Guest Post by David Middleton
I just love it when the authors of these sorts of articles start out with a series of mistakes…
The Anthropocene: Can Humans Survive A Human Age?
by Adam Frank
About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended. The planet became warmer, wetter and entered the geological era scientists call the Holocene. Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans. The entire history of our civilization (agriculture, city building, writing etc.) is bound within the Holocene and its bounty of productive land and oceans.
Now, it appears, the Holocene is over…
[…]
The author, an astrophysicist, must have never taken a course in Quaternary geology.
Mistake #1: “About 12,000 years ago (give or take a thousand) the glaciers covering much of the northern hemisphere disappeared and an ice age gripping the Earth ended.”
The glaciers retreated; but we are still very much in the grip of an ice age that began about 35 million years ago (the x-axes of first four graphs are denominated in millions of years ago (MYA) – Today is to the left)…
The boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene marks the beginning of the Cenozoic ice age. It’s the fourth major ice age of the Phanerozoic Eon…
The Holocene is an interglacial period within an ice age. The only thing that distinguishes the Holocene from previous Pleistocene interglacial episodes is the fact that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction…
Yes… I know that there’s not much evidence that our ancestors were capable of causing so much extinction prior to the invention of capitalism – But those megafauna had coped with all of the previous glacial-interglacial cycles just fine, so long as our ancestors stayed in Africa.
At this point in time there is no reason to assume that the Holocene marked the end of the Cenozoic ice age… There’s not even any reason to think that it marked the end of very cold Quaternary Period…
Mistake #2: “Marked by a stable climate, the Holocene has been good to humans.”
The Holocene has been a heck of a lot more stable than the preceding Pleistocene glacial episode (the x-axes of next three graphs are denominated in calendar years – Today is to the right)…
But it has been far from stable…
And it hasn’t always been nice to humans…
The Holocene of the Dark Ages Cold Period and Little Ice Age were quite often very unkind to humans.
Will there one day be a clear geological distinction between the “Anthropocene” and the Holocene and the rest of the Quaternary? I seriously doubt it – But no one will know for hundreds of thousands of years.
Professor Frank started out with a paragraph-full of mistakes; which then formed the basis of his sheer speculation about the Anthropocene’s future relevance in the geologic record.
H/T to Bill Illis for much of the paleoclimate data.
@ur momisuglyRobert Austin says:
June 25, 2011 at 10:14 am
@ur momisuglyMrX says:
June 25, 2011 at 12:37 pm
@ur momisuglySmokey says:
June 25, 2011 at 1:47 pm
@ur momisuglyJohn M says:
June 25, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Amen!
@Smokey
I found where your graph comes from. Here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
But strangely your graph doesn’t look quite like the monthly graph at the bottom that page, which at first glance does not appear to have the “repeating trends” that you highlight. Steeper after 1970. Any idea why that is?
Baby megafauna are not very big, smart, or fast. It is also safer to hunt them with pointy sticks then full-grown megafauna. They may have been primitive, but early settlers were smarter than the problem.
John B says:
June 25, 2011 at 3:27 am
No links, Google is your friend 🙂
Nope, I don’t think so. Google has search alGOREithms that they fully admit to designing to give a particular sequence preference they have chosen – think China. Google is no longer on my search screen, Bing, Yahoo, Dogpile, Kosmix come before Google now.
John B,
The graph I posted came from Phil Jones’ data. You can argue with him about it. Here’s another graph that shows repeating trends: click. So your statement that “the rate of change of temperature since the industrial revolution and particularly in the late 20th century is unprecedented for at least the last 2000 years and probably much longer” is debunked like most of your other assertions.
But I’m glad you posted that link showing deceptive graphs like this. As we can see from the first link above, the planet has been in a gradual warming trend since the LIA [beginning a couple of hundred years before CO2 began to rise]. Now, notice the zero line in the graph above. It deliberately ignores the natural warming trend since the LIA, and thus fools the brain into falsely assuming that there is a hockey stick of accelerated warming, when there isn’t. It’s a visual trick: click.
When the temperature is correctly plotted on the rising trend line instead of a zero line, you can see that nothing unusual is occurring; temperatures are normal and natural. This is a deceptive graphing trick that is used constantly by the alarmist crowd, similar to showing a scary MLO chart instead of an honest chart with a 0 – 100% y-axis. They know what they’re doing, and it is deliberately deceptive.
