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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Great article,
just wonder if Copenhagen will pass international laws to prohibit posts like this, it works in Iran were the country was taken over by crazy’s .
The Y axis in the first 6 graphs is temperature in celcius. All the figures are negative.
The raw numbers are here:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
along with the abstract by the author which kuhnkat posted earlier.
Not sure what the Y axis is representing on the Vostok graph (graph 7)
I have done a rather detailed statistical analysis of the readily available NOAA ice core data from both Greenland and Antarctica. This post is consistant with the results of my analysis. I produced a pdf presentation. http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf. You may find answers to many of your questions there. If you wish to contact me, my e-mail address can be found on that site.
Excellent work,very impressive!
Especially the plot from -2000 up to now, the three peaks: 1. about 0 -Roman Empire
at its best time “Augustus Cesar”,
2.Leif Ericsson discovers Greenland and Vinland,
last and least
” Holy Gore” invents Internet and Hockeystick!
Please don’t hide this decline!
“The problem is that the natural CO2 is constantly recycled”
But what is the storage factor? Could the % recycling be made much better?
Life uses CO2 contructively, and levels have been higher in the past, but unfortunately, a heck of a lot of it gets put into ‘deep storage’ doesn’t it? Otherwise we wouldn’t have such things as coal, or soil ending up as subsoil and piling tons and tons of the stuff piling up above archaeological sites Worldwide would we?
What about the billion upon billion tons of limestone? Limestone is mainly calcium carbonate, CaCO 3. When it is heated, it breaks down to form calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. We have all those building blocks that end up as limestone, raining down from the top 100ft layer of the Oceans that cover approx 70% of the Planet, all day and every day?
Funny how that CO2 absorbtion into the Oceans is supposed to be ‘acidifying’ when the real life in the real Oceans, uses the stuff to such great effect?
What’s the ph of limestone again?
Isn’t there a strong case, that by actually releasing the CO2 from deep storage, then all we are doing, is making sure that life has enough of a pretty essential basic component, to go forward with into the coming millions of years?
Now if the temperatures would indeed increase sufficiently so life could make even more efficient use of it . . .
Which leads me to Ice Ages.
I don’t worry about Ice Ages. We have had them before. If The Canadian and American grain belts goes under ice, well, there may well be super ice lakes over them which could be home to huge numbers of fish. At the same time, the Sahara and present similar regions Worldwide, might well become highly productive replacements. Africa as a whole, might return to its previous fertility.
Plus, sea levels will go down dramatically, and coastal plains that have not seen the light of day for 1,000’s of years, once the salt is washed out of them, well, they will be remarkably fertile after 1,000’s of years of fish guano and fish bones and recycled seaweed, dropping on them, won’t they?
We have either evolved the ability to cope, and cherish challenges, or we haven’t.
The miseryguts doomsayers so intent on frightening the children, don’t seem to be particularly evolved enough to adapt to anything at all (especially perhaps truth, let alone reality), do they?
They should keep their personal problems to themselves, and not expect the whole World to throw unaffordable trillions at their paranoia, phobias, and psychotic hatred of humanity.
In a very real way, all they are doing, is standing up in a crowded theatre, and yelling at the top of their voices FIRE! when there is no fire. Such scaremongering deserves jail time.
I’d far rather we spend some money on putting in desalination plants in useful places around the World, use drip agriculture in places with plenty of sunlight, and actually address the issues.
The price of desalinated water, is now down to less than 0.50c per cubic metre. Just think how much of the money that’s already been wasted on this AGW propaganda, could have been turned into desalination plants and drip agricultire systems around the World.
So, this is recorded as degree’s below zero? How was Greenland green with those kinds of temps? Or, was it just the southern tip?
*******
9 12 2009
Suzanne (17:22:03) :
I’ve read a lot comments about the interglacials lasting only about 10,000 years but detailed studies of the Ice Ages in Britain (Homo Britanicus)show that the last time the Milankovich signal was similar to the present, the corresponding interglacial in the British Isles was 40,000 years with a sharp cooling in the middle.
*******
Similar Milankovich conditions occured ~400k yrs ago — seen at the very beginning of the last figure. This is interesting because that interglacial, as you say, was longer than the later ones, and in fact has a U-shaped profile — rising rapidly, tailing off alittle, then rising again to a peak before showing the characteristic rapid dropoff as the interglacial ends.
