planet Earth?
Facts are pesky little buggers, aren’t they? And Planet Earth never lies.
No regional climate change can be observed without a poleward or equatorward shift in the air circulation systems.
Such changes are necessarily global. They have greatest effect in locations or regions which change their position in relation to a major component of the air circulation systems. Thus changes will always be most apparent in northern hemisphere regions that move from the poleward side to the equatorward side of the mid latitude jet streams.
Any change that does not involve such shifts is short term and better classified as weather.
The effect of such shifts will necessarily be less apparent in the southern hemisphere because there are less land masses to be affected. Nevertheless there is some proxy evidence in the southern hemisphere for a less intense and time lagged MWP.
TomP
‘On average, just from these three papers, there is no evidence of a MWP higher than today.’
Well you are certainly able to come to a rigorous and robust conclusion based on three papers, so we must accept that real life is mimicing Orwell and in true Animal farm fashion we can all chant with certainty;
‘warmist proxies good
sceptic proxies bad.’
The 2009 edition of ‘Irrefutable climate facts’ has now been definitively wrtitten. No need for updates. The science is settled. R.I.P. science
tonyb
Smokey,
“and you never answered if you’ll take a two hundred thousand dollar bet, Mr Trousers. We’ll let Anthony hold the money, and no one else. Pay up in advance.”
So we can see you never offered the bet in good faith in the first place. Never mind, people can form their own conclusions concerning your character.
Nevertheless, I’ll make sure that each month as the UAH measurements come out we’ll see if you hadn’t reneged on your own bet what would have been the outcome.
I’m not interested in the money, but to see you squirm on a hook of your own making does provide compensation that money can’t buy
Mr TP,
Read my current Antarctica post, this thread is old. I explained to you that you stacked the deck in your wager with ctm, therefore it is your lack of ethics on display.
No amount was ever discussed by me when I said something tantamount to, “I’ll bet it rains on Tuesday.” So now if you want the wager, please promptly send two hundred thousand dollars to Anthony, and I will do the same. Let me know when it’s sent, so I can get my cash in at the same time. We can iron out the details by snail mail.
The ball, as they say, is in your court. You have 48 hours to decide.
REPLY: The whole question is moot anyway, I don’t allow bets on WUWT. So nobody sends me anything. I wouldn’t take Tom Pike’s or your money anyway. You want betting action both of you meet up in Vegas. – Anthony
Tom P (16:53:14)
you said:
co2science don’t seem to have the publications you allude to supporting a MWP warmer than today. I’m starting to have doubts they exist.
reply:
All you need to do is either press MWP project, or look for it in the subject index. I can assure you they are all there. If you’re still not convinced they exist, cross reference them in the quarterly journals
Here’s just one from hundreds I’ve gone to the trouble of cross referencing.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VGS-4F92400-4&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1021686658&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3573c75aabe559eb37be87267cedb6c9
P WIlson,
I said:
“…please post references to any papers with evidence for a global MWP warmer than present.”
You link to a paper entitled:
“Rhythmic fine-grained sediment deposition in Lake Teletskoye, Altai, Siberia, in relation to REGIONAL climate change” (my emphasis).
I fully accept that there is evidence that certain localities were warmer in the past than today. But the times of such warming are not consistent, as a quick look at the MWP project itself shows.
Well, i’ve cross referenced over 120 papers, read most of them and come to a preliminary conclusion from those papers that there was indeed a period between 800-1300 that did show a globally superior inferred temperature than 20th-21st century globally averaged temperatures. Naturally, when aggregated, you find that there are multiple time period crossovers, although a commonest is the period 1050- 1230AD
addendum: aggregated from 5 continents
P Wilson,
You are correct.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports that “The worldwide range of climate records confirmed two significant climate periods in the last thousand years, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. The climatic notion of a Little Ice Age interval from 1300 to1900 A.D. and a Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D. appears to be rather well-confirmed and wide-spread, despite some differences from one region to another as measured by other climatic variables like precipitation, drought cycles, or glacier advances and retreats.”
Even Al Gore in “Earth In The Balance” acknowledges that the MWP has numerous climactic references demonstrating that the planet has been warmer than present during the MWP.
And one of my favorite sources, Professor John Brignell in his http://numberwatch.co.uk site, posts this chart directly refuting Michael Mann’s deceptive attempt to hide the MWP: click.
