Guest post by Dr. J Storrs Hall
A bit over a year ago, in the wake of Climategate, I put up a blog post over at the Foresight Institute which got picked up and run here at WUWT. The essence of the post was that there was lots of natural variation in the ice core record of climate, so that it was reasonable to be skeptical of scientists who claimed that recent CO2 variations were “the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend” (quoting myself).
Apparently that got enough exposure — and was persuasive enough — that over a year later the alarmists still feel the urge to “debunk” it. Most recently, Rob Honeycutt at the “SkepticalScience” alarmist fanboi blog weighed in with this: Crux of a Core, Part 1 – addressing J Storrs Hall. Now the thing about this particular piece that jumped out at me at first was the fact that he associated me with a graph I never used, and he calls me “Mr. Hall” to make me sound less qualified than other sources such as “Dr. Alley” he refers to. It’s Dr. Hall (and yes, I am a scientist, not a nanotech engineer as he claims), a fact that he could have discovered in 3 seconds with Google. That told me about all I needed to know about Honeycutt’s bona fides (in the original Latin sense of acting in good faith).
The only substantive point in the post is that GISP2 (or any specific ice core) is a local as opposed to global temperature record. Is it misrepresentation to use it as a proxy for global climate? Well, the inconvenient truth is that I’m hardly the first person to use ice cores as climate proxies in popular presentations:
… but, on the other hand, it’s actually an interesting question and one worth looking at.
How Ice Cores Record a History of Climate
That’s not my title, it’s from this page at the GISP2 site. Not “a history of local temperature,” — of climate. Here are some quotes from the abstracts of papers by GISP2 authors:
“Ice cores provide high-resolution, multi-parameter records of changes in climate and environmental conditions spanning two or more full glacial- interglacial cycles. …”
“Polar ice contains a unique record of past climate variations; …”
“One of the most dramatic climate events observed in marine and ice core records is the Younger Dryas (YD), … High resolution, continuous glaciochemical records, newly retrieved from central Greenland, record the chemical composition of the Arctic atmosphere at this time. This record shows that both onset and termination of the YD occurred within 10-20 years …”
“The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) core can enhance our understanding of the relationship between parameters measured in the ice in central Greenland and variability in the ocean, atmosphere, and cryosphere of the North Atlantic Ocean and adjacent land masses. …”
“High-resolution, continuous multivariate chemical records from a central Greenland ice core provide a sensitive measure of climate change…”
“The accumulation record from the GISP2 core as an indicator of climate change throughout the Holocene” (paper title)
So, sure, a single ice core is not a global average temperature record; but it is quite a bit more than one thermometer. It’s just mud-slinging to claim that using it for a climate proxy is “misinformation”.
… especially when I didn’t just use one ice core in my post but two, and the other one was from Antarctica. One way to cut past the verbiage is simply to look at a comparison of the Greenland and Antarctic data and see how well they correlate:
(This is GISP2 in green, NGRIP, another Greenland core, in cyan, and the Vostok Antarctic core in blue. The Vostok has been scaled and shifted for a best match with the others; the temperature in Antarctica is colder, with smaller variations, than in Greenland. Furthermore, there are some time-scaling issues — note the temporal divergence of the two Greenland records before about 40 kya. It’s possible that NH/SH actually match better than this plot indicates. Look here for data.)
Nowhere near a perfect match, but it’s pretty clear that these are all from the same planet. Even Vostok shows the Younger Dryas, which is generally believed to be a mostly northern-hemisphere event. The NH has more variability in ice ages, notably the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, but the SH more, on a relative scale, in the Holocene.
The GISP2 people also compared their core’s record with Antarctic ones; on this page they say that it “shows close correlation between GISP2 and Vostok in the delta 18O of air in these ice cores.” (That’s a key temperature proxy.) On this page they say “Holocene climate is characterized by rapid climate change events and considerable complexity. GISP2 Holocene ¶18O (proxy for temperature) (Grootes, et al., 1993) and EOF1 (composite measure of major chemistry representing atmospheric circulation) show parallel behavior for the Early Holocene but not for the Late Holocene (O’Brien, et al., 1995).”
