Geological Society statement about climate change

Tilo Reber says:
June 28, 2011 at 7:37 am
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Here are the Ice Ages and Milankovitch cycles over the last 3 ice ages. Basically, it doesn’t really work. It takes a really good down-cycle to put us into an ice age and then the up-cycles only work about one-third of the time in successfully melting all the ice to bring us into an interglacial. Bascially, one needs to take into the account the accumulated volume of ice versus the accumulated ability of Milankovitch cycle to melt that volume.
http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/9195/milkanvsiceages.png
Going back 800,000 years. Even stranger.
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/8735/milankovitch800k.png
One should also be aware that the forecast for the Milankovitch Cycles in the future is there will not be a deep enough down-cycle to put us into another ice age for 50,000 years (possibly even as much as 130,000 years). This should be the longest interglacial in the last 2.5 million years. They are not as regular as everyone believes.
For the inconvienent truth followers, here is Al Gore’s chart the way it should have been shown with the impact of CO2 shown in the proper scale and with the lag noted.
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/1640/last800klr.png

ferd berple says:
June 28, 2011 at 6:42 am
Which mainstream climate scientists came out and criticized “An inconvenient truth” for not mentioning the lag?
Did Hansen? Mann? Jones? Trenberth? How about RealCliamte? They knew there was a lag, but the general public did not. Instead the general public was told that the correlation between CO2 and Temperature proved that CO2 was driving temperature.
No, they did not criticise it, that was done by skeptics. So, why not? I think they knew it would be misinterpreted or deliberately misrepresented, so they went for a simplification. The cycles in question are over thousands of years. They are started by other factors, e,g, Milankovitch, but then the CO2 released by the oceans starts to drive temperature as a feedback ,until other factors dampen things down. That is what the science says. The lag is a few hundred years, but after that CO2 drives things (not exclusively, but significantly) for thousands of years.
FWIW, I think they made a mistake by not mentioning it, as it left themselves open to this sort of attack.

@-Tilo Reber says:
June 27, 2011 at 6:43 pm
izen: “Nature gets the first, last and only vote on this matter and as merely the art of the possible the politics will be shaped by that.”
Yeap, and so far I like the results coming from the exit polls.
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Really?!
This year is already in the top ten warmest years of the last hundred,
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2011/5
Antarctic sea ice extent was the 4th lowest recorded,
Arctic sea ice extent is at record lows,
glacier mass balance continues to fall,
http://nsidc.org/glims/glaciermelt/
the Pine Island ice-sheet is on the way out and with it could go the WAIS.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-ocean-currents-antarctic-ice.html
If you ‘like’ those results, seeing them as not supportive of AGW then I wonder what sort of climate you would consider supportive of AGW that would cause you to doubt your present position?

John B says:
June 28, 2011 at 1:00 pm
No, they did not criticise it, that was done by skeptics. So, why not? I think they knew it would be misinterpreted or deliberately misrepresented, so they went for a simplification. The cycles in question are over thousands of years. They are started by other factors, e,g, Milankovitch, but then the CO2 released by the oceans starts to drive temperature as a feedback ,until other factors dampen things down. That is what the science says. The lag is a few hundred years, but after that CO2 drives things (not exclusively, but significantly) for thousands of years.
That’s interesting. Can you point me to any published papers which discuss this effect (the “CO2 driving things for thousands of years”) because I’ve not come across this before.
FWIW, I think they made a mistake by not mentioning it, as it left themselves open to this sort of attack.
Science is supposed to be all about attack, isn’t it? Or did I sleep through the part in my science classes where the teacher explained that science was about everyone slapping one another on the back, telling each other what a good job they have done. Science only progresses through scepticism and challenge. Without scepticism we’d still believe in the aether.
It seems to me that it is only in Climatology, and perhaps some sectors of Parapsychology, where scientists routinely suppress, hide, or ignore data and information which undermines their theories, and attack those who challenge their results, rather than defending their theories or admitting they were wrong.

