From UCSB News: (h/t to David Schnare) UCSB Geologist Discovers Pattern in Earth’s Long-Term Climate Record
| Lorraine Lisiecki |
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(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– In an analysis of the past 1.2 million years, UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki discovered a pattern that connects the regular changes of the Earth’s orbital cycle to changes in the Earth’s climate. The finding is reported in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
Lisiecki performed her analysis of climate by examining ocean sediment cores. These cores come from 57 locations around the world. By analyzing sediments, scientists are able to chart the Earth’s climate for millions of years in the past. Lisiecki’s contribution is the linking of the climate record to the history of the Earth’s orbit.
It is known that the Earth’s orbit around the sun changes shape every 100,000 years. The orbit becomes either more round or more elliptical at these intervals. The shape of the orbit is known as its “eccentricity.” A related aspect is the 41,000-year cycle in the tilt of the Earth’s axis.
Glaciation of the Earth also occurs every 100,000 years. Lisiecki found that the timing of changes in climate and eccentricity coincided. “The clear correlation between the timing of the change in orbit and the change in the Earth’s climate is strong evidence of a link between the two,” said Lisiecki. “It is unlikely that these events would not be related to one another.”
Besides finding a link between change in the shape of the orbit and the onset of glaciation, Lisiecki found a surprising correlation. She discovered that the largest glacial cycles occurred during the weakest changes in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit –– and vice versa. She found that the stronger changes in the Earth’s orbit correlated to weaker changes in climate. “This may mean that the Earth’s climate has internal instability in addition to sensitivity to changes in the orbit,” said Lisiecki.
She concludes that the pattern of climate change over the past million years likely involves complicated interactions between different parts of the climate system, as well as three different orbital systems. The first two orbital systems are the orbit’s eccentricity, and tilt. The third is “precession,” or a change in the orientation of the rotation axis.
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The behavior is being described as being stable in both extra-warm and extra-cool situations, but unstable when not in either situation. That suggests that there are strong feedbacks for both warm and cool situations, as if cold encourages warming and hot encourages cooling.
When the extreme conditions do not exist, the temperature can wander… and as has been pointed out, a few localized cool summers can start an ice age so an unstable situation may be sufficient to set up the situation to try for a few thousand summers to hit a group of cool summers.
Anthony, I think you should have mentioned the great Milutin Milanković, the developer of the cycles you display in the opening graph. It would be interesting if Lorraine references the paper by, J. Imbrie, J. D. Hays, D. G. Martinson, A. McIntyre, A. C. Mix, J. J. Morley, N. G. Pisias, W. L. Prell, and N. J. Shackleton – “The orbital theory of Pleistocene climate: Support from a revised chronology of the marine δ18O record”, in Milankovich and Climate, Part 1, pages269–305. D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984.
Not having read Lorraine’s paper, I decline to comment if she is just confirming previous research or has come to differering conclusions.
REPLY: I don’t always have time to add details. Given how busy I was today with my daytime business I’ll just skip it next time rather than have a bunch of people rant later about what I should and should not have done. Since as is typical of colleges, they don’t actually include the paper (gasp! and violate the sanctity of the journal?) we are left to guess.
It’s a crappy way to send out press releases. -A
Klausb (13:10:45) :
a preprint is here:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo828.html
That’s not a “preprint”, that’s an abstract.
A pre-print is the entire paper, usually in PDF form, kept by the scientist before some journal assumes all ownership of the finished product.
Here’s an example preprint – they sometimes have bad editing, etc:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0911/0911.3817v1.pdf
It’s usually easier to get a web copy of a paper after a few years:
http://lorraine-lisiecki.com/LisieckiRaymo2007.pdf
Plio–Pleistocene climate evolution: trends and transitions in glacial cycle dynamics
Lorraine E. Lisiecki, Maureen E. Raymo
The fact that so many papers are behind a paywall is a real hindrance to the public trying to follow the science, but that’s another topic.
Sorry Anthony, I didn’t mean to criticize (which I wasn’t). I know you are more aware of the science of climatology than I and also a very busy man. So keep up the good work for those of us who believe that unbiased opinion in science should prevail without censorship and political interference.
REPLY: Apology also, I was brusque. I’m a bit testy today, I’m dealing with an internet stalker, a 50 year old eco-adolescent that has been harassing me. – A
I just read an interesting post on California’s Climate. In a dead simple way he was showing warming entirely because of cities, using NASA’s surface data. I think it’s worth a look:
http://www.excelhero.com/blog/2010/04/california-climate.html
Gail Combs (19:33:03) :
…..and more importantly bringing this theory back in front of the mass media’s attention.
