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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savethesharks (21:03:47) :
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.
__________________________________
The way that Joel sees the world IS the only way that the world could possibly be.
Real scientists, Joel, will NEVER believe your so-called “modern science” where the conclusions are written before the experimental procedures are performed (if at all).
Of course, he could be the blog equivalent of a seminar caller, in which case, he’s doing an outstanding job. I hope his salary is commensurate with his performance.
“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.”
— Mark Twain
Josh. Time for us sheeple to move on. 🙂
REPLY: Labeling yourself and others as “sheeple”? Doesn’t do much for credibility. -A
Joel Shore (20:18:45)
I only dispute the notion of belief. Scientific method is based on observation, ratiocination and inference, and the experimental technique. i’m asure you’d agree. Not belief. So for example if you have A and B, you couldinfer the hitherto unsuspected existence of C.
there’s quite a explanative book that discussed the scientific method. “The Scientific Outlook” written sometimein the 1930’s by Bertrand Russell. well, there are other methods of drawing hypotheses. In the end you have to ask. “It works in theory, but does it work in practice?”
AW,
It is called sarcasm. 🙂
@ur momisugly Scott Mandia (17:52:59) :
@ur momisugly Scott Mandia (22:09:06) :
savethesharks:
Not satellite data. Just an example of people taking data randomly off the web that supports their preconceptions without bothering to ask even the most basic questions about it.
Here is satellite data: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841
Scott, the paper you posted doesn’t say much about RH. OTOH, neither does mine. So we both lose for now. To me it is questionable whether total column water vapor causes warming or not. It is very much dependent on where in the column and of course the horizontal distribution. The authors in your paper say that the water vapor increase with temperature is predominately lower troposphere. Boiled down what they are saying is increase sea surface temperatures cause more evaporation which we knew already. The big question mark is convection.
Joel. The aqua satellite gives reliable data about tropospheric water vapour. So far it is showing the oposite trends from climate models. It show that far from a positive feedback, climate processed limit the warming effect and act as anegative feedback
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0315humidity.html
As a sidenote to that, given that the temperature in the troposphere is around -45C and decreases with elevation, there is no possible physical mechanism that can cause it to add more heat to the troposphere, regardless of surface temperatures. Hey, unless you can prove that putting eggs in the fridge will cook them….
John M:
I didn’t throw it under the bus. I said that it agreed within errorbars with the actual temperature record since 1988. However, my point is that this will not continue forever simply because the models aren’t perfect and because that model had one particular climate sensitivity and we only know the likely climate sensitivity within a fairly broad range. So, eventually, there will be a statistically-significant deviation. Given that the climate sensitivity in that model was near the top end of the likely range, one can only hope the real world deviates low.
I notice that “skeptics” demand that the predictions of AGW be perfect in order to believe them and yet totally ignore the the record that the “skeptics” themselves have on making such predictions. If one actually did a comparison, I think you would find that Hansen’s predictions have been head-and-shoulders above the “skeptics”!
Eric (skeptic) says:
Where do you see that? The paper is titled “The Radiative Signature of Upper Tropospheric Moistening”.
P Wilson says:
Nice try. You have linked to a press release from 2004 that is for the publication of Andrew Dessler’s first paper on the subject. In that, he found that the relative humidity had decreased a little bit and since their impression was that climate models predict constant RH, they thought there might be a contradiction. However, in a follow-up paper published in 2006 ( http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/minschwaner2006.pdf ), the same authors (with one additional coauthor) actually looked at simulations of the climate models and found that they too predicted a small RH decrease and that the models and data agreed within errorbars:
And, of course, there is this 2008 short review article on the subject that I linked to above ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;323/5917/1020 ) where Dessler and Sherwood conclude:
Joel, talking about picking data randomly off the web that supports their preconceptions…
Did you look up that thread? Scott already posted that paper. It doesn’t say much of anything except that when the ocean surface temperature increases, then evaporation increases and lower tropospheric humidity increases. What matters is convection and subsidence, neither of which are addressed by the paper. The paper cannot make any proper conclusions about warming due to water vapor since they do not distinguish by altitude (and in fact admit the lower altitudes get most of the increase).
