There’s a new article at Nature News where they report on an amazing new paleoclimatology breakthrough with temperature reconstructions using clamshells. The Nature article reports on a new paper in PNAS from William Patterson at the University of Saskachewan. Here’s a short excerpt:
The study used 26 shells obtained from sediment cores taken from an Icelandic bay. Because clams typically live from two to nine years, isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in which they lived.
Patterson’s team used a robotic sampling device to shave thin slices from each layer of the shells’ growth bands. These were then fed into a mass spectrometer, which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.
Unlike counting tree rings which have varying widths due to all sorts of external influences such as rainfall, sunlight, temperatures, available nutrients, and available CO2, this method looks at the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells that vary with the temperature of the water in which they live. One simple linear relationship.
The data resolution from isotope counts is incredible.
“What we’re getting to here is palaeoweather,” Patterson says. “We can reconstruct temperatures on a sub-weekly resolution, using these techniques. For larger clams we could do daily.”
The reconstruction is shown below. We see familiar features the little ice age, the medieval warm period and the downturn which led to the extinction of Norse settlements on Greenland.
And the feature of this reconstruction to surely stick in the craw of many who think we are living in unprecedented times of warmth is the “Roman Warm Period”. Have a look:
From Nature: Shellfish could supplant tree-ring climate data
Temperature records gleaned from clamshells reveal accuracy of Norse sagas.
Richard A. Lovett
Oxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change, according to a team of scientists who studied a haul of ancient Icelandic molluscs.
Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures, says William Patterson, an isotope chemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and lead author of the study1. But molluscs grow continually, and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in which they live. The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope, oxygen-18.
The study used 26 shells obtained from sediment cores taken from an Icelandic bay. Because clams typically live from two to nine years, isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in which they lived.
Patterson’s team used a robotic sampling device to shave thin slices from each layer of the shells’ growth bands. These were then fed into a mass spectrometer, which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.
“What we’re getting to here is palaeoweather,” Patterson says. “We can reconstruct temperatures on a sub-weekly resolution, using these techniques. For larger clams we could do daily.”
It’s an important step in palaeoclimatic studies, he says, because it allows scientists to determine not only changes in average annual temperatures, but also how these changes affected individual summers and winters.
“We often make the mistake of saying that mean annual temperature is higher or lower at some period of time,” Patterson says. “But that is relatively meaningless in terms of the changes in seasonality.”
For example, in early Norse Iceland — part of the 2,000-year era spanned by the study — farmers were dependent on dairy farming and agriculture. “For a dairy culture, summer is by far the most important,” he says. “A one-degree decrease in summer temperatures in Iceland results in a 15% decrease in agricultural yield. If that happens two years in a row, your family’s wiped out.”
Technically, the molluscs record water temperatures, not air temperatures. But the two are closely linked — specially close to the shore, where most people lived. “So, when the water temperatures are up, air temperatures are up. When water temperatures are down, air temperatures are down,” Patterson says.
Read the complete article at Nature News
Leif Svalgaard is right here. There is nothing new in using oxygen isotope ratios in biogenic carbonates be they forams, clams, snails or any other mollusc. Neither is there anything new in using a micromilling technique to achieve very fine resolution. Bill Patterson has been a pioneer of micromilling biogenic carbonates and produced some very excellent work.
Similar work, if memory serves me correctly at sub monthly resolution using the quahog Arctica islandica, a benthic marine species. Check out the studies of Schoene on North Sea temperature reconstructions.
As with all studies of the 18-O partitioning between carbonate and water there are two key unknowns: (i) the temperature of growth, and (ii) the 18-O isotope composition of the water. In shallow water bays we may expect the water isotope composition to vary, albeit within narrow margins, depending on amounts of surface run-off, river inputs, ice melt etc. This places limits on the precision with which we can estimate temperature.
I haven’t read the paper yet and it’s provoking a lot of interest so I’ll go to it today and have a good look.
