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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and here he is again, bless him, doens’t his sincerity make Gore seem repulsive?:
This is all very intersting and excellently explained. Can we please have the sources/references for the various graphs (and data) used? Thanks
It was the ice-core data that changed my mind about global warming. I used to be an AGW believer with a low-emission car and electricity supplied via wind-turbines. But then I downloaded the ice-core data myself and took a look and realised the whole theory was, well, “poppycock”.
You can see all kinds fo things from the ice-core data:-
1] Current CO2 levels aren’t particularly high
2] CO2 increases AFTER temperature increases, so you can’t even be sure that rising CO2 now is caused by man – it could be caused by perfectly natural increases in temperature which then releases more CO2 into the air as ice retreats slightly and unfreezes CO2 and releases methans which then breaks down to CO2.
3] High levels of CO2 aren’t enough to prevent temperatures falling.
4] Current temperatures aren’t particularly high.
5] Higher temperatures in the past didn’t cause tipping points that were enough to prevent subsequent cooling.
Funnily enough the AGW proponents started to go very quiet about ice-cores when these sorts of challenges were made and then they focussed on secret tree-ring data and surface stations with back-filled datalogs. They learned some lessons – not about AGW theory being fallacious but about finding ways of preventing the keen amateur from spotting gaping flaws in their theories. Information is now on a “need to know” basis. They have decided we don’t need to know.
Two things.
To anyone who does not know who Joshua Storrs Hall is, I recommend you look him up. He is the head of Foresight.org and one of the premiere names in Nanotechnology. He is the creator of the concept of Programmable matter, AKA Utility Fog, and one of the most creative minds working on Molecular Nanotechnology and Molecular Engineering. When it comes to Drexlarian Nanotechnology, not the redefined materials science dealing with nanoscale materials but actual Mechanosynthesis, there are few who can top him for knowledge.
The second thing is I recommend anyone who is concerned about bad science look up the Electrical Universe, which discusses how Modern Astrophysics has ignored any and all evidence that the universe is primarily ruled by Electromagnetic forces, not Gravity. Over any distance EM is 37 orders of magnitude stronger than Gravity, and falls off on a linear scale instead of a logarithmic scale like gravity. The electrical interactions between the Sun and our electromagnetic fields greatly effect weather.
Also, if you look into EU theory, you will also find that there is substantial evidence that our solar system underwent severe changes at the end of our last ice age. As ridiculous as it may sound, our ancestors insisted in numerous ancient documents that Saturn used to be much closer to Earth, and that a too close brush with Jupiter, once much closer to the sun, resulted in Saturn being removed from it’s previous prominence, and it and several other planets such as Mars and Venus also were sent into erratic orbits.
As planets act as anodes in a vaccum to the Sun’s cathode, the electrical forces seeking equilibrium brought all the planets into their current orbits, but not without several thousand years of eccentricity. It is recorded in some ancient texts that Mars and Venus both had close encounters with the Earth, resulting in massive electrical discharges between planets as they sought to equalize potentials.
The interesting thing is that if this theory is correct, which will require much more evidence to confirm, then our periods of warming and cooling would seem to correspond to the possible major changes in orbits among the planets. In theory, the Earth was originally a planet around Saturn, which was a small star, which intersected the current solar system, went through a long period of eccentric orbits before finally settling in a long period orbit which eventually intersected that of Jupiter. That would make the sudden end of the last ice age a product of assuming our own independent orbit around the sun, and the various spikes due to planetary interactions as the planets equalized charges and stabilized their orbits to what we see today.
I can’t say I’m convinced, but it is interesting to contemplate.
However, the story of how EU theory is being suppressed by the mainstream Astrophysics community is very similar to that of the chicanery seen here by the AGW crowd. While I can’t say I agree with the Saturn Theory, the evidence for electrical phenomena in space is readily apparent if you know anything about electrical forces. I highly recommend anyone who is interested to check out EU theory and see how the electrical interactions between Earth and the Sun can influence our weather.
Espen (00:04:52) :
‘About the 95 years not shown in the graph:’
Not to worry. Griss and/or CRU can make that graph dance.
is this new data ? .. if this is valid data then its obvious the planet is cooling and should end all discussion, what am i missing??
