From a Louisiana State University Press Release Oct 1, 2009
Algae and Pollen Grains Provide Evidence of Remarkably Warm Period in Antarctica’s History
Palynomorphs from sediment core give proof to sudden warming in mid-Miocene era
The ANDRILL drilling rig in Antarctica
For Sophie Warny, LSU assistant professor of geology and geophysics and curator at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, years of patience in analyzing Antarctic samples with low fossil recovery finally led to a scientific breakthrough. She and colleagues from around the world now have proof of a sudden, remarkably warm period in Antarctica that occurred about 15.7 million years ago and lasted for a few thousand years.
Last year, as Warny was studying samples sent to her from the latest Antarctic Geologic Drilling Program, or ANDRILL AND-2A, a multinational collaboration between the Antarctic Programs of the United States (funded by the National Science Foundation), New Zealand, Italy and Germany, one sample stood out as a complete anomaly.
“First I thought it was a mistake, that it was a sample from another location, not Antarctica, because of the unusual abundance in microscopic fossil cysts of marine algae called dinoflagellates. But it turned out not to be a mistake, it was just an amazingly rich layer,” said Warny. “I immediately contacted my U.S. colleague, Rosemary Askin, our New Zealand colleagues, Michael Hannah and Ian Raine, and our German colleague, Barbara Mohr, to let them know about this unique sample as each of our countries had received a third of the ANDRILL samples.”
Some colleagues had noted an increase in pollen grains of woody plants in the sample immediately above, but none of the other samples had such a unique abundance in algae, which at first gave Warny some doubts about potential contamination.
“But the two scientists in charge of the drilling, David Harwood of University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and Fabio Florindo of Italy, were equally excited about the discovery,” said Warny. “They had noticed that this thin layer had a unique consistency that had been characterized by their team as a diatomite, which is a layer extremely rich in fossils of another algae called diatoms.”
All research parties involved met at the Antarctic Research Facility at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Together, they sampled the zone of interest in great detail and processed the new samples in various labs. One month later, the unusual abundance in microfossils was confirmed.
Among the 1,107 meters of sediments recovered and analyzed for microfossil content, a two-meter thick layer in the core displayed extremely rich fossil content. This is unusual because the Antarctic ice sheet was formed about 35 million years ago, and the frigid temperatures there impede the presence of woody plants and blooms of dinoflagellate algae.
“We all analyzed the new samples and saw a 2,000 fold increase in two species of fossil dinoflagellate cysts, a five-fold increase in freshwater algae and up to an 80-fold increase in terrestrial pollen,” said Warny. “Together, these shifts in the microfossil assemblages represent a relatively short period of time during which Antarctica became abruptly much warmer.”
These palynomorphs, a term used to described dust-size organic material such as pollen, spores and cysts of dinoflagellates and other algae, provide hard evidence that Antarctica underwent a brief but rapid period of warming about 15 million years before present.
LSU’s Sophie Warny and her New Zealand colleague, Mike Hannah, sampling the ANDRILL cores at the Antarctic Research Facility.
“This event will lead to a better understanding of global connections and climate forcing, in other words, it will provide a better understanding of how external factors imposed fluctuations in Earth’s climate system,” said Harwood. “The Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum has long been recognized in global proxy records outside of the Antarctic region. Direct information from a setting proximal to the dynamic Antarctic ice sheets responsible for driving many of these changes is vital to the correct calibration and interpretation of these proxy records.”
These startling results will offer new insight into Antarctica’s climatic past – insights that could potentially help climate scientists better understand the current climate change scenario.
“In the case of these results, the microfossils provide us with quantitative data of what the environment was actually like in Antarctica at the time, showing how this continent reacted when climatic conditions were warmer than they are today,” said Warny.
According to the researchers, these fossils show that land temperatures reached a January average of 10 degrees Celsius – the equivalent of approximately 50 degrees Fahrenheit – and that estimated sea surface temperatures ranged between zero and 11.5 degrees Celsius. The presence of freshwater algae in the sediments suggests to researchers that an increase in meltwater and perhaps also in rainfall produced ponds and lakes adjacent to the Ross Sea during this warm period, which would obviously have resulted in some reduction in sea ice.
These findings most likely reflect a poleward shift of the jet stream in the Southern Hemisphere, which would have pushed warmer water toward the pole and allowed a few dinoflagellate species to flourish under such ice-free conditions. Researchers believe that shrub-like woody plants might also have been able to proliferate during an abrupt and brief warmer time interval.
