Mike Bromley writes in: BBC has the explanation for the European LIA… it wasn’t really an ice age at all. See this strange quote.
“The Little Ice Age wasn’t really an ice age of any kind – the idea that Europe had a relentless sequence of cold winters is frankly barking” – Dr Mike Lockwood Reading University
No real discussion of the mechanisms that I could understand, referenced some papers your front line team would profitably have a go with. The BBC has solved the whole riddle. this has nothing to do with Global warming and it’s all local variability.
Full story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15199065
So it’s the Sun? I thought that had been ruled out? Only sceptics say that.
Dr Mike Lockwood is a obviously denier of the Little Ice Age!
BBC again trying to justify their stance on CAGW.
We already knew about the variance of UV it is the changing magnetic field that does it which the BBC do not mention.
Sparks says: October 11, 2011 at 12:00 am
Brilliant collection of evidence there Sparks.
Usual rubbish from the warmist camp so I do not know why we are wasting time commenting upon it.
Variability lasting more than a century!!! Is that not a trend with significant felt impact?
Local variability affecting the majority of the populated area of the Northern Hemisphere!! Given that the majoriy of the land mass and hence populated area is in the Northern Hemisphere, even if this was not a global phenomen it is of utmost importance to mankind in general.
Is there any evidence to suggest that the Southern Hemisphere was warmer whilst the Northern Hemisphere was cool during the LIA? Without such evidence, the claim that there is no global effect is conjecture.
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However, to some extent the reasoning supports my long hefd view, namely that there is no such thing as Global warming; changes in climate have a local/regional effect. The IPCC does not wish to mention this since it wants to promote some solution to an alleged global problem. For many countries, ‘global’ warming would be hugely beneficial. The UK for one would greatly benefit by a few extra degrees, so too Canada. If countries performed their own evaluations of the effect on themselves many of the richest countries would see ‘global’ warming as a god send and this would make it more difficult to politically influence the population of those countries supporting efforts to curb a feared problem in some distant country. ,
If we now start getting more and more frequent cold winters over the next 10 or 20 years, it will kill the public support of the CAGW scam. In fact, the penny is beginning to drop. In the last few days, the Daily Mail has carried articles on the crippling effect of green taxes/subsidies on industry and its competitive and how jobs have been relocated abroad and a story about how the UK is investing £15 billion laying cables to France so that we can use their nuclear electricity since the government fears blackout due to the UK’s present energy policy. Sheer madness to force the UK to be dependent upon another country who will have huge demands on its surplus power from other large countries such as Germany. The UK would be better to spend the £15billion building new power plants (not wind) to meet its own needs. Of course, that is too sensible for politicians.
I would have thought that everyone here had realised by now that when the temperature goes up it’s caused by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. When the temperature goes down it’s caused by natural variability.
Well, that’s good news! So it wont be -23 degrees C, but only -22,9.
AGW saves the day.
Dr. Lockwood is correct. The LIA was not “an ice age of any kind.” The current geologic ice age began ~30 MYA and won’t end anytime in the near future. The LIA wasn’t even an ice age in the popular sense (a glacial stage).
The LIA was the interglacial equivalent of a glacial stadial. It was also the coldest Holocene stadial since the 8.2 KYA Cooling Event… But the LIA definitely was not a discrete ice age of any kind.
While the LIA was very cold by Holocene standards, it wasn’t a “relentless sequence of cold winters.” It was colder on average than the previous 7500 years; but there were plenty of brutally hot summers and mild winters during the LIA.
What I don’t understand in the way the AGW crowd describe this as a “regional” cooling that apparently has no effect on “global” warming.
Erm, but is not the “global” climate the sum of all “regional” climates? And surely if one region, such as the whole northern hemisphere, gets cooler surely that would mean that the globe gets cooler.
In order for this not to be the case then while the northern hemisphere is getting cooler the southern hemisphere must get warmer by a similar magnitude. Is there any evidence that this is not the case?
Just arskin…
‘The latest xyz in climate is far more changeable than we-runaway-anthropogenic-global-warming-CO2-is-a-toxic scientists had previously thought’, the new refrain in the old song.
