At the Foresight Institute, J. Storrs Hall had some interesting graphs made from NOAA ice core data (Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.) It sure seems to mirror other hockey sticks this past century. Dr. Mann will be thrilled to see this I’m sure.
J. Storrs Hall writes:
One thing that Climategate does is give us an opportunity to step back from the details of the AGW argument and say, maybe these are heat-of-the-moment stuff, and in the long run will look as silly as the Durants’ allergy to Eisenhower. And perhaps, if we can put climate arguments in perspective, it will allow us to put the much smaller nano arguments (pun intended) into perspective too.
So let’s look at some ice.
I’m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.
So what does it tell us about, say, the past 500 years? (the youngest datum is age=0.0951409 (thousand years before present) — perhaps younger snow doesn’t work so well?):
Well, whaddaya know — a hockey stick. In fact, the “blade” continues up in the 20th century at least another half a degree. But how long is the handle? How unprecedented is the current warming trend?
Yes, Virginia, there was a Medieval Warm Period, in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that — that’s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all. And the following Little Ice Age is what killed them off, and caused widespread crop failures (and the consequent burning of witches) across Europe. But was the MWP itself unusual?
Well, no — over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.
In fact for the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean. If it lasts.
From the perspective of the Holocene as a whole, our current hockeystick is beginning to look pretty dinky. By far the possibility I would worry about, if I were the worrying sort, would be the return to an ice age — since interglacials, over the past half million years or so, have tended to last only 10,000 years or so. And Ice ages are not conducive to agriculture.
… and ice ages have a better claim on being the natural state of Earth’s climate than interglacials. This next graph, for the longest period, we have to go to an Antarctic core (Vostok):
In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.
Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.
Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.
Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. 
) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.
For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.
h/t to Kate at SDA
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Beng,
I don’t think all ice cores were treated with some standard procedure and they were not analyzed by a single laboratory. I wouldn’t put much faith in the accuracy of the science in your cited web page. For information on clatherate hydrates of CO2, study http://www.john-daly.com/zjiceco2.htm. My analysis tends to confirm the conclusions expressed there.
But none of this has stopped Copenhagen and it is there that political and economic decisions with far reaching consequences will be made.
Thank heavens the third worlders have walked out because of not enough cash.
Now what will it take to stop the big bananas from going?
look, I must admit that initially I also believed that carbondioxide was a cause for climate change as its properties to absorb heat are well documented.
However, the fundamental argument of the AGW theory is that this trace gas (at slightly less than 0.04% or 400 ppm) is THE key ingredient to controlling a massively complex system such as climate.
We are asked essentially to dismiss the effects of solar variations, orbital changes, cosmic rays, magnetic field changes, or many other variables and their inter- relationships. The main component of air, namely water vapor (average 1% in air and which is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2), is completely ignored.
The argument is absurd on its face.
But now,
those like me who stood by (thinking that we must trust the experts) have allowed this to happen. I did not check up on the science until far too late. Here is now a whole worldwide industry based on a simple set of misconceptions – and ….you just cannot stop it. It has a life of its own. It is like a (false) religion. People want to believe it. All you can do is you to just sit back and laugh…..
I never thought much of Sarah Palin but got more respect for her when she said: the science used in Copenhagen is agenda- based science. I think that is hitting the nail on the head.
Now the question is: whose agenda is it? Follow the money….it is all just like a simple detective story.
Question for climate illiterate: When I look at the above carts I see negative number on the left hand side. What do those numbers represent? Temperature? Why all negative?
Thanks for the great work.
I have a pretty dumb question…
The axes in the charts aren’t labeled, but it’s obvious that the x axis is the time frame. What is on the y axis?
Add to last: Never mind, I got it. Brain malfunction. It’s degrees C.
The IPCC says that their Global Circulation Models (GCMs), on which all the climate panic is based, can only explain the late 20th century global temperature rise from a human signal: the extra CO2 added by burning fossil fuels. Then, i suppose, the GCMs can also not explain all the other steep global temperature rises during the Holocene, other than by some unnatural forcing. What forcing is that? Or is the answer that they simply cannot explain, so the models must be inadequate?