I didn’t see this study anywhere on tv. I do see something about Tiger woods, something about not using nuclear bombs, something about the Tea Party, …….mmmmm, but nope, no science.
REPLY: Apology also, I was brusque. I’m a bit testy today, I’m dealing with an internet stalker, a 50 year old eco-adolescent that has been harassing me. – A
I’m sure the guy has no life and nothing else to do. Don’t let him feel like he’s accomplishing anything. Let him continue going down with his global warming ship, unable to pull someone else down with him.
StarBP (19:33:39) :
“the stronger changes in the Earth’s orbit correlated to weaker changes in climate.”
Uh oh… I guess that means the weaker orbital changes correlated to stronger climate changes? Take another look at that graph… look at the left side (the present). The earth’s orbit just had one of the weakest eccentricity spikes on record (spikes in eccentricity often precede glaciation). The gun is cocked… and I happen to have a theory as to what kind of rare event pulls the trigger…
The way I look at the graph weak eccentricity spikes were also at approximately 400k and 800k years ago but the last Y catastrophic eruption was around 640k years ago. That was during a pretty strong eccentricity spike. Don’t see a correlation to worry about there, in my opinion.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/about/faq/faqhistory.php#oftenerupt
What I’d really like to know is how much mass there really is to the Taurids Complex debris streams? If there was a large enough object elliptically orbiting within the inner solar system between the Sun and Jupiter to possibly change the orbit of Earth before it was pulled apart by those heavy hands? The same gravitational forces shaping the debris into a tubular shaped stream disc, as well as several dense core streams, or ‘belts’, within the disc?
Something wiped out the Clovis people and the mega-mammals and caused the Younger/Dryas period.
Southern Taurids
http://star.arm.ac.uk/~aac/TCSTau.png
Northern Taurids
http://star.arm.ac.uk/~aac/TCNTau.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Taurids
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1998MNRAS.297…23A&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1993MNRAS.264…93A&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1987MNRAS.225P..55C&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1984MNRAS.211..953C&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES
RockyRoad (19:38:05) :
“But your answer is wrong and illogical.”
Nope, scienceofdoom is correct, perhaps the way I put it in my 16:47:58 comment is simpler for you.
REPLY: Apology also, I was brusque. I’m a bit testy today, I’m dealing with an internet stalker, a 50 year old eco-adolescent that has been harassing me. – A
Happy to help out if you need assistance on tracing, blocking etc.
Cheers
Mark.
May I extend a hearty thanks to Ms Lisiecki for responding to comments on this thread; welcome aboard.
I’d also like to take the chance to say that this article seems to have raised a large quantity of invective (unwarranted in my opinion) by certain posters, who can’t seem to be “arsed” to do a little background reading first.
Valid criticism is the cornerstone of good scientific debate, however, in this case it feels like the knives are out; seriously folks we can do better than this here. Let’s not descend to the level of other blogs shall we?
Cheers,
Mark
Lorraine Lisiecki (19:31:31) :
Thank you for participating in the comments.
Your paper adds to an old question common to all papers which rely upon measurements of the isotopic fractions. To what extent do new sources of the isotopic fractions have a confounding effect upon measurements of the distributions of existing isotopic fractions? For example, how much of an effect does submarine and terrestrial vulcanism and its emissions of new isotopic fractions have upon the measurements of isotopic fractions resulting from climate and biological processes?
Do core sites located in the vicinity of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge such as 607, 664, and GeoB1312 have sediments indicating a discernable effect from contemporaneous vulcanism upon their isotopic fractions?
RockyRoad :
On your point, I agree. If you read what I wrote, rather than imagining what I wrote you would see this.
I agree.
Here’s where you need to read what I actually wrote, rather than what you think I wrote.
For people interested in the subject, CO2 is released from the ocean when it heats (all other things being equal).
This particular piece of information tells us nothing about whether or not CO2 itself can have an effect on temperature. This 2nd piece of information is independent of the 1st piece of information.
The 1st piece of information tells us that as the ocean heats up CO2 will be released. Other properties of CO2 are still unknown as a result of knowing only this piece of information.
Is it therefore impossible that CO2 itself can have a warming effect? We cannot know from the 1st piece of information.
Is it illogical to believe two separate pieces of information about a substance?
A gas can be moved from one place (the ocean) to another (the atmosphere) as a result of warming of the ocean. And this same gas, if increased in the atmosphere, can also cause warming? Automatically impossible?
I believe many people come to this blog to learn. Hopefully most people can understand this simple and important point.