“An understanding of this event, in the context of timing and magnitude of the change, has important implications for how the climate system operates and what the potential future response in a warmer global climate might be,” said Harwood. “A clear understanding of what has happened in the past, and the integration of these data into ice sheet and climate models, are important steps in advancing the ability of these computer models to reproduce past conditions, and with improved models be able to better predict future climate responses.”
While the results are certainly impressive, the work isn’t yet complete.
“The SMS Project Science Team is currently looking at the stratigraphic sequence and timing of climate events evident throughout the ANDRILL AND-2A drillcore, including those that enclose this event,” said Florindo. “A broader understanding of ice sheet behavior under warmer-than-present conditions will emerge.”
“This is probably why your conclusions are at odds with the people who actually study this.”
Or he can evaluate the data without needing another grant.
Joel.
sometime late last year I put the following question to one of the IPCC’s senior assessors, and the reply was “Have you read the 2007 4th assessment report on radiative forcing?”
However, I had and have again, yet doesn’t answer the question at all, or address the issues. The crucial calculations to justify the c02 thesis were absent from the UPCC report . It wasn’t a challenge, but a question, so if it *was* answered then there is an unequivocal argument for AGW, and the debate would be over.
Q) Given 80 millions tons of carbon dioxide, (22 million tons of carbon) what, in terms of the current understanding of the climate, its sensitivity, and the proportion of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to all c02, and in turn, to the whole atmosphere does this represent, and what does it do to the temperature? Bear in mind the following qualifications:
1) all c02 is 0.038% of the atmosphere,
2) that some 3% of that fraction is annually anthropogenic
3) c02 delays outgoing heat at 15microns in the spectroscopic absortion range
4) outgoing radiation is between 0 and 1% of the heat budget,
5) c02 moves between air and oceans, soils and other sinks quite quickly.
6) There are 3067 gigatons of c02 in the atmosphere
7) the first 50ppm of c02 delays that fractional (5% of 0-1% heat budget) heat transfer into space, and anything additional only increases the metric range of this delay, and not the heat absorption, due to its logarithmic absorption factor.
8) only the carbon atom, and not the 2 oxygen atoms have this effect.
9) given natural variability, over 98% of carbon dioxide fluctuations are naturally occurring.
10) At a constant temperature, the amount of a given gas dissolved in a given type and volume of liquid is directly proportional to the partial pressure of that gas in equilibrium with that liquid. (oceans),
11) that oceans and vegetation absorbs c02 exponentially and not logarithmically on a diurnal and seasonal basis.
12) Water vapour is hundreds of times more powerful than c02 as a ghg – and has 3 times the thermal absorption bandwidth. A 1% change in vapour is equivalent to a 200% change in c02, yet still isn’t a radiative climate forcing.
Use data to highlight the direct causal affinity so that it is demonstrable and verifiable.
So far, none has addressed any of these issues . The best they can say “It is likely that…”, or “we are confident that….” and these are matters of conjecture and speculation than empirical science.
Lucy Skywalker said, :” … specialists no longer understand each other so they trust and believe instead of auditing the science.”
I happen to be a Geologist – oddly enough, I did my BSc with Rosemary Askin mentioned in the article above – and my sister-in-law has a PhD in Biochemistry. I was expressing my disbelief in AGW to her and her reply was, ” So every other scientist in the world is wrong and you are right”?. Her point was that she was judging the AGW dispute on published work – press releases actually – and she believed them – why would they publish wrong or biased data ?. My point back to her was that the authors were relying on an awful lot of assumptions in the papers – an incredible focus on CO2 and a lot of discarding of any contrary data. She simply could not accept that published papers could be written with a bias or exclude data.
The delay between temperature and c02 is recorded as being 800-2000 years. Total Ocean current have a total of 800 years cycle, and the MWP was around 800 years ago.
It could resonably be said that today’s increase in c02 is from the MWP. (800 years ago) That means that if we stopped all anthropogenic c02, it would continue to rise.
Addendum – the 800 year delay is taken from vostok ice data from petit et al, with Jan Veizer’s subsequent analysis
Joel Shore said:
“The main cause (of recent cooling) is likely simply the moderately-strong La Nina we had recently, although there might also be some contribution from the solar cycle minimum.”
Heck, Joel, thats the essence of what I’ve been saying and seeking to justify for more that 18 months now.
The thing is how can you say in one breath that those two processes can cause cooling yet still seem to deny that those same two factors in opposite modes could have been responsible for most if not all of the observed 20th Century warming (though even that warming may have been overstated due to UHI effects).
As it happens under the tutelage of Leif I am drifting away from solar influences except on longer timescales but current solar events might help to resolve that issue over the next few years.