Note that bit about “rapid climate change events.” In the words of Jeffrey Masters here, “The historical records shows us that abrupt climate change is not only possible–it is the normal state of affairs. The present warm, stable climate is a rare anomaly.” (And he’s talking specifically about the lessons of GISP2 — although alas he takes home the wrong lesson from it.) See also this recent post here by Don Easterbrook.
Does GISP2 — or any other paleoclimate record — show us that climate change isn’t happening? No, of course not. It shows us that climate change always happens. The 20th-century warming was hardly unprecedented, and doesn’t call for unusual explanations.
There is actually very little doubt that the ice-core record is a good climate proxy. There are differences in detail between Antarctic and Greenland ice-cores, particularly that the latter show Heinrich events and Dansgaard-Oeschger events quite strongly. These are North Atlantic events that show up only weakly in Antarctica. There is also a phase shift between Antarctia and Greenland, often known as “the bipolar seesaw”.
However the main climatic events, glaciations and interglacials and major stadials and interstadials show up in all the ice-cores at the same times and in the same proportions. The previous interglacial (MIS 5e) is always warmer than the present and followed by two cooler interstadials (MIS 5a and 5c), the next older interglacial (MIS 7) is always slightly colder than the present and multiple peaked and so on and so on. These are all features that can be checked by other data (ocean bottom drill cores, speleothems, loess profiles, cave sediments, pollen, fossils, ancient beaches, river terraces etc).
And yes, all these proxies agree that most of this interglacial was significantly warmer than the present. The warm peak was reached quite early and the temperature has on the whole been declining since then (this seems to be a general feature of interglacials). But the decline has not been even. There has been warmer rallies (like the MWP) two quite sharp cold dips 9600 and 8200 years ago, and a downward step change about 4200 years ago.
That the early and middle Holocene was markedly warmer than the present is nothing new. This has been known and universally accepted for a century ever since palynology was invented. It is as a matter of fact quite obvious if you are familiar with the fossil record and biogeography.
Well, if you look at _all_ the evidence, the multiple available cores, sediment evidence, etc., we appear to have 1-2C cooling over the last 5000-6000 years since the Holocene peak. That’s a decline averaging 0.033/century.
Now we’re up 0.75-0.8C in the last 100 years, 20X faster than the drop since the Holocene?
Hmmm. One of these things is not like the other…
Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am
Oh really? Those cores went through a hell of a lot more ice than Mann’s tree bores.
Laughable.
Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 11:13 am
“… And two points simply do not cover the global …”
Dang it – I misplaced my equatorial ice cores. Probably under the refrigerator with those 100’s of ice cubes I kicked under there.
Mike you are cherry picking and splitting hairs:
Here: “J. Storrs (“Josh”) Hall, Ph.D., is President of the Foresight Institute and an independent scientist and author. Dr. Hall is a prolific writer on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and other social impacts of technology. He is actively sought out to speak about and be interviewed on diverse future technology-related topics, appearing for example in the movie “The Singularity is Near”. He has over 30 years research experience in academia and industry.”
Thus, he has a Ph.D and thus is a doctor in that sense. Two, when you continue to read the bio, you see he has a multitude of professional interests and applications he has explored.
What is, precisely, a climate scientist? A professional from some field of science who studies climate, but to invoke some sort of special exaltation to “climate scientists” does not seem appropriate. Did you read the peer reviewed papers showing how poorly the GCM’s performed hindcasts and projections? Several papers in peer review show the flaws.
Ba how is this for supporting science?:
http://books.google.com/books?id=CS8-uzm3cvUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=global+warming+hoax&hl=en&ei=_ZNtTb-CEdP0gAeX3YCYBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CEkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false
If Fred Singer’s foward and Larry Bell’s book are not enough, why don’t you check out some of Dr. Singer’s work and that of others in climate and meteological science?
Peter Taylor, when you say “…and when confronted with the real scientific uncertainties where choices of some variables (like converting a radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere measured in watts, to a change in temperature at the surface measured in degrees C ) thought it best to embrace the newly invented precautionary priciple and go with the scarier values for that constant. And also lend consideration to some theoretically large positive feedbacks.”
