All these things happened before CO2, AGW, and worldwide worry wartism, and yet someday, somehow, we are warned, it will be worse, except that it isn’t likely. That and this zinger: “Climate models have yet to simulate the full scope of the event.” Well, of course, how can you simulate such an event with such spotty paleo data anyway? And then the author says:
“There’s much less ice left to collapse into the North Atlantic now,” Stager says, “so I’d be surprised if it could all happen again–at least on such a huge scale.”
So why did you lead with this?
How severe can climate change become in a warming world?
Worse than anything we’ve seen in written history, according to results of a study appearing this week in the journal Science.
At least they didn’t claim that the ancient megadrought was somehow “teleconnected” to our current CO2 level through time. That’s probably the next big breakthrough.
Extreme megadrought in Afro-Asian region likely had consequences for Paleolithic cultures
A boat on Lake Tanganyika today; the lake’s ancient surface water level fell dramatically. |
From the National Science Foundation
How severe can climate change become in a warming world?
Worse than anything we’ve seen in written history, according to results of a study appearing this week in the journal Science.
An international team of scientists led by Curt Stager of Paul Smith’s College, New York, has compiled four dozen paleoclimate records from sediment cores in Lake Tanganyika and other locations in Africa.
The records show that one of the most widespread and intense droughts of the last 50,000 years or more struck Africa and Southern Asia 17,000 to 16,000 years ago.
Between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago, large amounts of ice and meltwater entered the North Atlantic Ocean, causing regional cooling but also major drought in the tropics, says Paul Filmer, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research along with NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences and its Division of Ocean Sciences.
“The height of this time period coincided with one of the most extreme megadroughts of the last 50,000 years in the Afro-Asian monsoon region with potentially serious consequences for the Paleolithic humans that lived there at the time,” says Filmer.
The “H1 megadrought,” as it’s known, was one of the most severe climate trials ever faced by anatomically modern humans.
Africa’s Lake Victoria, now the world’s largest tropical lake, dried out, as did Lake Tana in Ethiopia, and Lake Van in Turkey.
The Nile, Congo and other major rivers shriveled, and Asian summer monsoons weakened or failed from China to the Mediterranean, meaning the monsoon season carried little or no rainwater.
What caused the megadrought remains a mystery, but its timing suggests a link to Heinrich Event 1 (or “H1”), a massive surge of icebergs and meltwater into the North Atlantic at the close of the last ice age.
Previous studies had implicated southward drift of the tropical rain belt as a localized cause, but the broad geographic coverage in this study paints a more nuanced picture.
“If southward drift were the only cause,” says Stager, lead author of the Science paper, “we’d have found evidence of wetting farther south. But the megadrought hit equatorial and southeastern Africa as well, so the rain belt didn’t just move–it also weakened.”
Climate models have yet to simulate the full scope of the event.
The lack of a complete explanation opens the question of whether an extreme megadrought could strike again as the world warms and de-ices further.
“There’s much less ice left to collapse into the North Atlantic now,” Stager says, “so I’d be surprised if it could all happen again–at least on such a huge scale.”
Given what such a catastrophic megadrought could do to today’s most densely populated regions of the globe, Stager hopes he’s right.
Stager also holds an adjunct position at the Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Orono.
Co-authors of the paper are David Ryves of Loughborough University in the United Kingdom; Brian Chase of the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier in France and the Department of Archaeology, University of Bergen, Norway; and Francesco Pausata of the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, Norway.
-NSF-
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Silly warmists should read this litte piece written some years ago before the heavy warmist machine really kicked in…….
http://ccb.colorado.edu/ijas/ijasno2/georgis.html
Pay particular attention to the cronology table.
It must have been caused by all the CO2 released 16,000 to 17,000 years ago by humans burning coal to power their cities. Clearly it is not possible for such dramatic climate change to have natural causes. The IPCC and all the leading climate scientists agree that if they cannot explain climate change, then the only alternative left is that it must be caused by human activity.