Finally, anyone who believes that the temperature in Europe was much higher than the temperature around the rest of the globe — for hundreds of years — certainly doesn’t accept the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That’s like believing that you can put an ice cube on a table in a warm room and come back a week later to find the ice cube unmelted. Or like believing the LIA only happened in Europe. Of course the MWP was global.
Smokey and P Wilson
Having studied the MWP in some depth for 35 years I have found that there is undoubtedly a worldwide core of information pointing to a consistently warm era around the period 950-1250, with long warm periods interupted by shorter cooler periods prior to 1000 (predominantly warm) and long cool periods intrerrupted by warm periods (predominantly cold) from around 1350 to 1850.
There is also a fair amount of time when the climate was rather neutral-I think it is a mistake to think the world is always in one state or the other.
I don’t know if either of you two read my article on historic arctic ice
variation carried here?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/#more-8688
I think it would be a useful project for me to do something similar with the MWP by investigating all the many worldwide strands of the period and putting all the papers/anecdotes/observations/records into context through an article with a strong narrative.
If either of you two want to help by making me aware of any information not contained in the co2 science project please do so through an email or posting it on a thread such as ‘tips’
I wrote a thread with a much broader time scale over at CA last year so I also have a lot of information that is not generally available.
best regards to you both (and Joel if you are still around)
tonyb
Sorry, and regards to TomP as well if you are still around 🙂
tonyb
Tx Smokey and TonyB. It is a fascinating period. However, the warmest period in human history, the Holocene optimum, which seems written out of climate history. The historic record is entirely relevant. According to Dr Nick Brooks of East Anglia University, severe climate change was the primary driver in the development of civilisation, from the earliest civilisations onwards.
“Civilisation did not arise as the result of a benign environment which allowed humanity to indulge a preference for living in complex, urban, ‘civilised’ societies,” said Dr. Brooks.
“On the contrary, what we tend to think of today as ‘civilisation’ was in large part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilisation was a last resort – a means of organising society and food production and distribution, in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions.”
“The first large urban, state-level societies emerged because diminishing resources forced previously transient people into close proximity in areas where water, pasture and productive land was still available”
Dr. Brooks said: “Having been forced into civilised communities as a last resort, people found themselves faced with increased social inequality, greater violence in the form of organised conflict, and at the mercy of self-appointed elites who used religious authority and political ideology to bolster their position. These models of government are still with us today, and we may understand them better by understanding how civilisation arose by accident as a result of the last great global climatic upheaval.”
Separate research from the Norway Geologic survey – based on real research and groundwork – suggests that 6000 years ago, the arctic was probably ice free, 2000 years later, the climate cooled dramatically: It was originally much warmer than the Medieval warm period at around 1100AD, itself hotter than today.
What is mystifying is that if history is so important, only the last 50 years (more specifically 1957) are invoked to claim the AGW case, and that anything before this is just bunk, especially in the face of much greater dramatic swings from hot to cold, from at least the last 6000 years to the present. Actually, the consensus thinks that the last 30 year trend alone matters.
Finally, with regard to the last point, although I don’t entirely agree with Dr Brooks, as civilisations did flourish during the holocene optimum, with regard to the last 100 years, which hte IPCC bases its c02 analysis on, they leave out of their 4th assessment report the crucual calculations necessary to justify ac02 thesis. They don’t seem to be in the public realm anywhere. One would think this would be the most valuable possible formula/algorithm for c02.
however, i’ve come across, and calculated for myself, the equations for c02 heat transfer and interception based on the physics as we understand them
P Wilson said
“What is mystifying is that if history is so important, only the last 50 years (more specifically 1957) are invoked to claim the AGW case, and that anything before this is just bunk, especially in the face of much greater dramatic swings from hot to cold, from at least the last 6000 years to the present. Actually, the consensus thinks that the last 30 year trend alone matters.”
I think that there are several related strands in as much history is not taught as widely as it one was, computers have come into everyday use and are intrinsically motre intesting than dusty historc books, and specialisation continues apace with research into ever more esoteric aspects of science.
Consequently you have a generation that knows little of history but a lot about computers, and rely on modern digitised facts and figures which they apply to their tiny area of expertise and fail to put things into the broader context. (sorry for the over generalisation)
It is a shame that Al Gore (who wrote eloquently of past civilsations being brought low by climate change in ‘Earth in the Balance’) was not sitting at MIchael Manns shoulder when he constructed the Hockey stick and iognored the context whilst looking at the detail.
tonyb