You are buying into the subjective probability philosophy enamored by many at skepticalscience. The probability of a (say) 5c sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is 100% or zero, take your pick. The scientific uncertainties you talk about are not measured as probabilities unless you count models with no local weather component that contain arbitrary randomization leading to invented probabilities. Science does not produce probabilistic estimates unless there are real world measurements to back up the probabilities, and in this case there are only inapplicable paleo measurements (from a much drier world, not the current world) and inapplicable modern measurements (i.e. weather, impossible to separate the results of any forcing like volcano cooling or CO2 warming)
The actual reason they like and use subjective probabilities is that it sounds like science and allows them to invoke the precautionary principle. But as I said, the actual probability of thermageddon based on a projection of the paleo record and models is 100% and some of the posters at skepticalscience have the guts to say so. The rest embrace subjective probability because it is better not to sound absolutist. Alternatively, the actual probability of thermageddon is zero based on the thermostat theory proposed here at various times and a much longer trail of paleo evidence. Again take your pick, but don’t fall into the fake probability trap.
KR, (1) GAT just dropped 0.2 degrees late last year. (2) the proxies are smoothed
As one who has spent a huge amount of time collating and translating paleoclimate data into useful form …
… I fully endorse Dr. Hall’s methodology and results here.
I have almost the same chart (at higher resolution).
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/9484/lasticeageglant.png
If someone wants, I can give you any timeframe back to 635 Mya.
Mike says:
March 1, 2011 at 9:33 am
“You are entitled to your views but one or two ice cores do not provide enough information to reconstruct global climate.”
This is a classic case of the Strawman fallacy. Hall did not assert that he was doing a reconstruction of global climate. In fact, in the article above he denied that he was:
‘So, sure, a single ice core is not a global average temperature record; but it is quite a bit more than one thermometer. It’s just mud-slinging to claim that using it for a climate proxy is “misinformation”.’
The Strawman in the fallacy is Mike’s claim that Hall is using ice cores as a reconstruction of global climate.
Mike, you really should pay the money and take a complete logic course. The help that I can give you on the internet is available only after you have your foot in your mouth, as happens so often.
Climate scientists, so-called, are not scientists. They have not created one reasonably well-confirmed physical hypothesis about the effects of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere.
It is true that they deploy the 19th century hypotheses about CO2 in the atmosphere. But they have added nothing to that. They have not one reasonably well-confirmed hypothesis about the “forcings” that they toy with endlessly in their computer models.
Jack Greer quotes Dr. Alley:
‘“So, using GISP2 data to argue against global warming is, well, stupid, or misguided, or misled, or something, but surely not scientifically sensible.’
Jack, just curious, can any amount of local data be used to argue against global warming. Let’s say I have some proxy record that covers eighty percent of Earth’s surface for a million years and it shows something like the data that Hall presents. Could something like that serve as evidence? I bet it could not. I bet you have ruled it out on principle. You will insist that we must use Warmista concepts, such as “global average temperature,” which cannot be given any empirical meaning whatsoever. I am right, aren’t I?
I think most people do not understand there is a phenomenon called “polar amplification'” whereby the polar regions change by twice as much as global temperatures. This shows up in every paleoclimate estimate I have ever looked at so it has to be considered as a factual point. Greenland will change by twice as much as the global temperatures (if one is talking about sea level).
Secondly, the altitude and proximity to the ocean is also important.
If one is on top of a 3 km or 4 km high glacier, the proxy data needs to take this into account (3 kms high proxies change by another 50% versus equatorial sea level) and almost none of the pro-AGW papers have made these adjustments.
If one is in the centre of the continents or if the data is sourced from an area in the centre of the continents, the proxies will change by less than the global temperature.
As one uses proxy data that goes further back in time, one has to detrend the proxies because they are subject to periodic incursions of water from earlier periods and the the change seems to be approximately linear over time. If you don’t adjust for this, one finds the proxies indicate the Earth was a snowball until about 100 Mya which it obviously wasn’t.