As far as the mega fauna are concerned. Modern humans (Homo sapien sapien) did come from Africa and competed with the Neandertals but to what extent we do not know. Some believe the Neandertal gene pool drifted North as they had a diet of mainly protein like the Inuits and adapted to colder climates. Certainly North America was joined to Siberia during the last ice age and there is evidence that large Bison existed after modern humans from Asia (Native Americans) came there around 10,000 years ago give or take a thousand years or so. There is slight evidence that the large Bison were in one instance driven over a cliff for later slaughtering and they evolved into the smaller version of today. There were many variables involved in their extinction, and we can’t say that human hunting might not have also been involved. We have adapted well, but another mini ice age or glacial will put stress on our ability to grow food or maintain animal husbandry to the extent this could cause famines in some regions. I believe that we are heading back to another cold period, that is beyond our control.
The political interference re AGW myth is worrying. And so is the fact that governments must know this cooling period is with us now, especially those countries who are buying up land and water resources in Australia. The Southern hemisphere will not be as badly effected as the Northern hemisphere. The cliche here is ‘Humans propose – Nature deposes’. Maybe we should start worshiping the sun again, as this dictates by orbit and solar activity whether we get cold or not. LOL
@Cassie King says:
June 25, 2011 at 8:24 am
@Policyguy says:
June 25, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Good posts. Are you folks archaeologists or vertebrate paleontologists? In defense of D. Middleton, I think he was being sarcastic about megafaunal extinctions. We know humans did the dodos, moas, passenger pigeons and (nearly) the bison. There may be some others to mention that escape my remembrance now.
Maybe, we got the giant ground sloth – big, perhaps slow, non-herd animal. But to have wiped out the wooly mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, saiga antelope, giant elk and certain daunting carnivores – some thousands of years ago – is preposterous. The known victims were either spatially restricted (moas, dodos), completely defenseless (dodos, which apparently had no mammalian predators); or else wiped out with a concerted effort using weapons far more effective than rocks, clubs, spears and maybe, arrows.
My educated guess – speaking as a geologist and not as a biologist or other scientist – is that these were quite climate-specialized animals, and their climate left them when the glaciers receded and conditions changed (the wooly ones, for sure, habituated extremely cold, snow-covered grassy savannas, where their horns, antlers or tusks could uncover forage in the winter). In addition, as the glaciers retreated, temperatures warmed, and grasses proliferated northward, the probability of grass fires in all seasons increased. This wreaks havoc on herd animals.
Finally, the caribou exist in substantial numbers. They are much more inviting targets than a mammoth. They are hunted (or used) today by numerous aboriginal hunters, but persist in large numbers.
Mammoths were adapted to a cold climate like the woolly rino and their cousins were living like they are in Africa at the same time. By the way Jim F I have a degree major in Archaeology & Palaeoanthropology from UNE, Armidale (2004). But I have been very interested in prehistory from my year dot. One of my lecturers (a favorite by the way) was Prof Mike Morwood who with Prof Peter Brown described the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) although the Homo label is still a contested genus. I would agree climate change had more to do with the European and American mega fauna demise or certainly contributed to it. In Australia it was the browsers that died off more than the grazers. And the dingo on the mainland only, did some damage too. When you think about it large animals like the modern elephant have long gestational periods – five years I believe. If the animals were under any environmental threat, like a drought or humans were sharing their water sources, it would NOT take long for them to die off. If you refer to Lascaux art, mega fauna were still around 32,000 years ago. During the last ice
age. I have difficulty in understanding, with the stone technology they had available, how a
group of either Neandertals or modern humans could take on a large mammoth, unless they
entrapped a young one. There is evidence of an ambush in America but overall not much evidence accompanied by tools to suggest humans killed them off. Or bush or grass fires helped to separate them as a herd. One of my lecturers suggested that there were several variables involved in their demise, not just humans. And like the dinosaurs the carnivores
died off too. Or got smaller.
Smokey, I will attempt to address your main points:
Smokey says:
June 25, 2011 at 6:50 pm
John B,
Here’s another graph that shows repeating trends: click.
We already discussed that chart. It is a cherry pick of 7 cities and Central England. Let’s stick to global, or at least hemispheric.
But I’m glad you posted that link showing graphs like this. As we can see from the first link, the planet has been in a gradual warming trend since the LIA [beginning a couple of hundred years before CO2 began to rise]. Now, notice the zero line in the graph above. It deliberately ignores the natural warming trend since the LIA, and thus fools the brain into falsely assuming that there is a hockey stick of accelerated warming, when there isn’t. It’s a visual trick: click.