The only consensus coming out of all their studies is the climate is far more changeable than they had previously thought.
Maybe one day it will sink in.
Hmm, toxic scientists..
I listened to a spokeswoman for the Met Office on the BBC yesterday she said the northern hemisphere might get colder but the southern half would not and so there would be no change in the increase in global warming and she also threw in that the Arctic was getting warmer as well..where do they get these people?
Mike Bromley the Kurd says:
October 10, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Anthony, unless there is a second Mike Bromley on here, I didn’t post the LIA story. I submitted a blurb about Scientific American.
Whilst I have no desire to calim to be the originator of this, I did post it on the recent Green Rock/Geologist psot yesterday as soon as the Beeb published it! Not being techy computer wise & all that I posted it in there!
Anyway the important thing is as many have said, they are readying themselves for any eventuality so that they have a ready excuse for why their previous prediction went wrong!!! 🙂
AtB
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/10/rare-earths-rock-green-tech-and-geopolitics/
Sorry, I meant this one! Have been working away the past few weeks & am in the middle of catching up on all sorts so have been a tad tardy on some things. Apologies to one & all! 😉
Back when I was but a snot-nosed PhD student, a few of the rudiments and theory of practical scientific philosophy were hammered into my head, so that I didn’t make a prat of myself in public. One of these fundamentals is this: always state your assumptions before arguing a point.
The current debate on human-induced global warming has very rarely done this, and has never overtly stated their main assumption: “Assuming energy and other input into the Earth to be constant…”.
This is what they are assuming with all arguments, and as we can see from historical records, the solar input is most definitely not constant, and indeed due to variations in the magnetosphere and solar wind, the cosmic ray input to the earth is also not constant. Given that the assumption of constancy is incorrect, the first task is therefore to determine how great an effect these inconstancies exert on the earth’s climatic system, and once this has been accomplished to use this to normalise the historical temperarure records so as to exclude these inputs.
The Climate Change evangelists have never done this explicitly, therefore their arguments should be regarded as suspect until they do this.
David L. Hagen says:
October 10, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Now that is remarkable…..
Such technology must have made it to the New World, for we have reports of skating on the Hudson River. and on the Brandywine.
How can we recover this amazing technological expertise?
___________________________________________
Too bad we can not ask my Father. He used to skate up the Bronx River to see my Mother. The Bronx River parallels the Hudson River heading into NYC before emptying into the Atlantic
Patrick said:
“However I have known Reading University since 1972 when it used to be “Reading Technical College”, a vocation school, mainly offering excellent City and Guides and National Certificate courses A few years ago all the UK tech colleges got grandiose ideas and became “Universities” .”
Errrr, it has been a University since 1926!
http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/about-timeline.aspx
Quote from the article.
“The new research involved plugging SIM’s ultraviolet measurements into the Met Office Hadley Centre computer model of the world’s climate. The results of the modelling re-inforce the idea that the UV variations affect winter weather across the region; and they indicate how it may happen.
UV is absorbed in the stratosphere, the upper atmosphere, by ozone. So in the quiet bit of the solar cycle, when there is less UV to absorb, the stratosphere is relatively cooler.
The Hadley Centre model shows that the effects of this percolate down through the atmosphere, changing wind speeds, including the jet stream that circles the globe above Europe, North America and Russia”.
Surely the article should have been headed “Met Office now admit that there was a Little Ice Age”? Thanks to cooperation with Imperial College and Reading University (which closed its physics department some years ago), Hadley Centre has now been able to tweak its model to show that there was a Little Ice Age (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) after all The Centre is still working to find an explanation as to why the LIA also extended into the Southern Hemisphere that does not conflict with AGW. When it has found a solution it will adjust its model again to show that the LIA was global”.
Bloke Down Pub said:
“I would have thought that everyone here had realised by now that when the temperature goes up it’s caused by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. When the temperature goes down it’s caused by natural variability.”
You almost got the science correct.