The thing then is whether oceanic variations in the rate of energy release could possibly cover all observed global air temperature changes over the past 2000 years on their own or with only a small solar contribution.
After all it could just be a coincidence that since sunspots started being counted the ebb and flow of sunspots was in approximately the same phase as oceanic cycles.
As the 20th Century shows us the solar and oceanic influences can either offset one another or supplement one another and in earlier times it may be that there were periods when sunspot numbers were high but nevertheless oceanic variations induced colder climates. We just don’t know at the moment.
Anyway I am coming to the view that oceanic variations could indeed achieve it all on timescales of up to a little over 2000 years which is all we can reasonably reliably discern from historical records rather than increasingly suspect and abusable proxy evidence.
To explain:
1) ENSO variability obviously affects global air temperatures on interannual time scales.
2) We have recently discerned that every 30 years or so there is an oceanic phase shift that increases or decreases the relative intensities of El Nino and La Nina events to produce overall warming or cooling of global air temperatures
3) We are then left with the issue of background warming or cooling trends which in combination with PDO phase changes produce a ‘stepped’ appearence upwards or downwards for longer term warming or cooling spells respectively.
4) We have all been discussing whether the 20th Century upward stepping is solar induced or CO2 induced. I prefer solar causes on the basis of historical evidence but as Leif says the correlation is not good enough to constitue proof (or in his view even any reason for considering the possibility but he cannot yet persuade me on that).
5) What if the longer tern cycling is also oceanic ?
Just as the PDO phase shifts alter the relative strengths of El Nino and La Nina events a 500 year or so underlying oceanic cycle would alter the relative strengths of the consecutive PDO positive and negative phase shifts and there you would get a stepped progression upward or downward as the global air temperatures cycle from Roman Warm Period to Dark Ages to Mediaeval Warm Period to Little Ice Age to the recent Modern Maximum.
6) Then note that the global air circulation systems all shift latitudinally in response to ENSO variations and in response to PDO phase shifts and it is clear that they would also do so in response to those 500 year ocean cycles.
7) Finally note that every climate change ever observed has been a consequence of a particular location or region shifting it’s position in relation to the nearest air circulation systems.
We then have a coherent explanation for every climate shift ever observed directly by mankind without needing CO2 or solar effects as a significant forcing agent.
Over to you.
Joel Shore (13:48:47) : “It is also true that the concentration of water vapor is determined by the climate, with more water vapor as the climate warms, and hence it acts as a positive feedback on warming produced by something else such as the long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2.”
“True” in climate models, perhaps. What’s the evidence that increasing water vapor in the atmosphere has amplified carbon dioxide-induced global warming in the 20th Century?
Joel Shore (19:28:50) :
“….. I have explained it to you about 30 times. Shall we go for 31? Looking at global temperature trend over intervals of around a decade and less to determine the response to rising CO2 is like looking at temperatures in Rochester over a week-long period to determine the seasonal cycle.”
So how long does it take for radiation to travel from the surface of the earth to the atmospheric CO2 where it is absorbed? And how long does it take for CO2 to absorb the radiation when it gets there, and then reimit it? And then return to the earth’s surface? You think 30 years. My guess is that it would all be over well within a second.
Or maybe it’s the fanciful water vapour positive feedback loop that takes 30 years? It takes 30 years for a cloud to form? Once formed they persist for 30 years?
Enquiring minds look forward to your 32nd explanation.
The only effect of c02 with oceans is absortion/emission circulation. c02 doesn’t add re-radiated energy to oceans. It simply doesn’t have the thermal magnitude. c02 only takes some 8 percent of what little re-radiated heat is available to it, which it then re-emited bi directionally. On the other hand, oceans *do* increase atmospheric temperatures. GHG’s only delay. They don’t increase temperatures
KimW (14:31:37) :
‘… my sister-in-law has a PhD in Biochemistry. I was expressing my disbelief in AGW to her and her reply was, ” So every other scientist in the world is wrong and you are right”?.’
You might ask her whether the medical scientists funded by Big Pharma are also right. The money in Big Green is much more than Big Pharma.
Joel Shore (13:36:04) :
Can you point out the ten year period where Scenario A shows flat temperatures?
Also, you might as well show the updated plot, although I guess in climate science you always move on to the next paper and never make sure that a particular data treatment holds up to new data.
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1793/hansen2008qa4.jpg
Anyway, I see real progress here. We’ve gone from the AGW mantra going from “no, the temperatures haven’t stopped increasing” to “well, maybe they have, but trust us, it’s only temporary.” I have to say, though, I haven’t seen anyone say “yeah, we knew that” (yet).