I do think that isotope studies offer us our best opportunity for recovering past temperatures and there are some new systems coming on stream that allow us to decouple the water isotope composition and temperature. This is a method known as clumped isotopes and pioneered at CalTech. The technique is so new that In one months time we have the first international workshop on clumped isotopes and their applications.
I’ll post my comments on the Patterson paper on my blog. I’ve been conspicuously quiet in posting due to an illness so apologise to those who may have been returning over the past month to find no new posts.
Can’t help thinking of the Walrus and the Carpenter talking about Cabages and Kings…..
Hairy clams, shaved clams….
Why can nobody keep on topic here?
What a crock. 26 from one location to suddenly show global climate shifts.
What is does prove is how readily scientists are ready to jump up and publish half-baked stuff when it comes to climate.
Come back and tell us when you have sampled 100 shells in each of 100 global locations.
CBut then perhaps this secures their future funding….
Leif said that sometimes people have to be reminded of the known unknowns.
How true. I often get a sense of deja vu when reading articles, whilst saying to myself ‘but I already know that’!
Myself and many others have posted numerous times regarding the Roman Warm Period and the MWP as well as more distant warm periods in the Bronze age and before. This was all common knowledge and very well documented before Dr Mann rewrote history. The ironic thing is that Al Gore refers to these warm periods in his 1992 book ‘Earth in the Balance’.
There is simply nothing extraordinary about our present age and it verges on the most absurd Monty Python type script when we need to use clams to demonstrate (again) what we already know.
Is there a restaurant delivery service near Manns office from where we can send him a sea food dish containing clams with our compliments?
Tonyb
If Lovelock thinks it, can the rest of the UK’s climate scientists be far behind?
***************************************************************************
HOW CARBON GASES ‘HAVE SAVED US FROM A NEW ICE AGE’
Daily Express
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/162506/How-carbon-gases-have-saved-us-from-a-new-ice-age-
Thursday March 11, 2010
By Donna Bowater
MAN-MADE carbon emissions are staving off a new ice age, says a leading environmental scientist. Climate-change expert Dr James Lovelock says the greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet are likely to prevent a big freeze that could last millions of years.
In a talk at London’s Science Museum Dr Lovelock said the balance of nature was in charge of the environment. He said: “We’re just fiddling around. It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age. If we hadn’t appeared on the earth, it would be due to go through another ice age and we can look at our part as holding that up. I hate all this business about feeling guilty about what we’re doing. We’re not guilty, we never intended to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s just something we did.”
Dr Lovelock’s comments come in the wake of the scandal at the University of East Anglia where leaked emails suggested climate change data had been manipulated. The 90-year-old British scientist, who has worked for Nasa and paved the way for the detection of man-made aerosol and refrigerant gases in the atmosphere, called for greater caution in climate research.
He compared the recent controversy to the “wildly inaccurate” early work on aerosol gases and their alleged role in depletion of the ozone layer. He said: “Quite often, observations done by hand are accurate but all the theoretical stuff in between tends to be very dodgy and I think they are seeing this with climate change. We haven’t learned the lessons of the ozone-hole debate. It’s important to know just how much you have got to be careful.” According to Dr Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the earth is capable of curing itself. “A planet that is effectively alive can regulate itself and its composition and climate,” he said.
Thomas Crowley, professor of geoscience at Edinburgh University, responded: “People have thought about the possibility of an ice age but it wouldn’t be for many thousands of years. Dr Lovelock might be right in the abstract but this does not necessarily mean that CO2 is good now.”
Another “global warming” scientist:
Who is Professor Crowley?
Professor Thomas J. Crowley BA, MS, PhD
Professor of Geosciences
Research Group: Global Change
Room: 343
Grant Institute
The King’s Buildings
West Mains Road
Edinburgh
Scotland
EH9 3JW
0131 650 5339
Email: Thomas.Crowley@ed.ac.uk
Web Page: http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/tcrowley
Research Groups: 1. Global Change (Primary) http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/research/globalchange/
Research Interests: History and modelling of past climates: effect of climate change on the biosphere; past carbon cycle variations; utilisation of palaeoclimae data to validate climate models and as a reference scale for future climate change projections; Pleistocene oceanography; palaeo-ocean modeling; decadal-centennial scale climate variability; climate projections for nuclear waste disposal sites; climate change in Texas and the Gulf Coast; effect of sea level rise on coastal processes.