@- Marc says:
June 27, 2011 at 9:02 pm
“The reason I read and participate in a blog like this is to learn, in general, and to continue to evolve, if appropriate, my views on CAGW and AGW. It is a subject that interests me from a scientific point of view and a socialogical/psychological dynamic point of view.”
Me too.
Being faced with uncritical agreement is hardly a test of the ideas you hold. I hope you don’t mind if I attempt to answer some of your points….
“Let’s take them in order:
A) I was really turned off by the clear and massive fraud perpetrated my Michael Mann and the IPCC. The orginaly hockey stick has been shown to be unambiguously fraudulent and wrong in so many ways: ….. the data is massaged and cherry picked and altered to a degree making it false iv) even honest data is polluted by things like UHI, and there’s not much honest data out there. c) the mixing of proxy data, instrumental data and other more precise instrumental data in reconstructions is just plain disingenous and scientifically invalid.
I could go on, but the points here are two:”
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Before the two points I would question the importance or significance you are attributing to one study of NH paleo-temperatures. It is hardly central to the over 100 years of physics behind AGW or the numerous other measurements that broardly confirm the results you are apparently unequivocally dismissing as fraudulent.
“1) It nearly impossible for me to get over such massive fraud by the leaders of the so called science and trust the data and conclusions.”
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Of the many diverse sources of data we have about temperature, sea level, ocean heat content ice extent and other climate indicators there are always quibbles about possible inherent errors.
But it takes a mature conspiracy theorist to ascribe the correlation between all these measurements to systematic errors always favouring AGW – or worse that it is a global cabal with fabrication by every involved scientists on the planet.
“2) The leaders are lying about what they actually know — they do not know, nor can they reasonably predict what kind of situation we are in or where the climate is heading or why.”
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I have no idea who ‘The leaders’ are that you are granting such omnipotent authority to decide what they know – or are lying about.
The science, and most of the data are out there in the public domain, anybody can, and does, go and decide for themselves to the best of their ability. I would disagree with your assessment of what can be known and predicted from the data and the underlying science.
“B) My second larger point plays off the last point above — the leaders of this field are taking particles of knowledge and drawing conclusions which the level of science doesn’t support. It doesn’t hold up. They make leaps that would fail to persuade teachers in middle school science classes…..
The evidence seems clear that the climate is a chaotic system that, even with super computers, is orders of magnitude beyond our ability to predict. ”
Wrong, and obviously so.
The seasonal changes we experience are part of the climate, the ability to predict that December will be colder than June in the NH is well within our capabilities, and strongly confirmed by observational data. Such climate changes are constrained by the thermodynamics. How those changes occur in detail, the weather of seasonal change is certainly chaotic and inherently unpredictable but deterministic. However the envelope of that chaos is constrained by the 1LoT, it is ergodic and so perfectly open to prediction and measurement. You have not made a case for climate (rather than weather) being as unknowable as you claim.
“furhermore, the future climate is much likelier to be driven by large black swan events or non-linear occurrences than anything put in a computer model. ”
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Interesting assertion.
Historical and paleoclimate studies show the opposite. A system with a limited number of states and a high degree of stability within any one state. Major climate change is causally linked to clear driving factors, whether it is orbital change in the Milankovitch cycles, tectonic effects of the closing of the Panama channel, the carbon ‘belch’ of the PETM or the regular succession of seasons in the higher latitudes.
A big ‘black swan’ event might be a major asteroid strike, or a super-eruption like Yellowstone… or a process that puts comparable amounts of non-condensing GHGs into the atmosphere as such exceptional geological excursions.
“1) The so called energy budget will be changed many times before we reach a point where accuracy of it is refined to a truly useable level — decades to centuries — and by the way, it will change along the way and act differently along the way in response to a nearly infinite number of drivers.”
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No, the energy budget is closely constrained by the stability of the solar input. Unless you are expecting gross climate effects all that you can change are details about how that ‘fixed’ input propagates through the system. Past climate history puts very strong constraints on the possible range of behavior. Energy in and energy out are well defined and well measured, all we are arguing about is really the ‘gradient between the surface we live on and the effective energy emitting surface of the globe.
“This is not calcuable in such a complex system of when and where CO2 will be at any time in any concentration at any time of year in any atmospheric conditions. There is to much randomness and chaos in the real system for this to be calculable Not to mention the fact that actual forcings, were they relevant, could just as easily negative 1 or 5 or whatever.”
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Military research in the 50s, tracking radioactive fallout from nuclear tests, established conclusively that CO2 is well mixed, the ‘chaotic variations’ you are invoking are about as real as a claim that a sugared coffee will alter in sweetness from mouthful to mouthful.
“There will be massive climate change no matter what we do over the long-run. ”
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The only statement in your list I completely agree with.
How we respond and adapt to climate change on whatever timescale or ‘long-run’ you consider is a combination of how robust and flexible our societies can be and how well we understand the possible changes that could occur.
You have expressed extreme pessimism about the limits of our knowledge, I dont think that is justified by the historical record or the depth of knowledge of the physics and specifically the thermodynamics.
The energy change represented by the extra CO2 is the biggest and fastest changing causal agency in the climate at present – and for the last few thousand years. It can be exceeded by albedo changes, either in cloud coverage or ice/snow extent. But the best evidence for both of those factors is that they are amplifying the CO2 effect.
Handwaving about the complexity or chaos of the climate does not negate the requirement to consider the effect of such a large magnitude change to the system Even chaotic systems have comuputerable and predictable ranges of behavior. Thats why we can build quite accurate water-clocks from the chaotic dripping of a spout!
Complex, chaotically dissipative systems have a profound built-in trait.
You can never change just ONE thing.