Eric (skeptic) says:
The climate models don’t make that assumption. Here is what Dessler and Sherwood say on the subject:
Eric (skeptic) says:
What you have linked to is a conference paper for almost 10 years ago that the authors admit is a preliminary analysis (and based on a quite short set of data). The field has advanced since then as the later papers by Soden et al., Dessler et al., and the review by Dessler and Sherwood discuss.
Eric (skeptic): You are completely misreading the Soden paper. Where do you get the idea that they are looking in the lower troposphere when they state many times, including the title and abstract, that they are looking at the upper troposphere?
Joel Shore (06:27:05) :
savethesharks: “HUH??? Bro…are you blind???
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/3537/relativehumidity.png
“Not satellite data. Just an example of people taking data randomly off the web that supports their preconceptions without bothering to ask even the most basic questions about it.”
Hmmm…the same could be said about you bud.
Bill Illis presented the above graph, and you have failed to refute it saying that because you have failed to refute it by just dismissing it altogether through the “Either/Or Fallacy” to wit:
“The radiosonde data is known to have severe problems and I’ve never even seen people try to look at the fluctuations with it.”
Hmm….seems like a few of them do:
http://radiometrics.com/vance04.pdf
“The possibility of temperature measurement errors producing errors in the relative humidities reported by the RD93 sondes has been investigated (A. K. Vance 2004, unpublished manuscript), and we conclude that although errors of up to 3% RH may exist from this source, which is a concern, THIS IS NOT SIGNIFICANT COMPARED TO THOSE LIKELY TO ARISE FROM ATMOSPHERIC VARIABLITY.”
But anyway, back to the original question, you have yet to refute the graph which Illis presented above.
Or are you just going to try to change the subject again?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
And see the following. Not only do radiosondes have a wide margin of error, BUT APPARENTLY SATTELLITES DO TOO:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/5/1529/2005/acpd-5-1529-2005-print.pdf
“A method to compare upper tropospheric humidity (UTH) from satellite and ra- diosonde data has been applied to the European radiosonde stations. The method uses microwave data as a benchmark for monitoring the performance of the stations. The present study utilizes three years (2002–2003) of data from channel 18 (183.31␣1.00GHz) of the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-B (AMSU-B) aboard the satellites NOAA-15 and NOAA-16. The comparison is done in the radiance space, the radiosonde data were transformed to the channel radiances using a radiative trans- fer model. The comparison results confirm that there is a dry bias in the UTH measured by the radiosondes. This bias is highly variable among the stations and the years. This variability is attributed mainly to the diðerences in the radiosonde humidity measure- ments. The results also hint at a systematic diðerence between the two satellites, the channel 18 brightness temperature of NOAA-15 is on average 1.0 K higher than that of NOAA-16. The diðerence of 1 K corresponds to approximately 7% relative error in UTH which is significant for climatological applications.”
Hey I am not saying that you are incorrect in the claim that the UTH levels are climbing…but you have, by throwing the radiosonde baby out with the bathwater, yet to produce the hard and fast evidence that they are.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Joel Shore (08:20:14)
Thats odd. The latest data, post 2007 shows stratospheric vapour on a downward trend, but increasing in th elower troposphere. These are not model simulations – as you refer to them – but data sets.
so what is happening? Climate sensitivity is greatly over estimated by models: far from water vapour giving a strong feedback in the troposhere, (cloud cover) autonomous cooling mechanisms occur, troposheric temperatures cool and less vapour goes into the stratosphere. However, it does prove that water vapour is the salient ghg overriding anything from other ghg’s .
The problem this is: How can c02 heat absorbtion cause the necessary heating of oceans to produce this vapour. There isn’t a scientifically valid mechanism for that. It can only be heat from the oceans via the solar connection that puts more vapour into the atmosphere, since the thermal coeffecient of c02 doesn’t affect the oceans
“Josh. Time for us sheeple to move on. :)”
Please do…..
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Correction:
“Bill Illis presented the above graph, and you have failed to refute it saying that because you have failed to refute it by just dismissing it altogether through the “Either/Or Fallacy” to wit:”
“The radiosonde data is known to have severe problems and I’ve never even seen people try to look at the fluctuations with it.”