Further Information: Personal Home Page http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/tcrowley
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/people/person.html?indv=1612
Nature is a clearing house for political science. They offer full editorial access for fraudulent climate alarmists. Can anyone recommend a science magazine that checks it’s facts and has a healthy scepticism ? It is time to write off these alarmist MS propaganda media.
Right, I think that’s what’s needed. It would be tedious, but it shouldn’t be terribly expensive.
The whole study sounds very interesting if it can be broadened enough to make worldwide judgments.
If Patterson used mussels from ancient docks, would this qualify as “pier” reviewed work? Just wondering.
@jorge (22:00:13) :
————————————————————
Frederick Michael (20:56:48) : “I’m sure Michael Mann can show how this is all just oil funded research. One of the oil companies is even named “Shell.” See?”
————————————————————
From: “Mick Kelly”
To: m.hulme@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, t.oriordan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Shell International
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 13:05:29 +0100
Reply-to: m.kelly@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
“Mike and Tim
Notes from the meeting with Shell International attached.
Sorry about the delay.
I suspect that the climate change team in Shell International is probably
the best route through to funding from elsewhere in the organisation
including the foundation as they seem to have good access to the top
levels.
Mick”
http://www.climate-gate.org/email.php?eid=185&s=kwshell
Search Results:”shell”:
http://www.climate-gate.org/search.php?keyword=shell&submit=Search
The reason tree rings are attractive is that each tree lives much longer than the typical clam. It will be very helpful of giant clamshells can be located. Is there some way that ground-penetrating radar can be used on the seafloor to detect such large shells?
oops — “if”, not “of”.
Leif Svalgaard (19:29:49) :
So there should be lots of data in old papers to extend this?
Okay, I’ve got to be equally skeptical with this report as with Mann/Jones/et al. They got all this from 26 shells? 26? You’ve got to be kidding me. And they’re trying to project GLOBAL temps using specimens taken from a single geographic locale? I think the science of determining the LOCAL temperature is better than than the tree ring data but I can’t give this any more credence at this stage than I gave to Briffa’s tree rings.
I’m worried about that Roman Warm Period. Didnt the Roman Empire collapse?
Lief Svalgaard
G.L. Alston (21:58:18)
It seems indeed there is “nothing new under the sun” – here’s a nice one from 1966
Australian Tertiary paleotemperatures, FH Dorman – The Journal of Geology, 1966
http://www.jstor.org/pss/30075176
Most previous O16-18 papers using clams looked at salinity and river flow-rates but this one also reconstructed past climate.
All of this is quite interesting and will hopefully help more correctly establish temperature histories. Nevertheless, I like my clams in a good New England-style chowder.
Why the picture of Mann? If it is old hat Mann could have used it if he had wanted to, instead of tree rings. The tree rings are far better and more reliable for reverse science – to get support for the pc results
pat (18:46:06)
“the revelation that the CRU emails were known to Paul Hudson, the BBC climate correspondent one month before the story broke ”
I think this has been covered many times before, and that Paul Hudson received a single email that contained a few other quoted emails, but not the entire Climategate emails.
On 11 Oct 2009 there was a flurry of emails about Paul Hudson “BBC has significant influence on public opinion outside the US. Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?” from these people:
Stephen H Schneider 11 Oct 2009
Kevin Trenberth 12 Oct 2009
Michael Mann 12 Oct 2009
Tom Wigley 14 Oct 2009
Kevin Trenberth 14 Oct 2009
Michael Mann 14 Oct 2009
Michael Mann 14 Oct 2009
Tom Wigley 14 Oct 2009
Tom Wigley 14 Oct 2009
Gavin Schmidt 14 Oct 2009
A couple people have complained about the study making broad generalizations, viz:
Actually, what this proves is how readily people are ready to jump up and make half baked claims when they haven’t read the paper. It says nothing about the global climate. The word “global” doesn’t appear anywhere in the paper. In their own words, what they are doing is “demonstrating the impact of seasonal climatic extremes on the establishment, development, and, in some cases, collapse of societies in the North Atlantic.” Nothing global in the slightest.