That could suggest that this interglacial may be similar — temps could, completely naturally, rise slowly (in our time perspective) again to Holocene optimum levels during the next few ~10k yrs before the next glacial occurs.
Let’s hope so. Not looking foward to the drastic temp falloff that occurs when interglacials end…
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.
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.
You are working on a couple of false premise’s here. Heh, if there are renewable EFFICIENT/COST EFFECTIVE ways of generating power, ain’t nobody gonna be against it.(except the greens) Nobody want’s to stop anybody from developing anything. What most skeptics, I believe ARE saying, is that I don’t want to pay 4 times as much for electricity and fuel to fight a bogeyman. The real tell, in this instance, is the AGW proponents constant fight against nuclear power, which, if they were serious, is the obvious answer.
The first time I saw this graph in a book touting how we are all going to die because of GLOBAL WARMING! I thought to myself:
You know, if CO2 GW is real then all we are doing is extending a very short warm period just a little. In other words, staving off the inevitable ice age for a few years. Hmmm. Can that be bad?
The problem is that the natural CO2 is constantly recycled while the human produced CO2 Just adds to what’s already there. It will eventually join the recycling pool, but for now it adds to the amount in the atmosphere (well about half of that produced does).
You make the mistake of assuming that there is some sort of Natural Balance, like the warmists assume there is some sort of Perfect Temperature. There is no apparent evidence for either position.
Bill Illis (18:26:54) : “Present” is assumed….
Ask mann et al make the graft. They do the trick better than you.
Moderator, edit it and my bad English.
CO2 is a good thing. More of it would be fantastic news for life on the planet.
Higher temperatures are a good thing. Slightly Higher temperatures would make life on this planet easier, not harder.
Unfortunately, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere does not appear to be increasing the temperature of the planet, nor are we emmitting enough yet to cause real benefits in the bioshpere.
The real issue we face is how to generate enough energy to support all of the wonderful increase of the creation, but I guess that’s why God put the Sun out there :-).
Mark (16:57:14) :
On the very last graph (at the bottom), there is a ‘ringing’ that is not seen on the other peaks. Could this be a sign of human influence?
did you not notice… there is ‘ringing’ in the trough. the line becomes smooth gradually, the further back you go. this ‘ringing’, as you called it, is possibly due to the recent records being more fine grained. it’s not a sign of human influence.
Bob
Life uses CO2 contructively, and levels have been higher in the past, but unfortunately, a heck of a lot of it gets put into ‘deep storage’ doesn’t it? Otherwise we wouldn’t have such things as coal, or soil ending up as subsoil and piling tons and tons of the stuff piling up above archaeological sites Worldwide would we?
Very true, there are massive natural processes that pull CO2 out of the air and store the C. But let’s think about this logically. CO2 is only a small portion of the air and has been that way for millions of year. Clearly if nature has massive carbon sinks it also has massive carbon emmitters. If it didn’t all the carbon would have disappeared from the air ages ago.
This hints that carbon is somehow very important to the system and both types of massive natural systems have been in rough balance for a very long time. At least in terms of human experience. Again if 500,000 years ago something wacky happened with CO2 and climate we weren’t around for it so whatever costs it imposed were born by animals and plants.
Can we improve the natural CO2 sinks? Sure but it seems like it would be very expensive to me. A project like, say, altering the DNA of 80% of the world’s trees to make them more CO2 asorbing sounds a lot more expensive and risky than cap-n-trade. But I’m no scientist so if you got a grant proposal please write it up.
I don’t worry about Ice Ages. We have had them before. If The Canadian and American grain belts goes under ice, well, there may well be super ice lakes over them which could be home to huge numbers of fish. At the same time, the Sahara and present similar regions Worldwide, might well become highly productive replacements. Africa as a whole, might return to its previous fertility.
Whose this ‘we’ that had them before? ‘We’ meaning a modern developed civilization have never had an Ice Age. You’re right that a something as big as an Ice Age probably wouldn’t mean the extinction of humanity but that is a long way from saying it wouldn’t represent a massive cost (which likewise means a massive expense would be justified to avoid it). Ditto for rapid warming.
If it didn’t all the carbon would have disappeared from the air ages ago.
Uhm, at less than Four HUNDRED parts per MILLION, it pretty well has.
Can we improve the natural CO2 sinks?
Why do the natural sinks need to be improved? What is the upward limit of the biosphere given different levels of temperature, humidity, precipitation, and CO2.