They make this claim in the current IPCC report. 400 years ago the scientists of the day blamed climate change on witches, and they burned the witches and eventually this helped heat the earth and the LIA ended. Of course today we know that the real cause is the CO2 pollution from cars, so the solution will be for everyone to stop using oil and make their cars wind driven.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_sailing
So ice cap collapse drops tropical sea surface temps by a few degrees inhibiting evaporation?
Too simple?
This requires an ice age to kick it off. Pardon me if I put it fairly low down in my list of worries. Did they happen to mention the time when the Sahara was green? Perhaps there is a wide range of climate which we could consider natural?
I despair, I truly do.
This is science a la James Cameron. We had a saying in Yorkshire when I was growing up .. . .
“if my uncle had tits he’s be my aunt” . . .
If this if that, so what.
Dam see what happens if you have a large population of very big grass eating animals passing large amounts of methane, a very AGW type gas (sarc).
Wonder who paid for the study, no wonder the USA is broke.
keep smiling chaps, I love this nonsense adds to the cackle factor.
Looking at Chicken entrails. period, throw some tea leaves in there, too.
We have no idea even today…
All that CO2 from mastodon flatulence had a major impact on late ice age climate.
Right!
Simultaneous translation: “warming leads to cooling”.
We can’t win. We’re hooped either way.
Bold is mine.
If you want to be a scientist these days, you have to be more pedantic.
/kidding.
Strange to think that our ancestors had gas guzzling SUV’s all those years ago. Shame that they must of all rusted away to dust and destroyed the evidence.
I think the explanation they are pushing is just too simple.
“Worse than anything we’ve seen in written history.” Again, let’s only go back a blink in time in order to make outlandish statements.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed… Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top. Someone or… something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks . . are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be…”
… Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, so awful.”
— from Orson Welles’ radio version of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the first time technology was used to convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition, with the effect of creating a nation-wide panic.
Personally, I think this kind of thing ought to be against the law. The editors of the journal Science ought to be rounded up and thrown in jail. I’m for free speech and all that, but shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is not acceptable.
Megadrought my a**. Conflating the beginning of the Holocene with it’s end. Panic and doomsaying. Hysterical alarmist Chicken Little-ism. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they are not, and so they ought to be incarcerated for attempting to raise a mass panic. Lock them in a hole, feed them bread and water, and let them contemplate their navels for a few years. That will fix the problem.
The “worst thing we’ve seen in written history” would be a new ice age.
Seems to be a Megadrought meme running around out there.
From the AP story linked above:
Followed by…
So we’ll compare geologic timescale warm-periods to a 30-year span of warming and call them equivalent.
Remember Clara Peller’s line “Where’s the beef?”
Many of these recent papers remind me of that. Truth be told, there is a bit of interesting research being presented in this paper, and a good deal of modern technology supporting it. Nevertheless, by wrapping it in balderdash and forcing the reader to search for the insight, the “beef” may not be found. I wish they wouldn’t do that.
ferd berple says:
February 25, 2011 at 8:17 am
. . . blamed climate change on witches, and they burned the witches . . .
Interesting connection you point to. Anyone not familiar with the fungus that can form on rye grain in cool damp weather should investigate. For a start, look at this:
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1037.htm
Like all Climate Psyentists, they have to continually try to fit the Warmist narrative with whatever facts they find. As usual, they have things completely backwards. What they’re describing are in fact Ice Age conditions, where mega-droughts and deserts were the norm, sea levels were 400 feet below today’s, and lakes and rivers dry up.
Their effort to link those conditions to a warming world can only be described as pathetic.
Bruce Cobb, I was just about to write the same. It’s really unbelievable how often the alarmists try to use the dry and unstable climate during glaciations (or in this case, in the turbulent period at the end of an glaciation) to draw conclusions about a possibly warmer climate in the future. They even use it to argue for high climate sensitivity, when it’s obvious that climate is much less sensitive during interglacials than during glaciations (the idea of a constant, temperature-independent sensitivity is ridiculous in the first place, but I won’t try to elaborate on that now).