@John B: “No, science is not all about attack. Idologically driven, so-called “skepticism” is all about attack, which is why climate scientists sadly have t0 take it into account.”
I think you are misunderstanding my point. I used the word “attack” because that was the word you used. I would normally have used the word “scepticism”. And I stand by what I said, although I’ll try to rephrase it to make it clearer:
Science is all about scepticism. Science cannot progress if we all just agree with the latest idea. Science has to be testable, repeatable, and falsifiable. Climate science is none of these. Data and algorithms are withheld/hidden (so the findings cannot be tested or replicated) and when actual observations contradict theory, instead of throwing out the theory, Climate science assimilates the observations and retrospectively changes it’s predictions to match the observations ()so it isn’t falsifiable). And this is even to the extend of changing the name of the phenomenon it is supposedly observing – vis: “Global Warming” is only ever uttered by sceptics these days; AGW believers prefer the term “Climate Change” because Earth isn’t actually warming, and hasn’t been for over a decade. That’s not science, it’s marketing.
So, please, explain it to me in terms I can understsand: if Earth isn’t actually warming – what is all the fuss about? I promise to listen.

Missed somthing.
@John B again (I promise I’m not having a go at you): previously you said:
No, they did not criticise it, that was done by skeptics. So, why not? I think they knew it would be misinterpreted or deliberately misrepresented, so they went for a simplification. The cycles in question are over thousands of years. They are started by other factors, e,g, Milankovitch, but then the CO2 released by the oceans starts to drive temperature as a feedback ,until other factors dampen things down. That is what the science says. The lag is a few hundred years, but after that CO2 drives things (not exclusively, but significantly) for thousands of years.
And in my reply I asked you this:
That’s interesting. Can you point me to any published papers which discuss this effect (the “CO2 driving things for thousands of years”) because I’ve not come across this before.
I suspect you overlooked my question in your reply re the word “attack”, but I really would appreciate it if you could point me to the work that supports this assertion. I am not trying to make a point here, and I am quite prepared to admit that it is ignorance on my part that I don’t know this already.

John B: “until other factors dampen things down. That is what the science says. ”
“Other” factors? I would have thought that “the science” would have a better explanation. By the way, have you ever seen a Milankovitch forcing chart to check its correlation with ice age turning points? I keep wondering why I have never seen such a chart.

izen: “But it takes a mature conspiracy theorist to ascribe the correlation between all these measurements to systematic errors always favouring AGW – or worse that it is a global cabal with fabrication by every involved scientists on the planet.”
This is the same lame tactic that warmers have been using for years. Claim that the skeptics are about conspiracy theories as a way of showing that they are nuts. But skeptics don’t talk about conspiracies; only warmers attribute conspiracy theories to them. No conspiracies are required. Only politically like minded people or people with like minded agendas are required. And we can see this effect in action all of the time. When Mann publishes upside down Tiljander data it is not just one man who is making one mistake. His paper is peer reviewed and the peers are silent about the mistake. The scientific journals that he publishes in are silent about the mistake. The AGW blogs are silent about the mistake. And they are not just silent once over one mistake. Mann has had the issue explained to him and he has repeated the mistake three times. And all of these people have been silent three times when the mistake was already widely known. And regarding the errors, can you point to one of Mann’s many mistakes that were in opposition to the AGW agenda.
Also, tell me what you think that Keith Briffa means when he says these words in one of the climategate emails.
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. ”
What do you suppose the “pressure” is that he is talking about?