Can anybody tell me what the warmist’s reply to this dilemma is? I’m really curious.
henry @ur momisugly frans
you should have a close look at all that work from Fred
http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf
he determined exactly by data analysis what I sort of felt instinctively!
Amazing!
henry@ur momisugly frans
By the way, if you do look at Fred’s work, note that SST stands for Sea Surface Temperature.
Frans,
The IPCC models claim to show an anthropogenic signal because they are not programmed to account for all the natural changes. A good model that one can use for prediction should be able to fit all the data including historical past. The alarmist have chosen to average out MIA and LIA to produce “hockey sticks” to fit the models. There is no way they can filter out ice ages and claim that their models are any good.
Anthony: I linked your article to a nephew, who had this to say,”This interpretation goes against all other NOAA data I can find. I’d welcome a more substantial source!”
Can you help us?
I misstyped in my last comment. I intended to type MWP rather than MIA. However, it could stand for the “Missing In Action” “Medevil Warm Period”.
this is all true
I know no one will ever read this but I have always wondered what testing nuclear weapons in the ocean might of had to do with El Nino’s and the like. Dead fish, currents, You know those kind of things.
I have asked myself that very same same question. Not only the killing of flora and fauna due to the radiation of the nuclear explosions but also the blasts itsself, could this not have been a cause of more instability of that ocean’s floor in terms of earthsquakes, tsunamis, volcanic activity, etc.?
I suppose those who know or suspect something will keep quiet about it.
(we are talking mainly about the Indian ocean here)
Could we not asks the dates of the blasts (from the governments of England, France and USA) and try to correlate this to any of the data that you found fishy? Pun intended
You should challenge Wikipedia’s version of the past 1000 years. They’re supposed to be neutral:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
They claim to compile nearly a dozen different 1000+ year peer-reviewed temperature reconstructions into one graph. Funny, none of those graphs remotely resemble this graph….But I’m sure they’ve all made a major mistake that the Greenland core data here caught.
The question in my mind is not how frequently temperature might swing over 500, 1,000, or 10,000 years; but how well species can adapt to a possible 1, 2, or 3 degree change over 100 years…while we’re demanding exponentially more production out of arable land over time. I’m sure its nothing to worry about. We won’t be alive anyway if something hits the fan. Let’s leave any potential problems to our kids…like social security.
I suspect that the graph on Wikipedia is a ‘global” average if that is possible,
i.e. they just used the South Pole measurements and the Greenland ice cores to make a an average?
You should read Fred’s analysis of all available data (as discussed earlier).
he concludes that there are thousands of temp. cycles with swings of around 2 degrees.
( Ithink this is why Copenhagen decided on that figure (of 2 degrees)
Apparently a statistically significant twenty year cycle tends to dominate sea surface temperature change rates of about 0.14 degrees C/year. We are now in the middle of this and can expect a downswing (I think it has already started in the US and Europe? – seeing that it is so cold now there….)
I think many species can adapt but low lying areas can be a problem in a warm period due to flooding.
Interesting graphs which apparently come to the same conclusion as I did that the climate is not quite at the end of a warm spot and due, around 2040, to get a lot colder.
The hockey stick much vaunted by global warming activists doesn’t quite reflect reality. My calculations, using a 55 year average of Greenland ice core results show a cycle of temperatures swinging regularly up and down with the swing getting progressively bigger. Overall there seems to have been a 0.1°C temperature rise since 1250 and the ‘swing’ is about to swing downward.
I am a little concerned about the data source for the graphs though. My understanding is that the ice cores from Greenland are not available for 40,000 years. How about quoting the data source as a web link?
I’m not sure if someone else mentioned this and I didn’t read all the other comments. But I do have a bad habit of noticing patterns.