LarryOldtimer (23:41:58) :
“Grossly exaggerated vertical scales can make even a speck of dust look the size of a mountain.”
1. Their side started it.
2. Where should the bottom of the scale be — zero degrees Kelvin? Changes that can be seen only on the scale portrayed are the ones that are meaningful to human civilization, so the scale isn’t exaggerated.
Dave Dardinger (21:25:08) :
‘The problem is that the natural CO2 is constantly recycled while the human produced CO2 Just adds to what’s already there.’
First of all you would have to prove that Co2 drives the climate.
Lets see. No “Hot Spot”, flat or declining heat in the “Pipe Line”, no increase in “Heat Trapping Clouds”, ice core data shows this is not the warmest period in “Our Time”, “Climate Models” have never been V and V and now, “Climategate”.
How deep is the “Rabbit Hole”?
So, tell me again how “Co2 drives the climate”?
Excellent article. I’m sending this one around.
Can someone please explain what is the scale on the y-axis of graphs 1 to 6?
This a fantastic explanation of the big picture of historical temperature. It is so very easy to get hung up on a few tenths of a degree here and there. The general public *are not* aware of this bigger picture, but htey should be made so.
How can we get the message out there? We could print t-shirts or print flyers? This should be made into a leaflet size that some of us can independently print off a few thousand copies and distribute at weekend and during rush hour.
Well, that’s it for me MMGW proved beyond doubt. That peak temperature around the end of the bronze/start of the iron age. All these guys with their home smelters pouring out CO2!
“Present” is assumed to be 1950 in this plot:
(Present might be different in ice cores but does not make much difference)
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/1373/gisp2moderngrnlnd.png
This appends a shifted (-29degC) measurement from modern Greenland on to the end of the misrepresented plots made here.
As can be seen even this crude addition shows modern temperature at 1degC above the MWP.
Todays temperature is in fact as high as any in the last 2000 yeats. In the period of the core there are only 3higher temperatures (5900BC,4975BC, 1347BC).
Comments?
Pull your heads out of the sand and check how the average temperature on Greenland has evolved over the last 95 years. I believe you can use the emerging hockey stick to smash the credibility of the author of this piece of garbage “science”.
The author’s final conclusion is based on a faulty premise – I’m generally not seeing anyone going around saying that humans are the _only_ cause. It’s easy to make your own strawmen and then knock them down.
“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.”
Problem is, in characterizing everything as “poppycock” that completely undermines any effort to develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels. Nanotechnology to generate power? Easily decades, if not closer a century away before we see such technology in widespread adoption for serving any substantial part of our energy demand. And no impetus to develop it anyways if the pundits and skeptics are going around saying we don’t need it. And as for “all the money going to climate science” suggests that some vast amount of money is being thrown at climate – yet there’s not really been that much of any dramatic increase in the budgets of agencies like NOAA or EPA regarding climate over the last couple of decades. Meanwhile, in the prior administration, money was actually cut off to efforts to develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels, and it was a major setback, while we in fact subsidized efforts TO rely on burning fossil fuels.
The basic issue I have with all of this is that the result of climate-skeptics’ efforts is that they remove all impetus to ever develop cleaner, renewable means of generating power and more efficient technologies.
It’s basically just throwing our hands up and allowing ourselves to be at the mercy of whatever (be it warming – or another ice age – or running out of coal and oil) rather than being proactive by trying to gain broader understanding and a broader range of technologies and resources, and thereby be more prepared to master our destiny, whatever that might be,
As such, we need to continue to develop energy technologies, we need to continue to study what drives climate change, to be more ready for whatever comes, whether it’s warming OR an ice age, as opposed to saying “we don’t have all the answers, so let’s just pull the plug, give up and put the blindfold on and accept our fate” as the pundits and skeptics would have us do.
This piece in Forbes is interesting. Scientists were claiming an ICE Age doom in 1975.
Wow. This really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it! I’ve been following the climate change debate for only the last several months. Before then, I assumed it was all conclusive science. There has been some damning evidence out there but this article is exceptionally enlightening. Thanks for posting.
I think those same Vikings who named Greenland Greenland then hauled themselves over to what is now Newfoundland and established colonies producing grapes etc. But that didn’t last because it got cold again.