A project like, say, altering the DNA of 80% of the world’s trees to make them more CO2 asorbing sounds a lot more expensive and risky than cap-n-trade.
Before you attempt that, you might look at the suggestion above.
But I’m no scientist,
Never would have guessed.
I take exception to part of the second to last paragraph of this post.
I don’t see anything in that data or anywhere else that provides a good reason to move away from fossil fuels. We have plenty of coal, gas and oil reserves and we should use them because there is nothing as cheap and effective other than nuclear for power generation, and I’m all for that too.
Dave Smith (05:51:37) :
It is indeed easy to create your own strawmen. Like the impetus argument you make…
Also, ignoring the fact that droughts, floods, extinctions, warmth, cold, rising seas, falling seas, and so on are the normal state of the climate is somewhat disingenuous at best. Instead, the sell in politics and media is that we can avoid these things by reducing our CO2 emissions, which is totally false, yet the save the world scientists do not speak up about the fact that these events will persist. Instead when North Dakota floods because a river froze over and explosives are needed to break up the ice, we hear about how global warming causes extreme weather events. Why?
What is the ppm where C02 becomes toxic to humans?
I’m afraid that the left is showing its hand, even my own mother (God have mercy on her) believes that Norman Borlaug was a bad man because his crop engineering resulted in several billion people -not- starving to death, resulting in a ‘non-sustainable planet.’ (as if Earth did not exist in a solar system full of energy and resources). Her views come straight from NPR.
One can get the impression from the Nature Conservancy, NPR, and the uber-rich at Kobenhavn, that they desire to engineer a society of perhaps 100 million lower-caste people serving a small brahman class, in an eco-paradise. Latin America and the 3,000 year reich of the brahmans in India seem to be there inspiration.
Boonton (09:43:11) :
The real problem in an Ice Age would come from the competition for resources that are suddenly more scarce combined with nuclear weapon technology.
EricH (23:32:00) :
Brilliant article. Every journalist should read it.
Have informed BBC UK & BBC Worldwide of this article. Hope they get sucked in and report it. I won’t hold my breathe.
The (intelligent) media must be laughing their collective arses off if they read this thread.
Read my and many other’s posts.
Bill (05:21:25) :
“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
The plots in the header above are simply designed to hide the incline. They stop in the 1700s with a flattening of the rise. However, from my plot you can see that the incline starts again increasing to +2C above initial recorded temps.
Unlike CRU there is no document explaining why the incline should be hidden.
Why do the natural sinks need to be improved?
Bob asked “But what is the storage factor? Could the % recycling be made much better?”
Uhm, at less than Four HUNDRED parts per MILLION, it pretty well has.
Well yea but then so what? We know there’s massive natural carbon sinks and massive natural carbon producers, the balance out leaving around 800ppm in the air. It still hints that carbon might be important and casually moving that number around can produce dramatic consquences.
Looking at the long term temp. graph I can see quite a few possible scenaros that might be at play.
Consider this hypothesis. Suppose that on average life is a CO2 drain on the air (leaving out the actions of modern humans). This might make sense given the massive oil reserves we had which is the past carbon storage of life long ago. Say we have periodic vulcanic eruptionsof CO2. There’s your long term graph. Life draws down CO2 cooling the climate and every few dozen thousand years eruptions push the levels back up creating warming spurts.
This would make for the long term graph that skeptics seem to be talking false security in but its actually quite scarey. Why? Because it would mean we are now pushing life to be a net CO2 producer. Rather than draw down CO2 between eruption events, we are keeping it stable and adding. The eruptions will still come so the CO2 positive aspects of the natural system remain meaning we might be pushing ourselves far outside of the relatively comfortable equilibrium that’s been at play for the last half a million years or so.
What is the upward limit of the biosphere given different levels of temperature, humidity, precipitation, and CO2.
Well clearly physics would say the most CO2 you can have is 1 million parts per million. Beyond that we know CO2 will suffocate us at some point between that upper limit and the current 800 ppm. No doubt life on earth can exist at more than what we have now but that’s not really the question. We’d like life to continue to exist, of course, but we’d also like to be comfortable for people like us and our civilization. Bob’s eagerness to see half of North America covered with an ice sheet notwithstanding.
From a conservative point of view, we don’t really know the consquences of pushing CO2 ever higher. This argues for setting systems in place now to try to limit that. Should the opposite case turn out to be, that we need more CO2 to dodge natural ice ages and such it’s really easy to change course….a gallon of oil or coal not burned today doesn’t disappear. It can just as easily be burned in 2020 or 2050. Put the systems in place now, figure out what the bugs are and if it turns out the next ten years of data and research show we are in deep trouble then at least we have a head start on clamping down on CO2. If not then issue more carbon credits and we keep the system in place but loose until we are sure.
