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.”
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finally, the question of the values found during the 19th century (which were scientifically valid) are not that they are or are not taken seriously. Wrong terminology. The correct terminology is that they are suppressed, and suppression of relevant data is not a sound scientific technique.
Joel,
With respect I think you should give up.
If one has to increase complexity to salvage a point then one has lost.
All the best and most likely real life scenarios can be comfortably expressed in terms easily accessible in plain language to a layman.
E = mc2 is a prime example.
It boils down to a concept that everyone can understand
i.e.
The total energy content is equivalent to the mass of an object multiplied by the square of the speed of light (I hope I remembered that correctly) which is a very big number which causes a very big bang.
Every schoolboy can cope with that despite the level of genius required to produce it.
AGW lacks that characteristic.
Keep it simple, stupid.
by the way – thermal imaging cameras detect radiation in the 8-14 bandwidth. Re-radiation is supposed to be in this parameter
Joel Shore;
How come the pro-AGW’ers always quote the Stefan-Boltzmann law as some kind of justification of their position but they never actually use it to determine anything except how warm the surface would be without greenhouse gases.
Let’s see what your extra 4 W/m^2 from a doubled CO2 results in according to the Stefan-Boltzmann equations.
Today = (390 W/m^2/5.67e-08)^0.25 = 288.0K = 15.0C
CO2 Doubled = (394 W/w^2/5.67E-08)^0.25 = 288.7K = 15.7C
So you can’t get very much warming from a little 4 Watts increase and the feedbacks on albedo and water vapour are going to be meagre with only a 0.7C increase.
So quit quoting the Stefan Boltzann laws if you are not going to use them properly.
Effectively, the impact of 4 watts/metre^2 is a “tuned” impact based on the assumption that temperatures will increase 0.75C per watt/metre^2 (not true) and that CO2 doubling will result in 3.0C per doubling therefore 4 is the right number. It is not based on physics measurements – it is a Hansen shortcut. The right number is probably about 9 to 11 watts per doubling but that would require re-writing the climate eqautions properly, something noone seems ready to do.
Scott A. Mandia (10:24:46) :
HOT OFF THE PRESSES!
Dr. Warny was kind enough to send me the PDF of this paper. Sorry to disappoint, but the sudden time scale the press release refers to is 50,000 years and the brief warming was 200,000 years.
Hmmm…
From the press release quoted at the top of this thread:
“A few thousand years”, 50,000 years, 200,000 years. Oh well, close enough for climate science and especially for the accompanying press release.
@joel Shore…
Joel, I’ll give you an A+ in persistence and courage. The way you wade into these debates merits a lot of respect.
I can’t categorically say that CO2 cannot drive climate change… But, as a geoscientist, I can tell you that I have never seen any direct evidence of it. There are lots of hypotheses for past greenhouse-driven episodes; however those are largely derived from the assumption that the moder climate is being modulated by fluctuations in greenhouse gases.
On ocean acidification… Please point me to the specific concrete evidence for it. I’ve read Caldeira and quite a few other papers on the subject; and I’ve yet to see any evidence of Co2-driven acidification that has actually occurred… Just models that predict future acidification. There seems to be a consensus that oceanic pH has dropped 0.1 since 1750 (although I have not found any empirical or observational backing for this assertion). The natural ~50-yr pH cycle is 0.5.
The only paper that I have seen that sort of presents the sort of geological-scale relationship of CO2, oceanic pH and climate change is Royer… And that was pretty well shot down when Shaviv and Veizer…
About 6-10 years ago, I was beginning to believe the CO2-temperature connection, despite the fact that my education in 1970’s geology told me it was wrong. Since then, I’ve come back to where I was in 1980. Every bit of “evidence” for anthropogenic greenhouse gas-driven climate change has either been refuted or seriously challenged over the last 5 years or so. The only facet still standing is the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas – A fairly impotent greenhouse gas at far less than 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Bill Illis (15:30:43): First of all, you have done the calculation wrong. The 4 W/m^2 is at the “top of the atmosphere” and the correct temperature to use is the effective radiative temperature of the earth of ~ 255 K. If you do that, you get ~1 C increase for doubling of CO2.
Second of all, the 4 W/m^2 is not tuned to give the climate sensitivity…That’s just silly paranoid talk. It is based on radiative calculations.
Third of all, the 1 C increase for doubling CO2 is the result in the absence of feedbacks, e.g., it doesn’t include the additional warming one gets from the additional water vapor that goes into the atmosphere as it warms and has its own greenhouse effect. The calculation of the feedback effects in the climate system go well beyond just the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation.