To those of you with access to Science mag, here we have the official admission that temperatures have been flat for ten years.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/326/5949/28-a
Subscription required.
tty (09:23:34) :
Thanks, I guess I should have checked the second google hit and not the first.
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215022/climate.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215022/climate.htm
As is typical of “science by press release”, it’s not clear to me if the researchers are talking about the whole continent or just the Ross Ice Shelf region.
But using -20 C as the average for the whole continent, if the study also refers to the whole continent also, the the current “alarming” rate of warming means we have about 2000 years to get there.
Scott hasn’t come back to tell us what his “enquiring mind” considers “sudden” to be.
woops, second link should be
http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/weather/index.shtml
Color me confused. I read and re-read the above, and nowhere did I find informationa bout whether this core they are talking about is an antarctic ice core, or whether it is a core from the ground. They talk about “sediments”, and that is not a term I have seen used before when referring to Antarctic ice cores.
So which is it; ice or rock ?
I think this reference is pertinent to the thread and deserves a mention
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V6R-4HBTDJ2-1&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F09%2F2006&_alid=1035909560&_rdoc=28&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5821&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=400&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4dad24796d8d2bc38e517b414c69981e
Britannic no-see-um (17:44:57) :
I have to confess, that’s the first time I’ve seen the word “dinoflagellate” used in a sentence.
I’m glad I looked it up, or I might still think it’s something Fred Flintstone might be scolding his pet about. 🙂
John M (16:12:29),
Your imageshack link was informative. It appears that Hansen is now wrong on two out of his three predictions. And his three guesses had such a wide range that you or I could probably have done as well. Or even better.
It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy: shoot some holes in the side of a barn, then go and draw a circle around them. Presto! You’re a sharpshooter!
I am still trying to find out what sudden means to these researchers and the rate of warming. I am still here.
Sudden is subjective. I think the global warming in the past few decades has been sudden and I think the warming in the past century to be sudden.
Decades is definitely sudden and many times centuries is sudden. It all depends on the rate of change.
Smokey (18:17:21) :
Hansen’s “Scenario C” was essentially a cold turkey cessation of GHG growth in 2000. It’s what every AGWer’s dream was wrt to Kyoto. It has since been stated that the most realistic model is Scenario B (at least that’s what they used to say a mere 2 years or so ago.)
To be fair, this year looks like the station data (what I plotted and what is most friendly to Hansen’s scenarios) will be around 0.7. The combined land and sea anomaly will probably be around 0.55.
Joel Shore (19:28:50) : “Smokey, I think you are pretty much “Exhibit A” as to why it might be a waste of my time to ever write an article for WUWT. Why should I say things if you are simply going to ignore them? You don’t even attempt to respond with intelligent, coherent arguments…”
You are 180 degrees out of phase on that accusation, but thanks for the chuckle.
And Joel, your ad homs…weaken YOUR arguments still.
In the mean time….show the evidence. Write that article. Show the evidence of a trace gas causing runaway AGW.
Prove it. Show it. The burden of proof is squarely on your side.
The skeptic side is not obligated to do one damn thing but science business as usual…
Those that posit a fantastic theory…are thereby obligated to back it up…with hard evidence (not just GCM extrapolations).
Where is it? Show forth the hard evidence of significant “anthropogenic” global warming.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
tty (09:23:34) :
Some facts may be useful, considering the wild speculation on this thread.
——
Thank you for taking the time to give us that background data.
p wilson says:
Correct. However, since ~99% of the atmospheric constituents are transparent to IR radiation, the ones that aren’t have a disproportionate effect. Furthermore, the radiative effect of any constituent is not linear in its concentration (except at extremely low concentrations) but rather rises fast at first and then more slowly. This is another reason why small amounts can have disproportionately-large effects.
What you are doing when you say this is looking only at emissions into the atmosphere and ignoring the large amounts going the other way. I.e., there are large exchanges between the oceans and atmosphere and between the oceans and biosphere, but before the industrial revolution these were in so close balance that for the last ~10000 years, the CO2 levels had been something like 270 +- 10 ppm and in the last 750000 years, they had always been between 180 and 300 ppm. Now the levels are ~385ppm. What we are doing is taking a source of carbon that has been long locked away and rapidly releasing it into the atmosphere.
I don’t really know what you mean by delay. What adding CO2 does is decrease the RATE in W/m^2 at which the earth emits radiation to space. When that occurs, the rate of emission is then less than the rate of absorption of energy from the sun and this causes the climate to warm to the point when the emission (via the Steffan Boltzmann Law) once again balances the absorption.
