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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It’s all relative, Mr. Hall.
I would say we’re in a cold period (very cold by my thermometer outside).
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
Scroll down to see how the planetary temps have changed through geological time. Based on tectonic research over hundreds of millions of years, it appears the Earth is emerging from the last of four cool phases. Along with you, I sincerely hope it is emerging.
Over and over in the last 20 years the AGW idealogues have shown us the parts of the graphs that they wanted us to see – and told us what to think. If there’s one lesson that’s worth taking away from the climate change discussion, it is that the next graph will suggest something else.
I’m with you. The precautionary principle really should pertain more to cold-weather preparations than warm. More things go wrong in the cold. And that reminds me – my car heater broke down today (probably the sensor out again). I only know that it’s miserable when the temp is – 10 F.
Dr. Ross Taylor (17:15:49) :
Sigh…Al Gore, on CNN yesterday, pronounced to the world that humans were responsible for the majority of CO2 in the atmosphere. Of course, no-one picked up on it. I could not believe what I was hearing:
Ross, there is an emerging pattern in the TV “debates” we are being fed now. It revolves around the rather preposterous inability of many skeptic debaters to mount a cogent response to blatantly ignorant statements. And there are SO MANY good talking points for the skeptical side. Like it’s 3 percent of .0388 percent of atmosphere! Roughly equivalent to a peanut in the Astrodome!
In the CNN “debate” with Gavin Schmidt and John Christy, Wolf Blitzer lets Schmidt rail on about how the emails were stolen and invasion of privacy and taken illegally bla bla. Blitzer never steps in to return the debate to the science issues it’s supposed to be about. Aside from Chris Horner of CEI there is no one able to articulate or respond well to the alarmist ranting.
Maybe someone with on-camera television experience would step up and talk to the media about this stuff. Ah hem…)
Wolf Blitzer is not dumb? I suggest you google his performance on Jeopardy!
As Obama (I hope) has shown – one gave give off the appearance of integrity and intelligence while lacking even a drop of them!
I used to see charts like this all over the web before Global Warming was big. About two years ago all those charts dissappeared and all I could find was the “Hocky Stick.” It feels like 1984.
I like what was presented. The facts just keep getting in the way of new taxes and more power. Please keep up the good work. Make sure your national politicians hear your views.
Those are frightening profiles especially the last few down toward the bottom. And what is being done in terms of contingency planning for the end of the interglacial? Nothing whatever. W.A.S.S.
cheers Indiana, well, the MSM aren’t doing the job, so we have to keep trying to point things out about the facts, not the hysteria
“During the ice ages, Antarctica declines by 10.0C yet Greenland declines by more than 20.0C?”
Could very well be. Even during an ice age, Antarctica is still surrounded by water and I doubt the center of Antarctica will get much colder than it already is. Greenland, on the other hand is much smaller. During the summer months the island is surrounded by water. During an ice age, the sea around the island is frozen solid year round. Under those conditions, the North American polar region appears as a much larger continental land mass than Antarctica is. In other words, Arctic temperatures would approach Antarctic temperatures during glacial periods. Today the Arctic is much warmer. Antarctic drops 10 degrees, Arctic drops 20, the Arctic becomes about the same as the Antarctic.
@ur momisugly meself: “Based on tectonic research over hundreds of millions of years, it appears…”
The research took place more recently than the tectonic shifts. ‘Scuse me.
George E. Smith (17:33:45) :
Better batteries for a start, lighter, stronger, materials (lighter even than the carbon fibre you’re talking about), meaning less energy required to push things around. Bullet proof tee-shirts, pills that reduce the need for surgery. There is no area that it will not affect.
It’s a field that is still in it’s infancy, but it is likely to be where all the major “applied” discoveries and inventions happen, because in a sense, it merges the four main scientific disciplnes, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Earth Sciences.
Bear in mind, Nature does most of its work at the molecular level, so for the first time, we humans will be on an even footing with it, which is good, but it’s also scary. Imagine the sorts of things that can be made once it becomes possible to produce buckyballs and carbon nanotubes on an industrial scale.
Where is TomP loitering these days? 😉
How come modern temps are shown as -35°C but the coldest station in Greenland only shows -18°C?
tokyoboy (19:02:43) :
“Where is TomP loitering these days?”
Good question. Maybe with Joel Shore.
Makes you wonder if they aren’t in climategate up to their chins, doesn’t it?
Has any one told Gore?