More precisely, the research says UV variability modulates the warming Northern hemisphere climate. It’s a bit like having a DC signal gradually increasing in amplitude with an AC signal added to it. The troughs of the AC signal will subtract from the DC signal, making it ‘colder’ than would be the case if the AC signal were not there.
Soloman Green said:
“Surely the article should have been headed “Met Office now admit that there was a Little Ice Age”?”
If you do a simple search on the Met Office web site, you’ll find plenty of material referring to ‘Little Ice Age’. Will Soloman Green admit he needs to look harder?
Sadly much of what the BBC decides to report is doctored to ensure that it is consistent with its own particular brand of permanent bias. This factor is now well known here in the UK and as such much of what one reads from that organisation has to be taken with a pinch of salt (treated with the utmost caution).
The LIA was NOT an Ice age. Ice ages last for a few hundred thousand years. However it was a global even which meant that the earth was significantly colder than the few hundred years prior to it.
I guess that is why the researchers who have discovered and confirmed it called it the LITTLE ice age.
The BBC slant on it reeks of desperation though. They are trying to show that in spite of the vast amount of evidence to the contrary, the little ice age never happened. That in spite of the evidence of a large solar effect on the climate, that the sun has no bearing on “global warming”
It is the height of dishonest spin to suggest that the large changes we have seen are directly related to solar fluctuation, but yet this has no impact on global warming.
Mike Lockwood’s quote that there wasn’t a Little Ice Age at all during the Maunder Minimum, after he says that low UV radiation for many decades could cause cooling, is completely wrong.
He’s apparently not looked at the evidence, which in a way makes sense, since he studies solar issues. The first line of evidence is that borehole reconstructions from many places in six continents show a substantial cooling of about 1 degree C about 400 years ago.
That isn’t local, Prof. Lockwood. That is a Little Ice Age, correlating with low UV in all likelihood, since we know from current experience that a weak sun, with few sunspots, have substantially lower UV radiation.
Yes, the LIA was just local variability, which just happened to be cold almost everywhere on the globe at the same time, for centuries.
Neil says:
October 10, 2011 at 10:17 pm
Hmm. Interesting.
So if there wasn’t a LIA, the Hudson River couldn’t have frozen in 1775 / 1776.
That comment is backed up by a Wikipedia article about Lake Champlain, which is adjacent to and linked to, the Hudson River.
“On February 19, 1932, boats were able to sail on Lake Champlain. No living person could remember the lake being free of ice during the winter up until then.[14]” Link broken.
However, the lake once again freezes in winter.
“Ferry
North of Ticonderoga, New York, the lake widens appreciably; ferry service is operated by the Lake Champlain Transportation Company at:
Charlotte, Vermont to Essex, New York (may not travel when the lake is frozen)
Burlington, Vermont to Port Kent, New York (seasonal)
Grand Isle, Vermont to Cumberland Head, part of Plattsburgh, New York (year-round icebreaking service)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Champlain#Ferry
The Delaware crossing was no picnic either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_Crossing_the_Delaware_by_Emanuel_Leutze,_MMA-NYC,_1851.jpg
Patrick,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/10/bbc-the-little-ice-age-was-all-about-solar-uv-variability-wasnt-an-ice-age-at-all/#comment-764806
I’m personally no fan of Mike Lockwood nor Reading University (even though I’m very familar with Reading itself) but 30 seconds of Googling showed me that you are a bit wide of the mark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Reading
Regards
KevinUK
Dear Ville (age) Troll,
Let’s cut to the chase. All your inane comments are predicated in your belief that someone did some kind of scientific experiment and we are all too stupid to understand it. Hence your quote in your first post, ““Sarah Ineson, who performed the experiments…”.
If you would carefully read the David Whitehouse article you will find that no experiments were performed. Different values were plugged into computer models. Sorry friend. That is not science no matter what institute of higher learning is funding the program. It is the scientific equivalent of moving the joystick in your favorite video game. Careful inputs produce desired outcomes. And of course, if the desired out come is not achieved with the careful input, change the program until you have a winner. It is what passes for science in far too many cases.