And I realize I have not demonstrated from these words that CO2 can be a warming agent – simply opened the possibility that CO2 could be both a consequence of warming and, when increased, a cause of warming.
You can see more at CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas?
So here is a paper. Now, don’t we apply what has been learned over the years at wuwt and climate audit and others:
-is data archived and available? (raw and “refined”)
-are methods explained? (suficient for replication)
-what statistical methods used? (standard techniques or mannian-like or possibly laddy-like in this case)
-are conclusions supported by the evidence
-what are the physical mechanisms linking climate to these specific climate proxies?
-is all data included in the study or convenient data?
-how are the several proxies combined into a time series?
-once a proxie time series is calculated, what time series does one choose to compare this to? isn’t the “target” time series itself a composite of data from elsewhere (that is, other data crunched to someones’ satisfaction into a temperature time series)?
I think that if empirical data can be shown to correlate with mathematically derived orbital characteristics, then we might have gained some knowledge. Because i am not an expert, it seems like we have a new set of geophysical data that is shown to be consistent with other (previeous) geophysical data.
As with the atmospheric system and climate so goes the geosystem and earthquakes. Earthquakes appear to vary cyclically in number and intensity entirely without human assistance unless…co2 dooed it.
scienceofdoom (16:46:39) :
Therefore CO2 increases can be a cause of temperature rise and a result of temperature rise.
Now you just have to explain the correlation between increasing CO2 and decreasing temperatures.
During our previous plunges into the deep-freeze, CO2 continued to climb, and, after about 800 years, reversed and tracked downward. If increased CO2 *caused* the temperature rise, why wouldn’t it prevent — or at least slow — the temperature drop?
Bill Tuttle,
who’s to say it didn’t? Perhaps the precipitous temperature drop was slowed a little by CO2? We don’t have an alternative CO2-free scenario to compare with.
Besides, I don’t think there’s any contradiction, all that happens is the original solar forcing at the start of the ice age is amplified by albedo changes and all the other standard positive feedbacks, and CO2 is powerless to stop this.
On the geological timescale, atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature are typically anti-correlated with divergent trends.
The recent glaciations were caused exclusively by the various Milankovitch cycles.
Case closed!!
Well, I have a problem with that.
The main change in eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit of about 100 000 years is a weak effect. It is a weak forcing and should not be a main driver for the glaciations.
Also, the rapid warming into interglacial like the Holocene is not fully explained by these cycles.
No, I’m not saying that the Milankovitch cycles do not exist, just that that explanation from them to fully explain glaciations is weak.
I don’t know if you have seen this, but there is a curious visual similarity between changes in solar flux after a solar flare and changes in the temperature, as measured from the Vostok ice cores, when an interglacial starts and when the temperature returns to the next glaciations.
We have first a large spike and then a gradual drop with several smaller upwards spikes. This does not sound to me to be caused by several sinusoidal smooth cycles.
So what could cause such climate variability? One such possible cause is of course the Sun.
I have tried to look for proxies of the solar activity.
Eventually I found it in this article.
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0010/001065/106523E.pdf
On figure 2 there is a recording of Be10 from Vostok Antarctica.
In this paper they use the Be10 concentrations as a measure of snow accumulation in the ice core assuming that the Be10 concentrations are constant.
I don’t know if this is correct and that they can use other measure to correlate with timescale and link this correlation to precipitation. Can the proxy be used to measure solar activity? The Be10 half time is about 1 million years. How much is accumulated in snow.
I don’t think it is strait forward to assume that the Be10 concentration is directly related to precipitation. Be is an ion which I think quickly is being washed out of the atmosphere.
What do you think?
I do think there are reasons to look more closely at the Sun for some of the explanations for the ice ages. Here is one other article I found
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/19866
I happen to be a believer in the barycentric influence on solar activity.
I write about it here, not to have a debate about it, but to explain a possible other explanation between the 100 000 year orbital Milankovitch Cycle and the climate.
This effect on the Earth is caused by variations of the orbit of the large gas planets.
This also effects the Sun and its barycentric movements.
I have ideas how this effect could directly affect the solar activity, possible causing the solar activity to enter prolonged periods of solar inactivity during glaciations.
@ur momisugly scienceofdoom, RockyRoad, Bill Tuttle, et al.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I can tell it appears that the onset of glaciation occurs much more rapidly and dramatically than the onset of warming. The temperature lines going down are steep and pretty straight, the lines going up tend to have several little peaks, and the warming intervals are much longer than the cooling ones.