Dave Dardinger (21:25:08) :
The problem is that the natural CO2 is constantly recycled while the human produced CO2 Just adds to what’s already there.
CO2 is CO2 — there aren’t any people-cooties on manmade CO2 to enable Mama Gaia to identify it as unsuitable for recycling.
Slightly OT, but I just had an enlightening discussion with someone who swears the MWP never happened, and those Viking ruins being excavated are actually in Newfoundland, *not* Greenland, and my knowledge of geography is obviously deficient.
I pulled up Greenland on Google Earth and he identified it as Norway.
My head hurts now…
Excellent article, both in content and presentation.
As a former NOAA employee, it’s good to see the numbers used in an even-handed manner.
So is someone going to explain the scale on the y-axes, PLEASE?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png has the long term records of temperature as recorded by ice cores. The context that is missing, though is this.
We don’t live in -350,000 AD. We live in 2009 AD. The dramatic costs that global warming may impose on us were not imposed in -350,000 because we didn’t exist then (and to the extent we did, our ancestors didn’t have cities, buildings, machines and fixed capital to worry about in order to maintain their standard of living).
Likewise the Medieval Warm Period was real but local to Europe (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warm_period). But again we don’t live in Medieval Europe. Imagine there’s a button that if you push it will instantly revert the earth to the climate of the Medieval period. There’s no reason to think that pushing it wouldn’t impose an immediate and immense cost.
Additionally, let’s say the MWP was imposed by some natural process totally independent of human activity. Let’s say a comet of frozen CO2 crashed into some remote corner of the world in AD 800 and while no one noticed the impact the world experienced a few centuries of higher temperatures. What does that have to do with the AGW debate today? Absolutely nothing.
Yes its true, we can do a fantastic job of lowering CO2 output and just when we think we are done another giant CO2 comet comes along ruining all the work we did. But if CO2 comets are a random feature of our climate system then there’s nothing we can do about them. If we didn’t lower CO2 output, we’d be facing both the CO2 from the comet as well as the CO2 from our activities. (For ‘CO2 Comet’ substitute any natural process(es) that might cause a spike in warming or CO2 outside of AGW).
Some other issues:
Gore did misspeak regarding humans making the majority of CO2 but:
“Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. There’s nothing special about the “human produced CO2″. It gets recycled just like all the other.”
No the bulk of natural CO2 is recycled. For example, breathing. You and all animals breath out CO2. But to do this they need to burn C with the O2 in the air they breath in. They get C from food which pulls CO2 out of the air. Yes there is no law that gurantees all natural processes net out to exactly 0 but they tend to be in rough balance. Humans are responsible for the majority of the unrecycled CO2.
I love this thread! I had produced a series of graphs like these of ever lengthening duration for a PTK lecture I did about 14 years ago to show the 1/f-noise-like variations of climate. Mine was more schematic and not an actual record, but doesn’t it do a nice job of putting the hockey sticks, even fabricated ones, in proper perspective?
In the mid 1990s geophysicists were making hockey sticks from borehole temperature measurements. I now realize these predated Mann’s hockey stick. They were fabricated using “inverse mathematics” but fabricated none the less. I think they have disappeared from public view almost entirely, yet, with warmists looking for new confirmatory data they are likely to reappear at some time.
Rutger: Good question. Mann and co make a big deal out of a few tenths of a degree here and there and claim that man made CO2 is the cause and theat they can detect it and that it is dangerous.
Please do ask the guys on realclimate.org whether think that the hockey stick (which we now know has lots of arjee bargee attached to its creation!) is relevent when plotted in the context of the entire record.
The fact is that the climate has been swinging around VIOLENTLY (orders of magnitude more than the worse IPPCC bullshit) without any help from us for hundreds of thousands of years – and we have not switched off, and cannot control, that natural process. Am I worried about climate change? You betcha I’m worried, I’m worried about NATURAL climate change and we can’t do a thing about it.
Excellent article. I have two questions though. Hopefully someone can answer them.
1) Why does the data not extend to the current year?
2) Heat will be conducted from warm ice to cold ice, so that over the years the temperature distribution will tend to level off. Has anyone done the calculations to determine the magnitude of that effect? Is the data we are seeing, “adjusted” to account for that ?