Mainstream sience certainly does not ignore natural warming trends, see my final point. And the zero line doesn’t trick me, it’s just a zero line, which is what an anomaly is defined against. However, your linear trend really is a visual trick, because the trend over that period is not linear. See how bad a fit is at both ends.
This is a deceptive graphing trick that is used constantly by the alarmist crowd, similar to showing a scary MLO chart instead of an honest chart with a 0 – 100% y-axis. They know what they’re doing, and it is deliberately deceptive.
Your y-axis here is not 0-100%, it is 0-1000 ppm, quite arbitrary. Use 0-500 ppm and the data still all fits, but looks “scarier”. Use 0-10000 ppm, it looks “less scary”. So what? Whether a 40% increase in CO2 is significant is a question of physics that has nothing to do with graphs like this, scary or otherwise.
But that is all just details. The real question was whether late 20th century trends are unprecedented. So, here is my final point:
You have to look at the big picture. There will always be short-term noise, there will always be other factors to take into account. Mainstream science has gone to great lengths to filter out the noise and take into account the other factors, though I note that your argument is that they have not done so adequately. I looked into what the mainstream has to say on these trends (I don’t just make this stuff up myself, you know) and here it is: The period you highlight in the 19th C is just noise. It’s only 20 years, the 19th C as a whole is pretty flat. The period 1910-1940 is longer and steeper, so needs to be explained. Here is the explanation: firstly note that you have to pick the endpoints very precisely to get a 30-year trend that high. Pick any other 30-year period around there and the trend goes down. Secondly, the warming in that period is attributed to increasing solar forcing and relative lack of volcanic activity (see, we don’t ignore natural factors). On the other hand, the 30-year trend from 1970 onwards is not so sensitive to endpoints, but more importantly that trend is in a period when the net effect of other factors is slightly negative (solar output has been flat and there has been more volcanic activity). In other words, the fastest (admitted only just) rate of warming occurred when natural factors alone would have caused cooling. That is why late 20th Century warming is said to be “unprecedented”. And the science also says warming will continue. We’ll see!
I am sure you will not agree. Shall we leave it at that, for now?
I would have thought that the sarcasm in my extinction comment was obvious.
I’ll rephrase it…
@John B,
What Smokey said and…
If we take the HadCRUT3 series and compare the the period from 1912-1945 to the period from 1975-2009, we find that they are statistically indistinguishable…
20th Century
If we cherry-pick a supposedly “carbonated cherry” out of HadCRUT3 (1976-2010 AD) and compare it to a non-carbonated cherry out of Moberg’s Medieval Warm Period reconstruction (863-897 AD), we find that they are statistically indistinguishable (a fact Keith Briffa warned the Hockey Team about in the Climategate emails)…
HadCRUT v MWP
@David,
Moberg is indeed a cherry. Most of the many other proxy studies do not show the MWP to be as strong.
Re. 1912-1945, we are confident that was due to solar forcing, and we are equally confident that 1970 onwards was not. Warming at that rate despite natural forcings is what is claimed to be unprecendented.
The next few years will prove one side wrong.
John B says:
“… the zero line doesn’t trick me, it’s just a zero line, which is what an anomaly is defined against.”
Wrong, but that’s no surprise. An anomaly is simply a deviation from the trend line. Apparently John B wants to be tricked. He cannot admit that the deliberately deceptive manipulation of those noaa graphs is being done to promote the alarmist agenda. The agencies that misrepresent reality with their devious charts are doing it to protect their job security and to garner more public funding. Is there any doubt?
If John B admitted what is obvious to everyone else, he would be taking the first step on the road to redemption. But so much of his self worth is invested in the CAGW fraud that he can not admit that it is about money, political power and status, and he cannot admit that there is no evidence – none – supporting his mistaken belief in catastrophic AGW.
The entire runaway global warming scam is based on always-inaccurate computer models, not on empirical evidence – which is completely non-existent. The whole thing is a massive head fake, and the true believers are acting increasingly deluded when confronted by facts that debunk their belief system. With zero evidence of global harm from CO2, their belief in CAGW is based on religious faith, not on scientific facts. Thus, John B rejects all contrary evidence in order to maintain his faith in catastrophic AGW, which the planet itself is falsifying. So, who should we believe – John B? Or Planet Earth?
maybe this might be of help. This is just a lead though to other U tube recordings.