In the last graph in the article, look at the duration between temp peaks. I know the original summation is that the Earth is more often in cool periods, with a temp spike that looks a lot like a normal heart rhythm on an EKG monitor. Look at the current conditions and the width of time to the previous spike. We about due for a cold plunge. And CO2 levels have nothing to do with it, other than as a consequence of temp change. Whether temp changes causes CO2 change (good evidence for that, at least coincidentally, from the Vostok record) or as a coincidence based on volcanic emissions, CO2 does nothing to change overall climate. It would appear that we are headed for another cool period, just based on the pattern of the graph.
Ron, I did a study on my own and came to the conclusion that CO2 has little or nothing at all to do with global warming. If global warming is real then it must be all the energy and water vapor producing activities that we are putting in the atmosphere, – which would mean that the only the energy that we steal from nature i.e. solar, wind, hydro, gravity etc) is green. (remember that nuclear needs a lot of water to cool and rocket fuel also makes water vapor). Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 and its concentration in the air is between 25 and 50 times greater than CO2.
In the course of my investigations I found that most scientists skeptic of AGW think that climate is related to cloud formation. The more cloud formation, the more sunlight is deflected from earth. The less cloud formation the more heat is absorbed by earth (the oceans act as buffers for this energy). In its turn, cloud formation can apparently be related to solar activity. More solar wind means fewer cosmic rays and fewer cosmic rays mean fewer clouds. It is predicted that a period of more clouds is now coming, i.e. global cooling is apparently on hand. (I know some people in the northern hemishere who might actually not like to hear that!). Let us hope that the cooling wiil not be as dramatic as before? I think for the big dips in the last graph there must be specific reasons that start off the big freezes, like orbital position (Markovnikov). You are right, it looks like we are a bit overdue for a dip…..
There was a professor in Australia (I think his name is Bob Carters or Carteres) who plotted the CO2 in the same graphs as shown above and he found that the increase in CO2 always lagged the warming periods by a couple of hundred years, in other words: Increases in CO2 followed global warming, not the other way around. Just as lung cancer does not cause smoking.
This makes sense from a chemistry point of view as I am sure a large portion of CO2 is dissolved in the oceans: CO2 + cold 3H2O =>CO3– + 2H3O+. If the oceans warm up, the equilibrium shifts in the opposite direction: CO3– + 2H3O+ +heat => CO2 + 3 H2O
This is where I blame Al Gore. He and the professors that helped him should have known this. In the movie they made it look like as if the temperatures went up the same time as when the CO2 went up. If he (Al Gore) did not know about this then, he should know it by now.
Are you people now also beginning to wonder: who is benefiting from keeping up this CO2 and carbon footprint nonsense? What a waste of ….energy! I am sure a few simple tests can prove that CO2 is not to blame.Here is now a whole worldwide industry based on a simple set of misconceptions (like testing done with 100% CO2 and weighting of global warming influence of CO2 by comparing the current CO2 concentration with that of 1750) – and ….you just cannot stop it. It has a life of its own. It is like a (false) religion. People want to believe it. All you can do is to just sit back and laugh…..
Just a correction.
The vikings did not settle Greenland in the MWP, as you sugggest in figure 2.
But at the end of the 900’s, which is at the end of the huge spike in figure 3.
Keep it correct.
The data, by your own admission, give ” us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot”.
At that one spot? I thought global warming was, um, global, not at one spot. I don’t understand, therefore, how these diagrams are refutations of global warming.
John, the point of the graphs was just to show that climate does not stand still. The last graph (from Antarctic ice) shows this better.We must be thankful that we have a warm period. From the graphs, it would seems we are due for dip. I hope this has not already started. I heard someone complaining thet they have the evidence of “global warming” lying on the streets, for weeks now. By the way, it seems that the cold weather that the northern hemisphere is experiencing seems pretty global. Even here in South Africa it is a cooler than usual. It means that that tipping point that we all talked about (which happens to coincide with an increase earth albedo) and which started in 2003 has been again confirmed. I predict that soon we will be talking about global cooling and how we can protect earth from falling into a little ice age.
John!
here is an another example of that tipping point I spoke to you about
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/coal-creek-redux/#more-14815
watch this space: global cooling is coming. it is real. and this time it is not a hoax (like global warming).
omg