This is utter nonsense. If that were true, the climate system would be heating up like crazy! In fact outgoing radiation and incoming radiative energy from the sun are generally very close to balanced (within perhaps a percent or so). Ask Roy Spencer; I believes he’s involved in the satellite missions that are measuring this emission!
True…but for the ocean part, it is only in the upper part of the ocean and the amount that it can absorb quickly saturates. Exchange with the deep ocean is much slower. This means that about half of what we emit is taken up by the ocean and biosphere quite quickly but the other half slowly decays in a non-exponential manner.
Another ridiculous statement. The absorption bands are due to excitations of the molecule as a whole. It makes no sense to say it is all due to the carbon.
Balderdash! We are responsible for essentially all of the rise in CO2 from ~280ppm before the industrial revolution to ~385ppm today. And, it would have gone up about twice as much if not for the fact that some of it has gone into the upper oceans (where it is causing ocean acidification) and some into the biosphere.
Correct.
What the upper oceans do is absorb some of the excess CO2 quite rapidly and then saturate.
No. It is not hundreds of time more powerful as a GHG. If I recall correctly, it accounts for somewhere around 70-90% of the natural greenhouse effect of 33 C (depending on how you measure), with CO2 accounting for most of the rest. Your statement about 1% change in water vapor vs 200% change in CO2 is also nonsense. And, the point about water vapor is that its concentration is essentially slave to the temperature, so water vapor acts as a feedback, not a forcing.
More nonsense for many reasons. For one thing, an 800 year delay wouldn’t mean nothing happens for 800 years and then it suddenly shoots up. Second, in order to account for the CO2 rise one would need the warming to be about the same as the warming between the last glacial maximum and now, which is about a 5 C global warming. Third, where then is the anthropogenic CO2 that we are emitting going? You are claiming that the system is magically absorbing all of the CO2 that we are emitting and then independently deciding to emit about half that amount on its own. And, fourth, there are of course the isotope measurements that show that the CO2 accumulation is due to the burning of fossil fuels.
John M says:
I don’t know if there is or is not such a period. As I noted, that model was crude by modern standards but even it showed fluctuations up-and-down. For a study of the statistics of trends in the modern climate models, see http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/csi/images/GRL2009_ClimateWarming.pdf
The point is that trends over 10 year periods have such large errorbars that one cannot really say whether temperatures have stopped increasing or not. Within errorbars, the trend over the past 10 years is compatible with no increase but also compatible with a significant increase.
It is also worth noting that more resilient methods of looking at the temperature behavior, such as computing an average temperature for each decade show that the temperatures in the 2000s decade (through 2008) continued to increase relative to the 1990s decade. What is also true is that 7 of the 8 warmest years in the global surface temperature record occurred since 2001 (with 1998 being the only one that didn’t, and it was the hottest year in the HADCRUT record and the 2nd hottest in the NASA GISS record)
Smokey says:
The projections were based on three different emissions scenarios. Since we know what the actual emissions have been, we know that we are closest to his Scenario B. (And, also, we have had one major volcanic eruption, like he assumed for B and C and not for A.)
As for whether he was right or wrong, you are going beyond what the data can say. After 20 years, there are errorbars in the trends such that the differences between the Scenerio B projections and the actual data are not statistically-significant. Furthermore, it is important to remember that many “skeptics” at the time were generally arguing that the warming would not continue at all…So Hansen’s projection is far better than theirs. Finally, it is worth noting that Hansen’s model at that time had a climate sensitivity that is at the high end of the current IPCC estimates, so we had better hope that the climate warms more slowly than his projection suggests!
Joel. I’ve verified that my qualifications are legitimate. Your observation of the outgoing radiation budget are based on mathematical equations from NASA, and not on thermodynamic science.
I know that you like to be contrarian just for the sake of it, so won’t respond to each case in point. Water vapour excepted. It absorbs heat over three times the bandwidths of c02, and at the bandwidths required for outgoing radiation. At 15C, c02 doesn’t absorb heat. It only absorbs at 13-15 microns which is subzero. C02 from the equator therefore isn’t intercepted by c02. Its only in polar regions where c02 interfered with heat
on the basis of that, you would have to multiply water vapour by 3 for its ghg effect. Actually, probably more, since it intercepts heat at the outgoing absorbtion range, and the air can hold a lot of water vapour. Since it can change for up to 2 per cent of the atmosphere, that 2,000ppm. Yet is is still a feedback, as you correctly observe, resulting from the temperature. On this basis, c02 isn’t a feedback by any measure. Its siply too insignificant