Prof. Dr Vincent Courtillot Prasentation. (There is a .. over the a) (31 mins)
or Prof Bob Carter ‘Is CO2 The Cause? 1 of 4 (10 mins) but more from Bob on the U Tube
http:www.youtube/watch?v=FOLkze-9GeI
There are lots available
I’m off to bed, just spent hours compiling an essay to my local rep who is a member of the
Multi party climate change commission. I don’t think he knows a cloud from a cow pat? LOL.
Moderate Republican re: my collection of a large nautiloid from the Ordovician of N Saskatchewan a period when seas were up to 220 meters higher than today, temps were 10C warmer and CO2 was 5000 ppmv following which we slipped into an ice age. My obvious point is that what alarmists call unprecedeted, robust science, scary tipping points (eg. Ocean acidification at 390ppmv CO2) is the musings of politicized astronomers and physicists. These folkes have had an education since real geologists have belatedly entered the discussion. But do they accept the ed? No they concentrate on trying to deflate the past, inflate the present, change global warming to a term that coverrs both warming and cooling, shift the goal posts, cherry pick, block publication of alternative scientific papers (even so far as to blackball journals,have editors who publish non cagw stuff canned…). I can tell you also that I collected one nautiloid but the formation was crammed with millions of fossils, and they also occur in limestones and shales all over the globe. Anyway your one of these “my mind is made up” types no matter what is brought before you, which is a figurative form of fossiization.
John B
If this claim is based on the following figure, I’m afraid it’s not a very impressive argument.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-9-5.html
The IPCC was unable to fully account for the temperature increase in the early 20th century, so they put whatever they could think of into the models to come up with a big fat red line that splits the difference between the temperature minimum in ~1910 and the temperature maximum at ~1945. As we saw in the e-mails, visual presentation is a primary goal of some climate scientists.
Such are the data that lead some to conclude “we can’t account for it any other way, so it must be CO2.
Smokey said: “So, who should we believe – John B? Or Planet Earth?”
Planet Earth, definitely. But you have to know how to listen, and that is what science is for. Can we all agree on that?
BTW, The AMS defines “climate anomaly—The difference between the average climate over a period of several decades or more, and the climate during a particular month or season.” i.e. against a zero line. Not against a linear trend. The whole point of an anomaly is to show deviations from the average for the period.
http://amsglossary.allenpress.com/glossary/browse?s=c&p=39
An exceptional work on the demise of the various fauna, including the Clovis people is available:
http://cometstorm.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/a-different-kind-of-climate-catastrophe-2/
Read the whole paper.
As for those who claim stone age hunters killed off all those large and, one suspects, very dangerous critters has never been around even smaller ones, such as enraged modern day bulls, weighing in around 2,500 pounds, or a cow defending her young. Hunters trying to kill a mammoth calf, defended by a very large enraged female with a flint tipped throwing spear, certainly would have their hands full. And kill all of them in a rather short period of time? No way.
An alternative has been put forth by the author above, which makes sense. It also explains the cause of some very interesting geologic scars on the North American surface.
With the single exception of Mr. Frank using the term ice-age, rather than glacial period, his article raises some interesting questions, and while you aptly set the record straight on the difference between the two, that does not in and of itself invalidate the issues he raised.
John B,
The temperature trend line from the LIA is intact, and it shows tthat CO2 has had no measurable effect. The deceptive zero line is used to alarm the public. When the proper trend line is used, it is clear that the planet has been warming naturally since the LIA.
And of course you’re up to your usual tricks changing the word “anomaly” to “climate anomaly”. From my handy desktop dictionary:
anomaly n. 1 something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected
The rising temperature trend from the LIA has fluctuations [anomalies] above and below the trend line. But the temperature always reverts to the trend. There is no hockey stick; that is a lie promoted by the alarmist cult based on a few anomalous warm decades. The temperature will revert to the trend line – unless our luck has run out and it keeps getting colder.
Smokey, you disappoint me. We both know words can have more than one meaning, but if we are talking about anomalies in the context of climate, which do you think is the most appropriate: the AMS definition of climate anomaly or your desktop dictionary?
And you say “The temperature will revert to the trend line”. And you know this how?