P Wilson says:
This might be true…but is irrelevant. The path length for such a vessel is much smaller than the pathlength in the atmosphere, which is why you have to go to the 100% CO2 case to get a large enough path length.
Joel,
It looks you have some homework to do on SB.
In antarctic ice core measurements that relate c02 to temperature, the lag is quite explicit at every juncture. So are the abrupt shifts over short time periods. If this data is correct then so be it. However, a 1C doubling could not be caused by c02. It could be caused by water vapour, all other things being equal, but this wouldn’t be a long term climate shift.
How subzero temperatures – the points at which c02 absorbs, or delays radiation – could increase other temperatures by 1C is a pure scientific deception. At any rate, 8% of outgoing heat that c02 intercepts puts it this explanation a physical error. Certainly, c02 would have quite an effect in a glacial climate, but not enough to pull it out of a glacial climate – certainly not an effect in a non glacial climate
I stand by my notion that c02 are cents, water vapour are dollar notes, whilst climate forcings are assembled wads of bank notes, for easy understanding by the layman
Joel Shore (16:02:19
I see you’re playing games.
The experiment is tightly controlled, and given that its closed to convection, in fact gives a far greater bias and concentration in favour of c02 being a greenhouse gas than the atmosphere, if such existed in the case of c02
Joel Shore (08:41:46) :
Hey, nice fall-back positions.
If an old model doesn’t look so good, call it out-dated and crude.
If a new model doesn’t look so good, just say that not enough time has passed to adequately evaluate it.
If temperatures stop rising, just say they have been rising and are near record territory, even though the near constant drumbeat has been that AGW is accelerating and “it’s worse than we thought”.
And then you can always fall back on “uncertainty” and error bars, even though those phrases are carefully hidden when talking to the media.
You know, throwing Hansen’s 1988 model under the bus may not look so bad if AGW proponents weren’t saying how well it was standing up only a couple of years ago.
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/hansen-has-been-wrong-before.php
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/01/1988-and-all-that-as-soon-as-nonsense.html
I guess it’s easy to be patient when nothing’s falsifiable.
Just curious Scott and Joel, how patient do you think either of you would be if you were trying to argue an opposing point of view at one of the above blogs or on RealClimate?
Joel, the assumption of fixed RH is theoretically impossible. RH is never fixed, witness the fact that it decreases almost every day planetwide. Second the 4 w/m2 (actually 3) decreases as water vapor increases (spectral “wings” are much less important than the CO2 notch).
If there’s one fact you must remember it’s that water vapor is highly nonlinear. CO2 is logarithmic and rather easily modeled. Water vapor is nonlinear and doesn’t model well except at mesoscale resolution which the GCM’s do not have. Contrary to those models there is ample evidence that upper tropospheric water vapor is decreasing and not just in the tropics, e.g. ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/84927.pdf
Using an oversimplified model to predict sensitivity is a GIGO exercise, you will get out whatever you want based on assumptions about the weather.
@ur momisugly John M (15:43:36) :
John, are you suggesting that the press release is more accurate than the paper itself?
Preliminary dating of the AND-2A core via magnetostratigraphy, isotope stratigraphy, and biostratigraphy (Acton et al., 2008) places
the peak of the 312–310 mbsf warm interval ca. 15.7–15.5 Ma ago
The area being observed laid down 2m of sediment. That takes quite a bit of time.
Here is a screen capture:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/warny.gif
@ur momisugly Eric (skeptic) (16:40:27) :
The Radiative Signature of Upper Tropospheric Moistening by Brian J. Soden, Darren L. Jackson, V. Ramaswamy, M. D. Schwarzkopf, Xianglei Huang
Climate models predict that the concentration of water vapor in the upper troposphere could double by the end of the century as a result of increases in greenhouse gases. Such moistening plays a key role in amplifying the rate at which the climate warms in response to anthropogenic activities, but has been difficult to detect because of deficiencies in conventional observing systems. We use satellite measurements to highlight a distinct radiative signature of upper tropospheric moistening over the period 1982 to 2004. The observed moistening is accurately captured by climate model simulations and lends further credence to model projections of future global warming.
http://www.gfy.ku.dk/~kaas/forc&feedb2008/Articles/Soden.pdf
I guess we are playing “my paper is better than your paper.” 🙂
Hey, this is science.