Most supporters of climate policy are not claiming the skeptics are right about the uncertainity. Considering how complex these systems are its clear this is no simple model. The problem is with skeptics claiming uncertainity merits assuming no problem and not even baby steps at a solution.
Boonton
“Whose this ‘we’ that had them before? ‘We’ meaning a modern developed civilization have never had an Ice Age. ”
Have a look at just how much of our present civilisation exists close to sea level.
Then look at the sea level change at the end of the Ice Age.
Archaeologists can’t exactly do much research at such depths even today.
So we don’t know the extent of development in the past, yet the fact that we can’t manipulate stone (e.g. massive granite chests with lids weighing tons, and which have perfect, and airtight joins) like the Ancient Egyptians, even today, are among the things that beg some pretty big questions.
“but that is a long way from saying it wouldn’t represent a massive cost (which likewise means a massive expense would be justified to avoid it). Ditto for rapid warming.”
Evolve, adapt, sieze the opportunities. Don’t waste money fighting Nature to avoid what Nature wants, work with it. I was taught this at an early age as a competition swimmer and trained lifesaver (any lifesaving tests, I went in for, and qualified with them all). Don’t fight the current. I have had to watch someone drown, while myself and others watched helpless, but tried to shout instructions what to do to live. There were two in the water, on a freezing day. One lived, one died.
It was all I could do to stop myself going in, yet I managed to stop a few others going in as well so the result was +4, and -1.
We would have had to fight our way through a strong current to try to get to those in trouble, and they were in trouble because they were fighting the current. Bear in mind I was a very strong swimmer, yet I knew, if I had gone into that water, within 200 yds, I would have been in deep trouble too.
So I watched a guy drown.
Even being +3 up, is cold comfort, I can assure you.
Similarly, we cannot justify outrageous expenditure on measures that most certainly will not avoid the inevitable, and we most definitely cannot justify interference in the Right to Life, the Right to Liberty, and the Right to Property, that accompanies this ‘pretence’ of being able to make a difference.
I don’t vote for tyranny in any guise, and tyranny is precisely what we face, in this disguise called ‘Climate Change’.
I never though I would hear this again!!!!!!!!!
rbateman (20:05:10) :
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
I thought we had finished with CO2 freezing out of the amosphere when temps fall below -78.5C!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s a larf a minute here!
@Profarmer, you failed to demonstrate how what I put forward is a false premise. I am asking, how WILL efficient/cost effective ways of generating power materialize, when we pull the plug on research toward it, and while we continue to subsidize and support non-efficient and non-renewable power?
You said “Nobody want’s to stop anybody from developing anything” yet that’s precisely the outcome of the skeptics’ efforts. The solutions to clean, efficient and renewable energy aren’t going to just fall out of the sky. What I am saying is that I don’t want to be caught paying 4 times more for gasoline and coal 40 years in the future with NO alternatives.
For my part, I have no problem with nuclear power, but we have to seriously rethink how we go about handling and processing spent fuel, i.e. recycling it more effectively, to reduce the waste and possibility of contamination as much as possible.
@David, again, my impetus argument is no strawman. It’s fact that we’ve made bad policy decisions in the past to pull the plug on pursuit of renewable alternatives, and it’s fact that we’ve made bad policy decisions in the past to subsidize non-renewable energy at the expense of alternatives. Regardless of past historic temperature trends, we need to be able to prepare for future energy needs, and this going around saying “climate change is a scam” is completely counterproductive to solving future energy needs.
I said nothing whatsoever about droughts, floods, et cetera, so it makes little sense for you to be attacking me on this. I would however point out that an instance of North Dakota flooding or freezing is not ‘global’ nor is it indicative of a trend – it is regional and is a single event, and let’s please not be myopic here and muddle the issues, as it’s even worse ‘science’ to take a single isolated event in time and geography and then attempt to extrapolate it out across the entire globe and into future decades than to depict an out-of-context “hockey stick” of historic data as is being pointed out here.
And for Nick Stokes, the point being made is that the Earth’s climate state is the ice house climate, not the interglacial climate. It also seems from past evidence that the greenhouse effect is incapable of overcoming the processes that cause icehouse.