I am much much more afraid of the next ice age than continued warming. The graph here is nothing new, and any fool can see how steep the slope for all the previous progressions into ice ages were…. less than a couple hundred years. This means that this earth can go snowball within your lifetime. This should not be a pleasant thought.
Makes me wish the U.S. had put more money into researching nuclear power. With a great source of heat like that readily available, surviving an ice age might be a little easier. Of course, you’d still need to build greenhouse domes and pray no encroaching glacier has you in it’s sights.
If we head into an ice age we had better burn fosil fuels and fast. Too bad the atmospheric response to CO2 is logarithmic.
Geoff Sharp (18:02:50) :
I have been waiting for this kind of data. I will plot it against the Holocene solar proxy records (14C & 10Be) and see what transpires.
Thanks.
Here is a first pass: http://www.landscheidt.info/images/solanki_sharp_greenland.png
George E. Smith (17:33:45) :
“Well the ice capades are rather nice; thanks for that. But as to the statement above.
What on earth leads you to believe that nanotechnology has any application to future energy sources ?”
Well to begin with, current day ‘nanotech’ is akin to MNT nanotech like 18th century chemistry is to modern biochemistry. There are a number of projects in the works to produce power with nanotech:
a) Casimir Torque Generator: uses nanogaps in nanoscale rotor/stator assemblies to generate torque from casimir forces. Accepted physics says this will work.
b) piezoelectric nuclear batteries: tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes poised under nanotech piezo armatures is used to generate electricity from the piezo vibrations generated by alpha radiation striking the arm.
c) Efficient hydrogen synthesis from sunlight: Captures photons and utilizes every quanta of their energy to separate hydrogen from water and other compounds. Projected 60%+ efficiency vs solar power at 33% and photosynthesis at 3%.
d) Nanofusion: Use nanoassemblies to force hydrogen atoms to fuse under mechanical pressure of van der waals forces.
Any questions?
Wow.
Wow plus. We should be trying to find a way to INCREASE greenhouse emissions, not decrease them.
Tom T (19:17:06) :
“If we head into an ice age we had better burn fosil fuels and fast. Too bad the atmospheric response to CO2 is logarithmic.”
With diminishing returns. We are very near a complete plateau. The diminishing returns curve is something these bozo’s GCMs ignore, they treat CO2 as having linear returns, which even Arrhenius knew was bogus. Their claim that every doubling equals a 1 degree rise tries to present it as linear, but a) note the use of doubling, and b) its nowhere near that sensitive at this point, we are past the bend in the asymptotic curve, the rise for each doubling is decreasing by half with each doubling.
It would seem that charts like the ones in this article, taken from central Greenland, would at least partially refute the current scare over methane bubbling up from the Arctic. If the temperature in the Arctic circle has been warmer quite frequently in the past, then bubbly methane would seem to be no big deal, since the temperatures would have also been warm enough back then to send the methane bubbling and yet nothing bad happened.
However, I am not a scientist, only a concerned person. Taking these charts into account, is it still possible that methane is something to be concerned about?
As an aside, I would like to see someone give a comprehensive rebuttal of the whole methane scare. Right now, if you google “arctic methane skeptic” nothing very convincing comes up from the skeptic side of things. I would think this article could be relevant to that topic.
Looking further into the Greenland data I noticed the timescale between the data points varies. This makes it very difficult to match with other records of the Holocene that have a regular data point gap.
Over long time scales the data needs to be adjusted somehow to be relevant.
Fraud again. Pure fraud. I was instructed in the Greenland discovery and abandonment in 9th Grade, more years ago than I wish to discuss. The Southern Coast of Greenland, sheep, cattle, horse husbandry, trade with the fishing and fur outposts in Vinland, were all lectured, as were the stone and sod homes. Winter wheat and cheese. Then the mini-iceage, the advancement of the inuit and the starvation, etc.
All of this seems to have gone down some bizarre, revisionist, hole. As if it never happened.
ben wilson (17:47:18) :
What about the lagging CO2 levels? What are the theories for that?
Simple volatility. It takes hundreds of years worth of temps low enough to freeze out C02 at the poles and keep it there, along with a much colder oceanic temp to suck in more C02. The only thing it’s saying is that C02 isn’t gulped out of the atmosphere/biosphere overnight. And it isn’t released that quickly. So look again at the graphs. Fast plunges and fast rises get the temps low enough to take out /high enough to release in a slow sequestration/desequestration process.
We just happen to be around to witness global temps leveling and falling at the same time C02 is still rising.
It only says that we are not cold enough yet to stop the rise by restarting sequestration.
The Sun keeps acting the way it is, and that will change too.