John B — My apologies.
My reply was to Izen for his crazy response.
Izen:
Read my last post to John B was meant for you.
Futhermore, Izen:
izen: “But it takes a mature conspiracy theorist to ascribe the correlation between all these measurements to systematic errors always favouring AGW – or worse that it is a global cabal with fabrication by every involved scientists on the planet.”
It is not a conspiracy theory, though Mann et al conspired, it is a large scale corruption scheme, with lots of like-minded folks in on the game, and gaming rubes like you. What is it that causes you to enthusiastically embrace a corrupt endeavor? Work on it.

Hi Tilo Reber-

Of course I see the correlation. CO2 follows temperature. But temperature doesn’t follow CO2. That is why you can see cases where CO2 is rising steeply and temperature reverses, ignoring the CO2 forcing that is still on the rise and going where some other forcing is taking it. This shows clearly that there are other elements of natural variation that are stronger than CO2. Considering how weak Milankovich is suppose to be, either there are some other very strong elements overriding CO2 or CO2 induced climate sensitivity is simply not that large. I have yet to see any evidence that it is as large as 3C per CO2 doubling.

Yes, as temperatures increase or decrease due to Milankovitch forcing, CO2 is likely absorbed or released from the oceans, under normal conditions without huge influxes of carbon into or out of the carbon cycle. If on an upswing, CO2 released from the oceans amplifies the Milankovitch forcing, and the water vapor feedback to CO2 amplifies the CO2 forcing. So the system tends to wander, with initial slight forcings amplified by various positive feedbacks. Once icecaps start growing, they also tend to continue growing by the ice/albedo feedback.
Looking at your graph, there is a very steep rise in temperature at about 330 thousand years ago. That sudden rise could possibly be due to a medium to small methane release from some source, just speculating of course. As icecaps grow and sea levels fall, pressures on some hydrate deposits are decreased, and this allows them to start to dissociate, or so goes the theory. Other scientists think that the methane comes from decay of plant sources. But there is a spike in methane concentrations right around 330 thousand years ago:
madmikedavies.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/800px-vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg
The methane curves seem to follow the temperature curves even more closely than CO2, and seem to have less of a time lag.
Another thing left out of your model is water vapor concentration. Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. So, if glaciation was taking place, and temperatures were declining, water vapor forcing would also decline, leading to a further downward trend in temperature.

Hi D. Patterson-
No outright lying either done or intended.

Now you are resorting to outright lies. Even a cursory glance at a chart of Earth’s geological past reveals there was no consistent pattern in the relationship between temperature and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. For millions and tens of millions of years at a time there were anti-correlations and inconsistent rates of change. If carbon dioxide had the influence claimed by AGW proponents, the geological evidence we actually observe in Nature could not exist. So, you are faced with making a choice between the AGW conjecture on faith or the physical evidence observed in Nature.

It’s a nice line of BS, but clearly there is a correlation between greenhouse gas levels and temperature in the Vostok ice cores, as Tilo Reber acknowledges.
madmikedavies.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/800px-vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg
Clearly, these curves correlate with one another. In normal Milankovitch driven and water vapor, CO2, methane and ice/albedo feedback amplified warming and cooling, there is an obvious and transparent correlation.
AGW is not normal Milankovitch driven warming and cooling. It is a special case of warming, CO2 driven with methane, methane atmospheric chemistry, and water vapor positive feedbacks.
The time lag is actually something we have to worry about. As temperatures rise, CO2 is clearly going to start coming back out of the oceans.

If there was no ice in the summer at the poles at both extremes of the Milankovitch cycle then we would have no ice ages?Does the occurrence of ice ages depend on the average temperature of the Earth over the Milankovitch cycles?