I’ll let you have the last word and see you on another thread…
@ur momisugly R. Gates,
“With the single exception of Mr. Frank using the term ice-age, rather than glacial period,” his anthropomorphic mis-characterization of the Holocene as a unique period of climatic stability and his quasi-religious belief that an “Anthrpocene” can be geologically distinguished from the Holocene, the good professor didn’t do much of anything apart from demonstrate an ignorance of geology.
I don’t know if John Middleton is a geologist or not.
David Middleton was an Exploration Geophysicist in the evil oil & gas industry from 1981-2006. In 2007, he got kicked upstairs into management and learned how to use Excel and PowerPoint to mskr cool looking graphs. </sarcasm>
To answer you question… For a future geological analysis to distinguish an Anthropocene from the Holocene, we will have to have left a clear signature in the geologic record. Our instrumental data will not be a part of that record… And, thus far, we have had very little impact of the sort of proxy data that will be part of that record.
The multi-proxy climate reconstructions not done by the Hockey Team and stomata-derived CO2 reconstructions don’t yet demonstrate a distinct human signature…
Kouwenberg, Lungqvist & Moberg
Boron isotope reconstructions of seawater pH don’t yet demonstrate a distinct human signature…
Pelejero
As far as marine hypoxia goes… The “dead zone” happens every spring; when increased water flow in the Mississippi River delivers a large load on nitrogen-rich nutrients. This causes an algal bloom. The algae die. Bacteria eat the algae, consuming oxygen in the process. This causes the dead zone.
Human activities account for, at most, 30% of the nitrogen…Natural sources account for at least 70%.
Agricultural fertilizers might make the dead zone a bit bigger than it would be from just natural organic nutrients…But…Like the ozone hole and climate change, mankind is not causing the dead zone. We could stop eating tomorrow and the dead zone would not go away. For that matter, if it wasn’t for some really big natural dead zones back in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, we’d have very little oil.
The dead zone itself will occur every spring so long as the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
The fishing industry has lived with the dead zone for as long as there has been a fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico. The size of dead zone has only been measured for a bit over 20 years. And it’s been fairly stable in size since 1993 – Ranging from 17,000 to 21,000 square kilometers in most years.
Since 1986, it has covered between 10,000 and 20,000 square kilometers…The Gulf of Mexico covers 1.5 million square kilometers. So the dead zone covers from 0.7% to 1.4% – IOW 98.6% to 99.3% of the Gulf is unaffected by the dead zone. A future sediment coring expedition would be unlikely to distinguish the areal extent of the Anthropocene dead zone from the Holocene dead zone.
The notion that human activities will leave a mark on the geologic record is sheer speculation. Our “mark” would have to be big enough to be resolved through the mother-of-all low-pass filters: The Earth. Geoscientists in the oil industry are very mindful of Nyquist… New Age Science seems to think there’s a green exception to Nyquist.
“In 2007, he got kicked upstairs into management and learned how to use Excel and PowerPoint to mskr cool looking graphs”… “mskr” should be “make”… While learning Excel & PowerPoint, I forgot how to type…
Berniel: ‘Yet there are some really problems with Middleton’s case against it. Most alarming is the way he presents the the claim that the migration of humans out of Africa during the Holocene (and not before) caused the extinction of the megafauna. Is the science behind this claim so well established that it does not require so much as a sceptical qualification or a reference? Wow.’
I wondered about this too. It’s not my area but the only reference I could find is Jared Diamond’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee’. It was a holiday read but as I remember the claim was that from DNA marking we can trace Homo Sap to the East African coast and that as we migrated out we ate what didn’t run away – explaining, I seem to remember, why most animals that currently exist run away from humans. There may be some real science behind it but I wasn’t particularly impressed by the supporting references.
The current ice age got a lot colder and the frequency of the glacial-interglacial cycle increased about 2.6 million years ago. This much colder period is known as the Quaternary System. The Holocene is an unremarkable interglacial episode within the Quaternary. Apart from the rapid migration of modern man out of Africa and the demise of the non-African megafauna, the Holocene is not significantly different than the dozens of previous Quaternary interglacial stages.
The Cenozoic ice age began when Antarctica’s year-round ice cap began to form. This probably occurred at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. It was most likely the result of the Antarctic continent migrating into its current polar position and the formation of the circumpolar current.. The glacial cycles of the Oligocene through the Pliocene were relatively mild. The formation of the Isthmus of Panama and rapid growth of the Himalayas are thought to have been the primary cause of the rapid cooling after the Pliocene. The Quaternary (Pleistocene & Holocene) has been the coldest part of the Cenozoic ice age.