Overall, the do18 proxies need to be adjusted for latitude, altitude, time and proximity to the ocean. If you have not done this (and it is not a large change required), then your estimates will be off by a quite a bit. Pro-AGW researchers like Richard Alley, are perfectly willing to ignore these issues whenever it suits the pro-AGW position.
feet2thefire says:
“Yet perhaps the greatest scientist of the last 40 years, Freeman Dyson, is frowned upon as “just a physicist,” when he voices skeptical points.”
~ ~ ~
CC: Yea, he was a great physicist, but he also wanted to used nuclear bombs to dig mines and power rocket ships. Even a great physicist can become disconnected.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Crispin in Ulaanbaatar says: “priestly class of self-appointed alarmist oracles”
“Must be a slow news week if we have to stoop to mentioning RC and science in the same breath.”
~ ~ ~
CC: Why the need for this kind of constant name calling? Is this a brawl or an attempt to learn about our climate?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Smokey says: Excellent article. Michael Mann’s acolytes are the ones who don’t believe in climate change prior to the mid-1800′s.
~ ~ ~
CC: Come on, if you believe that than you’ve never looked at, or listened to, what they are presenting.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Oslo says: Skepticalscience is a fundamentalist propaganda site. . . fling links to Skepticalscience, presented as the ultimate “truth”
~ ~ ~
CC: Why this need to demonize?
You folks act like think you having nothing to learn from anyone else?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ged Darkstorm says: Science is about data and data only, it cares not about titles or professions, only data.
~ ~ ~
CC: You forgot the part about having the education and knowledge to interpret the data.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
J StorrsHall says: This is an interesting hypothesis…..cast a bit longer as a small cabal of otherwise underemployed and career limited physicists at NASA,
~ ~ ~
A small cabal that was joined by many thousands of scientists and scientific academies throughout the world… hmmm.
bubbagyro says: Modeling for persuasive presentations is handy for separation science, however. Separating a VC investor from his money, that is. ~ ~ ~
PR and emotionalism. . . . . goes a long way.
dana1981 says:
March 1, 2011 at 3:18 pm
Lucy:
“If you don’t like the temperature records of the ice cores, then why should you trust the ice core CO2 records?”
CO2 is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. Rob Honeycutt’s criticism is not the use of ice core data as a temperature proxy, but its use as a global temperature proxy. Temperatures vary significantly around the globe, particularly near the poles. Atmospheric CO2 does not.
===
Good golly Miss Molly…
“CO2 is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. ” <– not on planet Earth that I've ever seen. The mix lag NH to SH is 12-18 months.
The ics cores are even worse in reflecting such subtle regional changes. We can spend all year snorting the "peer reviewed Ink" but doesn't it ultimately come down to the lack of accurate data and the unwillingness to properly reflect their "hunch"?
I think Mike is concerned that Dr. Hall doesn’t have a certificate on his wall that reads…
Offishul Klimate Si-un-tist
[LOL!]
P.S. What degrees (if any) does Big Mike have? Are they in “Climate Science”? Maybe he can show them to us “engineers” so we can gasp in awe and admiration…
citizenschallenge says:
March 1, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Is that why your comment was loaded with ad homs and snark?
Theo Goodwin said March 1, 2011 at 6:08 pm:
“Jack, just curious, can any amount of local data be used to argue against global warming. Let’s say I have some proxy record that covers eighty percent of Earth’s surface for a million years and it shows something like the data that Hall presents. Could something like that serve as evidence? I bet it could not. I bet you have ruled it out on principle. You will insist that we must use Warmista concepts, such as “global average temperature,” which cannot be given any empirical meaning whatsoever. I am right, aren’t I?”
No, Theo, you are not right. Quality, calibrated proxies covering that percentage of the Earth would, in effect, establish a pretty convincing approximation of “global average temperature”. I’d bet Dr. Alley would agree. That’s not what was presented here today or last February … this in addition to a misleading assertions of phase matching, especially the Younger Dryas event.
@Peter taylor
Why should only Wall Street brokers snort coke and drive Lamborghinis?