@ur momisugly John M (16:22:35) :
Just curious Scott and Joel, how patient do you think either of you would be if you were trying to argue an opposing point of view at one of the above blogs or on RealClimate?
Speaking only for myself, chances are that I would quickly learn why I was wrong and I would thank them for enlightening me. 🙂
REPLY: Scott I know you think RC is fair and all, but really, you are deluded. Read this http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/busted/
-Anthony
Scott Mandia (17:46:53) :
Nope, I’m suggesting that maybe climate scientists ought to read their own press releases. After all, if Steve McIntyre can be blamed for what every flavor of skeptic might say in some corner of the web…
Scott Mandia (17:52:59) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheeple 🙂
Scott Mandia
“At the top of the atmosphere”, the atmospheric pressure is about 1/5 that of sea level. That means radiation will travel 5 times as far before being completely absorbed, which is 50 meters for CO2.”
given that c02 absorbs heat available to it in 10 metres from the earth, doubling c02 would decrease this distance to 5 metres. It wouldn’t change the temperature. Radiation is the limiting factor and not “greenhouse gases”. It also measn that warming cannot occur beyond the area where ghgs absorb radiation. they can trap heat in the stratosphere, but is so neglible as to have no effect. Besides, the stratosphere doesn’t influence the troposphere, where the climate takes place.
if water vapour increases in the troposphere, there is certainly no scientific mechanism by which it anthropogenic. Radiation is the limiting factor and not the amount of ghgs.
Also, the top of the troposhere is very cold. Given that it is very cold, it is physically impossible to produce more heat at ground level.
Again there are great limitations imposed, the further up the atmosphere one goes. Because the greenhouse effect isn’t working where it is supposed to be, climatologists pretent that there is someting unusual happening in the troposhere.
Again, it sounds like they are looking at the end result and then adjusting equations to produce the 1C that cannot be delivered where ghg’s are supposed toi have their effect.
Actually, these aforementioned problems are the least of what is wrong with the anthropogenic consensus, according to atmospheric height.
oh, i don’t mean that one paper is better than another, just that some form the conclusion and bend everything to fit it.
I once tried that method of asking a question about the relatively low heat capacity of air on ‘RC’, in response to the fact that the temperature plummeted by 10C *immediately* in the zone of the recent eclipse, then returned back to nrmal when the event was over. They called me a troll and snipped my post.
Scott Mandia (17:50)
Humidity Levels are not increasing.
Specific Humidity is as flat as a board (except for a very small increase at the lowest levels of the atmosphere – upper tropopause is actually declining very slightly).
http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/7908/specifichumidity.png
Relative Humidity – declining at all atmospheric levels.
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/3537/relativehumidity.png
Bill Illis: Well, I guess you believe satellite data when they suit your purposes and whatever data you can get your hands on instead of the satellite data when it suits your purposes. The satellite data is clear on the subject of upper tropospheric moistening for both fluctuations and long term trends. The radiosonde data is known to have severe problems and I’ve never even seen people try to look at the fluctuations with it.
P Wilson: Frankly, you can write nonsense faster than I can correct it. I give up. I may be patient, as Scott Mandia says but I ain’t a saint!
I think what I have learned from my many months of posting here is there has to be some commonality of interests in order to have a meaningful dialog. When people are dead-set on disbelieving modern science and believing any nonsense that they can get their hands on, there is really no convincing them otherwise.
Joel Shore (20:18:45) : “When people are dead-set on disbelieving modern science and believing any nonsense that they can get their hands on, there is really no convincing them otherwise.”
Nice self-confession. Thanks for admitting that, Joel.
There is truly” no convincing you otherwise” of the nonsense tenets [snip]
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Joel Shore (20:18:45) :
Bill Illis: Well, I guess you believe satellite data when they suit your purposes and whatever data you can get your hands on instead of the satellite data when it suits your purposes. The satellite data is clear on the subject of upper tropospheric moistening for both fluctuations and long term trends.
HUH??? Bro…are you blind???
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/3537/relativehumidity.png
Yoru clever sophistry just does not work, Joel. Give up. Thanks for giving it the college try.
I just wonder why…..WHY….is a smart guy like you pursuing a dead-end cause with limited evidence.
Again….to beat a dead horse….the burden of proof is on the party that makes a fantastic claim.
Show forth the evidence.
Not pages and pages of words.
Pure, simple, hard, fast…evidence.
This is the witching hour…
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Meant to say “Your clever sophistry….”