So if CO2 (or any other factor) were to contribute to warming after released (the 800 year lag), should I not expect that the positive feedback would lead to a steeper, straighter curve for the warming? And should I not expect to see a slower decline during cooling? Since this appears to be the opposite of the observed temperature cycles, would the more appropriate conclusion not be that to the extent there is overall feedback in the system it tends to be negative, i.e. whatever initially causes things to start getting cold seems to trigger feedback in the system that accentuates the cooling, and whatever causes the warming to begin seems to trigger feedback that slows it down and can even temporarily reverse it?
Which does not demonstrate that CO2 does not have the effect that scienceofdoom claims, but that at the system level it would certainly seem to tell me that there are much bigger fish to fry, and that all of this focus on CO2 is really diverting attention from more worthwhile lines of inquiry.
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7 04 2010
scienceofdoom (02:58:08) :
RockyRoad :
It wasn’t the rise of CO2 that caused the heating (since it trailed the heating), and it wasn’t the fall of CO2 that caused the cooling (since it trailed the cooling).
On your point, I agree. If you read what I wrote, rather than imagining what I wrote you would see this.
it cannot be invoked as causing either the rise or fall of the temperature change.
I agree.
But I’ll allow that you did get one thing right: the influence of the TEMPERATURE on the CONCENTRATION of the gas CO2 (and NOT the other way around). You correctly pointed out that a warmer temperature regime caused more CO2 to be in the atmosphere; conversely, that a cooler temperature regime caused there to be less CO2 to be in the atmosphere. What is NOT correct is that more CO2 caused a warmer climate; converselely, that less CO2 caused a cooler climate.
You have provided the proof and logic that has destroyed your own theory.
Here’s where you need to read what I actually wrote, rather than what you think I wrote.
For people interested in the subject, CO2 is released from the ocean when it heats (all other things being equal).
This particular piece of information tells us nothing about whether or not CO2 itself can have an effect on temperature. This 2nd piece of information is independent of the 1st piece of information.
The 1st piece of information tells us that as the ocean heats up CO2 will be released. Other properties of CO2 are still unknown as a result of knowing only this piece of information.
Is it therefore impossible that CO2 itself can have a warming effect? We cannot know from the 1st piece of information.
Is it illogical to believe two separate pieces of information about a substance?
A gas can be moved from one place (the ocean) to another (the atmosphere) as a result of warming of the ocean. And this same gas, if increased in the atmosphere, can also cause warming? Automatically impossible?
I believe many people come to this blog to learn. Hopefully most people can understand this simple and important point.
And I realize I have not demonstrated from these words that CO2 can be a warming agent – simply opened the possibility that CO2 could be both a consequence of warming and, when increased, a cause of warming.
You can see more at CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas?
*******
Scienceofdoom (BTW, your website is excellent), here’s the rub concerning CO2 lag in ice-cores. Going by standard GHG theory, the change in CO2 (oscillating between 180 to 280 ppm) should have shown some effect on the temp curves, both during the interglacial warm-up & the subsequent cool-down. But it doesn’t. The temp curve seems completely independent of the CO2 (OTOH, the CO2 shows definite dependence on the temp). The slope of temp doesn’t change a bit during the CO2 rise, and then even makes a complete reversal while CO2 is still rising! Again, as CO2 starts to fall at the end of the interglacial (after a ~1000 yr lag), no apparent effect on the temp slope.
A graph comparing the derivatives dTemperature/dtime and dCO2/dtime should show this non-correlation.
I can’t say this “proves” that CO2 causes no warming, but it’s pretty obvious that its effect is practically negligible compared to whatever effect(s) are actually causing glacial-period changes.
Paul:
I think you can look no further than the enormous heat capacity and latent heat of crystallization of water. It takes a huge amount of heat to melt ice compared to the also large heat to evaporate water. Inertial dampening effect of H2O. Add that effect to the huge thermal sink of the deep oceans and I can see why cooling is so dramatically fast compared to heating.
Paul,
I think the sharp decline into an ice age is because it doesn’t take a thick layer of ice and snow to vastly increase albedo. As ice sheets and snow cover grow over a period of only decades to centuries, the global temperature drops quickly due to this feedback.
Then, during the ice age, the ice sheets grow large and thick. So when conditions become condusive for warming again, it takes a long time to melt all that ice.
FYI – Milankovitch Cycles: History and Projection Graphic
(source Wikipedia – caveat emptor)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/MilankovitchCyclesOrbitandCores.png
Uh, nobody knows about the size of this thing that was running around in the inner solar system up to maybe 20,000 years ago?
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/seri/MNRAS/0251/0000636.000.html
http://star.arm.ac.uk/~aac/zetataur.html
Leif?