What about dendrochronlogists?
citizenschallenge says:
Smokey says: ‘Excellent article. Michael Mann’s acolytes are the ones who don’t believe in climate change prior to the mid-1800′s.’
CC: “Come on, if you believe that than you’ve never looked at, or listened to, what they are presenting.”
Of course I have. Mann’s debunked Hokey Stick shows conclusively that there was little climate change prior to the industrial revolution. Just look at your hero’s anti-science. The shaft of the stick shows almost no temperature variation before the mid-1800’s. And you still believe him.
I’ve read extensively on Mann’s shenanigans in MBH98, MBH99 and Mann ’08. I think he is a conniving charlatan. The emails recorded in The Crutape Letters indict Mann and his clique. Or read A.W. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. It will open your eyes.
If you’re not interested in reading the skeptical arguments in books, then read Montford’s Caspar and the Jesus Paper, a short exposé of the widespread corruption in mainstream climate science, and the incestuous relationship between people like Caspar Amman and climate journals desperate to retain the rock stars of climatology. They have sold their souls.
The common theme running throughout the “Team” is their desperation to keep everyone in line, and attacking anyone who puts a skeptical thought into words. Their motive is keeping the Billion$ of dollars a year in tax money flowing into “climate science.” They lie for money and fame.
It is all based on the evidence-free fiction that CO2 is causing climate catastrophe. If they don’t keep fanning the flames of runaway global warming fear their funding will begin to dry up. They depend on people like you to repeat the canard that CO2=CAGW, when there is zero evidence of any global harm due to the rise in that essential minor trace gas.
You accuse skeptics of “demonizing” the purveyors of this fraud, when in fact it is charlatans like Mann and his ilk who demonize “carbon,” by which they mean harmless, beneficial CO2. Every prediction of runaway global warming and climate catastrophe has turned out to be false. And yet, you still believe.
@John, “Good golly Miss Molly…
“CO2 is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. ” <– not on planet Earth that I've ever seen. The mix lag NH to SH is 12-18 months."
Mean Vostok temporal resolution is on the order of decades to centuries, not months. An 18-month lag between NH and SH CO2 has nothing to do with the 1,800 year offset between the Antarctic cooling event and the Younger Dryas. Dana's point is valid.
This concept of polar amplification don’t make sense with the south pole not having heated up. Have I missed something? The warming on the south pole is very low right? Hardly beats the error bars and we are supposed to have polar amplification and global warming, something is not right.
How do the AGW crowd explain this ?
@Smokey, “citizenschallenge says:
Smokey says: ‘Excellent article. Michael Mann’s acolytes are the ones who don’t believe in climate change prior to the mid-1800′s.’
CC: “Come on, if you believe that than you’ve never looked at, or listened to, what they are presenting.”
Of course I have.”
Of course you haven’t, I’m with citizenschallenge here. Find a quote where Mann or any scientist said there was no climate change before the mid-1800s.
Even though he didn’t provide the graph with the red hockey stick blade, Storrs Hall did say the following in the earlier WUWT post, which was criticized at Skeptical Science, when he looked at the Greenland ice core in question.
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?
The ice core data stopped being valid 95 years ago. The implication of the above statement that Greenland’s temperature should go about 0.5C higher.
So the author of the Skeptical Science web page felt justified in adding the global temperature increase in the 20th century to the GISP2 graph, based on Hall’s statement.
Now 0.5C is the approximate average global temperature increase since that time. The actual temperature increase in Greenland over the past 95 years was actually 3 C , according to the following thermometer record:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/rs_Greenland.htm
So the actual 20th century temperature increase in Greenland is unusual with the 3C increase on top of the ice core record.
The Skeptical Science rebuttal was also true. They pointed out that in fact the global temperature reconstructions showed that the increase in global temperature was unusual.
Let’s see
Hide the decline removed a few years of proxy data and plotted instrumental readings instead.
This apparently makes all climate science fake
This posts jiggles dates, changes temperature scale uses data from 2 areas of the globe and manages to prove conclusively climate change is a fraud.
(no info as to the actual changes by the way!)
Truly skeptic logic!