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg – it must have been pretty dry a couple of thousand years earlier, around 20000 years ago, when CO2 and temperatures were at their lowest – and dust peaked.
And now you understand why I dropped my membership in the AAAS. It now stands for And Anything [snip] Say. (Save ya the trouble moderator, and thanks for your efforts.)
Of course there was a megadrought in Northern Africa and surrounding regions beginning as the Ice Age began the shift toward an Interglacial. It was not caused by any discharge of ice dammed lakes such as Glacial Lake Agassiz in North America.
During an Ice Age the polar zone of climate expands toward the Equator. All other climate zones are squeezed or moderated in some way. The most dramatic change is in the desert zone which lies approximately between 15 and 30° of latitude. Here the change is between arid, as now and called an Interpluvial, and wet as it was during the Ice Age and called a Pluvial, after the Latin word for rain.
The current desert zone is created by downward flow of air on the poleward side of the Hadley Cell. Moisture that is evaporated at the Equator either falls back as tropical rain or is transported to the middle and high latitudes. It carries the latent heat energy with it and is the major transport mechanisms of heat energy offsetting the energy imbalance between the Equator and Poles.
During the Ice Age most of that moisture falls between 15 and 30° thus making the region wetter and able to sustain grasses and trees, but reducing energy transfer to the middle and high latitudes. This acts as a positive feedback to the continuance of the Ice Age. It couples with other positive feedbacks such as the massive albedo change with extended snow and ice cover and the wind pattern shifts such as the massive katabatic flow from the ice sheets. This pattern is only broken by a shift in the external forcing mechanisms of the SUn/Earth relationships and solar output.
Lakes also form in the Pluvial of which the remnants remain in the forms of Lake Chad in Africa and Lake Eyre in Australia. Vast aquifers were also formed under the deserts such as the massive ones under the Sahara.
During the panic over the Sahelian drought back in the 1980s governments planned to offset the trend of Lake Chad drying up. For example, there was a UN proposal to divert water from the Congo River through the Central African Republic to recharge the lake.
Ironically, Khadaffi in Libya put in place massive pumps to extract water from the aquifers to ‘green’ the desert. A reporter pointed out the water placed there during the Ice Age was not being replaced (an extremely slow recharge rate) and at the rate he was pumping it would be gone in 30 years. His response – So will I. He is still hanging on – barely.
It was caused by the residents of Atlantis, who had the misfortune of building their civilization below the current sea level.
There is a famous Monty Python skit were two men try to outdo each other on who had the worst hardships in their childhoods. It make me think of climate scientists who feel compelling to ratchet up disaster meter in order to outdo each other.
The Law of Unintended Consequences say that the more outlandish these predicted disasters are, the more people will turn away from the whole comedy show that is now passed off as climate science. Let these climate clowns spew their disaster jokes, the crazier the better because it helps support the skeptics’ position more than harms it.
“Worse than anything we’ve seen in written history”
And precisely how far back does written history go? 5000 years or so.
My extremely complex and impressive climate model clearly shows that the massive amount of CO2 from man’s burning of fossil fuels has caused a chronoton rift formed high in the atmosphere during the extreme temperatures of 1998. This spatial anomaly is polarized such that only anthropogenic CO2 is attracted to and can cross the barrier. A percentage of anthropogenic greenhouse gas is thus being transferred back in time to approximately 18,000 years ago. This is why there was the vast increase in ice melt and an ending of the ice age, AND why our present day warming rate has unexpectedly slowed (although it hasn’t stopped) since 1998. If this were occurring, things would certainly be far worse than they already are – but the transfer isn’t sufficient to save us from catastrophic global warming within the next 50 to 100 years. Meanwhile, should that rift close, there will be 6 billion climate disruption/weirding refugee’s by 2020. Maybe 2030. Then where will we all be? Clearly we cannot cope with disaster of that magnitude.
There. See. It all makes sense now. We’re not only utterly ruining our own future, but we caused the greatest natural disaster within known human history also. Both the paleodata and computer models prove it. Oh, the horror.
/illogic&unreality&sarc&joke