MEANT TO SAY:
Bill Illis presented the above graph, and you have failed to refute it by just dismissing it altogether through the “Either/Or Fallacy” to wit:
“The radiosonde data is known to have severe problems and I’ve never even seen people try to look at the fluctuations with it.”
I can’t access the science mag article. Synopsis?
on entering the subtitle in a google search, it came up with this:
How strong a part does water vapor play in global warming?
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Joel, from the paper:
However, because the
mass of water vapor decreases rapidly with
height, the column integral is primarily weighted
by the lower troposphere, and its largely
thermodynamic behavior is unsurprising (21).
And their fig 1 shows that warmer sea surfaces cause more evaporation, something we already knew. We also knew we in a primarily positive PDO and expect warmer sea surface temperatures overall. The rest of the paper has no water vapor information, just temperature (figs 2 and 3). They assume their simulation can’t possibly be wrong and that running their sim with constant RH produces the same temperature results as measured (well it would with the same forcing), that means there must be constant RH which they devolve to “moistening trend” in the UT. They dismiss the actual measurements showing the UT is not moistening.
Eric (skeptic): Your first quote is from the introductory section of the paper where they are talking about what has been looked at before, so I hardly see how it is relevant. And, the rest of the paper does indeed contain information on water vapor…It discusses the radiative signature for the water vapor, i.e. measurements of effective blackbody temperature. (How else do you expect a satellite to sense water vapor if not by a radiative signature?) Here is their explanation:
P Wilson says:
Which one? Soden et al. or Dessler and Sherwood?
You can find a lot of non-peer-reviewed garbage on the internet. I think you know enough to poke the obvious holes in that particularly silly one yourself.
savethesharks says:
Well, determining long-term trends in the satellite data is certainly not without its problems but it sounds like the radiosondes are considerably more problematic. Furthermore, Soden et al. used the satellite data not just to compare not just the long-term trends but also the shorter-term fluctuations (e.g., on the timescales of months to a few years). For these, the problems with stitching together different satellites or orbital decay or other issues that affect long-term trends won’t be an issue. So, I think the evidence that the water vapor feedback operates as expected over these timescales is quite robust. I suppose it is possible that it works over the shorter timescales but breaks down over the multidecadal timescales, but this seems rather unlikely since the processes involving water vapor operate on timescales of hours to days.
Dessler and Sherwood
i hope it isn’t as preposterous as you’ve presented it!
Oh. I mean by that, i’m interested in the part where they use data to support the notion that enhanced tropospheric water vapour has led to a multiplied increase in global warming, from 2002 to 2009, which is the context iin which you brought the paper to attention
Joel, the article is poorly worded. HIRS does not measure water vapor (nothing measures it), but OLR. See http://dods.atmos.umd.edu/~lee/documents/Lee04_GOES_HIRS_hybrid.pdf for example. Water vapor is estimated by subtracting other OLR measurements. The HIRS satellite doesn’t do that and AFAIK they don’t do it on the ground. The way the authors did it is use their model and assume that since constant RH in the model gives the same UT temperature, the model must be a correct estimate of the UT water vapor.
There are many other temperature and water vapor gradients that can produce the same OLR measurement at the satellite, not just the one they modeled.
Joel, did you look up reference 28 in the text you quoted above? He says “widely used” but provides one reference to an article with no title that he authored. I really would like to see more (any) legitimate references that HIRS can measure water vapor. Like I said, nothing can measure water vapor, but some satellites have multiple IR channels that they can subtract to get water vapor (basically subtract the non-absorbed IR from the absorbed IR). Then the authors in this article state:
Figure 2 compares the satellite-observed
equivalent blackbody temperatures from chan-
nel 12 (T12) from the HIRS instrument with
those computed from the model_s temperature
and moisture profiles (30). Under clear skies,
T12 is primarily sensitive to changes in relative
humidity averaged over a deep layer of the
upper troposphere (roughly 200 to 500 hPa)
(21). Thus, if the water vapor mass in the upper
troposphere increases by conserving relative
humidity as the atmosphere warms, only a
small perturbation to T12 would be expected.
They are assuming constant RH so they can compare the model temperature to the observed temperature. They are assuming the same hypothesis that they are trying to prove (constant RH aka UT moistening).