Another verse to add to the climategate song that did the rounds on the internet.
Picking clams one at a time,
Shaving them and slicing fine,
measuring the years in their lines
temperature’s fine…
:Chorus:
Clambakegate,
you know the clams just taste so great,
Would be better with some wine,
But the temperature’s fine…
We found the decline…..
There are literally hundreds of studies showing the MWP, the LIA and not a few the Roman Warm Period as well. All those proxies tell much the same story: MWP as warm or warmer than today; Roman Warm period, warmer still. Only the tree-proxy results beloved of Mann and Briffa show a different picture, and more so when cherrypicked and improperly analyzed. My view based on that is that Mann’s results are a heap of junk. They can’t even get correlation between surface temperatures and the tree proxies within living memory (the ‘divergence’ problem), and that is the final nail in the coffin.
Considering that tree-proxies are clearly the outliers in the data, one needs to ask why such unreliable data and methods would be used to adorn the IPCC report and become the poster boy of the AGW brigade. Clearly this is manipulation of the worst kind. I think the only fit response to anyone who insists that tree proxies should be used for paleoclimatology should be ridicule.
The methodology is nothing new. There are a range of other studies on clams that live longer that are already out there, try this one, or this one (from 1993).
Arctica islandica is long lived. The one in the study above is 374, and I recall that there was one aged 600…..
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram: “The Roman Warm Period did not exist because Wikipedia felt fit to delete a well resourced article on it.”
The really dim-wit thing about the idiots who edit climate articles on Wikipedia, is that they really can’t see that the public are less likely to swallow their BS if they remove every piece of evidence contrary to their view. Most sceptical editors want nothing to do with articles that are so POV and perhaps have realised that the best way to let the public know how much this is all propaganda dressed as science, is to let them fill wikipedia as much as they like with their propaganda and hope the public can read between the lies.
Rather odd that this particular paper hasn’t raised much interest within the WUWT community. Temperature reconstructions using clamshells may become the primary method in coming years considering the level of data resolution it offers. I am no scientist but it seems to me we are looking at Hubble Space Telescope of paleoclimatology. I wonder whether the technique may be expanded further to other shell types, even if theoretically. Is it possible to reconstruct temperatures from other shell creatures lakes and rivers further inland? Will it be possible to one day to take snapshot of global climate in particular periods using shell re-constructions from all around the world?
Leif Svelgard says that this is “old hat”. Well, that may be so for some scientific specialists but it is fairly fresh news for the rest of us. I note that Dr. Svelgard gave the link to the basic science behind the technique. What makes this particular paper unique is that it not only demonstrates a new line of evidence for past climate but it matches climatic variations with the anecdotal evidence with great precision as well. The paper validates the events depicted in Norse Sagas but more so it verifies the reliability of the technique used to identify the periods in which the events took place. One may see the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in tree rings as well but it seems not at the same zoom range and focus as clamshells. This looks like a new hat.
There are two other interesting bits in the paper. The first one is that it doesn’t shy away from declaring “reconstructed water temperatures for the Roman Warm Period in Iceland are higher than any temperatures recorded in modern times.” While the current debate is whether the MWP was warmer than the modern times, the new paper claims that the Roman period was even warmer than both the Medieval and the modern era. The second, temperature reconstruction from clamshells extend only to late 18th Century. Why they did not extend the study to the 19th and 20th Centuries and/or whether there will be a fresh paper covering the modern period are questions that perhaps ought to be asked to the authors of the paper.
Now, with the business end of my comment is over, I’d like to express my LOLs to yet another witty ‘re-construction’ of that famous Mann photo. While many other commenters also tried their hands at clam jokes, Doctor Zoidberg tried his claws: On Earth, you enjoy eating a tasty clam. On my planet, clams enjoy eating a tasty you.”