Guest post by William McClenney
This piece is advisory in nature to the many state Attorneys General, Eric Holder and any attorneys that may be involved in joining any of the many suits brought under the Public Trust doctrine beginning in May 2011 through the filings engendered by way of “Our Children’s Trust” (http://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/legal-action/lawsuits).
It remains unknown at this point in time if any of these many suits will be successful, but as it is a shotgun pattern, just one would set a legal precedent. For this reason I thought I would take a moment to do one of the things I do best, technical litigation support. In this case invention of an argument from whole technical cloth, which, if used adeptly, has the potential to be a gamechanger.
The entire concept hinges upon the definition of just what the public trust is. We can rest assured that the plaintiffs have given this matter quite a bit of thought given the litigation history surrounding the use of the public trust doctrine and how it could now be applied to air instead of water and land, it’s traditional application.
So the argument to be progressed here applies to the defense.
We will first build the appropriate question from which can be evolved a fairly strong argument that nimbly avoids getting into the normal “carbon weeds” type of defense:
- What is the public trust?
- What is the public trust climate?
- What is the public trust climate at an end extreme interglacial?
Some of you will instantly recognize where I am going with this as bits and pieces were delivered in my first two essays here. We will be utilizing the simple to understand principle of signal to noise. And you may even recognize some of the quotations as their ultimate relevance may have just come into fine focus right here.
Because we are going to use this to define the Public Trust – Climate. I think of this as the “Big Bang Theory” as opposed to the “Steady State” one it replaced.
Crucial is the understanding that the public trust in this case may be stated as an “affirmative duty to protect and preserve the atmospheric trust”. Any such definition immediately runs afoul of just what constitutes the Public Trust Climate such that its domain may be preserved and protected.
As this derivation is intended primarily for attorneys, the prose will not be so scientifically rigorous however I will be including some choice literature quotations in the spirit of driving the point’s home at the appropriate cusps.
We all live today near what may very well be the end Holocene, the third interglacial considered an extreme interglacial in the literature. Although there are different ways to define an “extreme interglacial”, we will use an oversimplification, it is an interglacial in which either temps or sea levels have at least been found to equal or exceed our own.
It is best that we establish the whole framework for the ensuing discussion with a direct quote from the scientific literature. I have highlighted the relevant bits for the impatient, but I strongly recommend reading this until you understand it. From the conclusions:
“Various lines of scientific evidence over the last decade have led to the conclusion that the last million years of the Quaternary may be viewed as consisting of two disparate halves. The early portion (1.0–0.5 Ma) was a quiescent, stable period when fluctuating sealevels were always below that of the present and this period is marked in many places by massive soil development. This was followed by a turbulent later half (0.5 Ma to present) in which the amplitude of sea-level fluctuations was much greater, resulting in several major interglacial flooding events. The point of transition is MIS 11, which has long been recognized as one of the longer and warmer Quaternary interglacial episodes (Howard, 1997; Droxler and Farrell, 2000; McManus et al., 2003; EPICA, 2004).
“As we have established here and elsewhere, the MIS 11 highstand was in excess of 20 m, making this perhaps the single most important global event of the past million years, and all the more so for its potential heuristic predictive value as being the interglacial most similar to the present interglacial now in progress in terms of Milankovitchian forcing (Loutre and Berger, 2003). It thus becomes essential that the full extent and duration of the MIS 11 event be more widely recognized and acknowledged.”
From Olson and Hearty, 2009, “A sustained +21 m sea-level highstand during MIS 11 (400 ka): Direct fossil and sedimentary evidence from Bermuda”, Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 28, Issues 3-4, February 2009, Pages 271-285.
This is the most compact text I have found to lay the foundation of “when we live”, the wide-angle lens of just the past million years of which only the last “turbulent half” is relevant to the Public Trust Climate. Allow me to set the stage.
About 2.8 million years ago, as the earth continued to cool down, the first “modern” northern hemisphere glaciations began to occur. We began to experience glacials (ice ages) and interglacials or warm times, such as the most recent one, the Holocene, the one in which all of human civilization has occurred. Ice ages and interglacials occurred in couples every 41,000 years, which matches the obliquity in our orbit around the sun (the wobble on our rotational tilt axis). During the period between 1 million years and 800,000 years ago we transitioned into a 100,000 year ice age/interglacial couple, which matches the eccentricity in our orbit about the sun (as close as it gets to a circle now but cycling towards an ellipse and back to near circular every 100,000 years). But the eccentricity itself varies, a cycle on top of a cycle, such that in two cycles from now (200kyrs) we will achieve the maximum ellipse or eccentricity (a maxima), and in two cycles from then, we will experience near circular conditions like now (a minima).
This is important. Olson and Hearty above refer to MIS-11, technospeak for the Holsteinian interglacial. The latter half of the Holsteinian is considered by many to represent the closest analog to our interglacial. I say the latter half because The Holsteinian appears unique in the last million years of climate in that it may have lasted something like 30,000 years, or 1.5 to 2 precession cycles. Precession is the third orbital variable that paces climate. Five of the last six interglacials have each lasted roughly one half of a precession cycle. The precession cycle itself varies between 19,000 and 23,000 years, and we are presently at the 23,000 year part of the cycle, making the current age of the Holocene exactly half…….
Is the Holocene interglacial, our interglacial, just about kaput? Well, that’s the trillion dollar question, isn’t it? I went deep into the science on this in “The Antithesis”, you may refresh or intimate yourself with the poignant literature there. The present consensus seems to be that we will not have an extended interglacial this time, even though we are also at an eccentricity minima, just like the Holsteinian was 400kyrs ago. All things considered, our interglacial seems to match best the last half of the Holsteinian, the bit where we fall off into an ice age.
If we use the simple definition provided above for an extreme interglacial, then we are the third of three. The other two being the Holsteinian and the Eemian (MIS-5e).
The ends of those two may very well define the Public Trust Climate today. In
other words, the defense.
A recent definition of the timespan involved for the Holsteinian is 428kyrs ago to 397kya. From Olson and Hearty (2009) above we have:
“Four TIMS U/Th ages on flowstone directly overlying (at millimetric scale) beach deposits at +21 m in Dead End Caves yield a weighted mean of 399 ±11 ka (Hearty and Olson, 2008), confirming a correlation
with MIS 11.”
A sea level highstand of +21.3 meters, at least, was achieved right about the very end of the Holsteinian, the very first of the extreme interglaciations! We have our first benchmark of Public Trust Climate. This can happen anyway, whether by carbon or not. And if by carbon, what was the source at the end Holsteinian? What could one do about that if it was carbon, obviously natural carbon?
And it happened again, right at the very end of the second extreme interglacial, the Eemian.
So, in continuing our construction of what might reasonably constitute the “public trust climate” at an end extreme interglacial, we will look to Hearty again, this time as Hearty and Neumann (Quaternary Science Reviews 20 [2001] 1881–1895):
“The geology of the Last Interglaciation (sensu stricto, marine isotope substage (MIS) 5e) in the Bahamas records the nature of sea level and climate change. After a period of quasi-stability for most of the interglaciation, during which reefs grew to +2.5 m, sea level rose rapidly at the end of the period, incising notches in older limestone. After brief stillstands at +6 and perhaps +8.5 m, sea level fell with apparent speed to the MIS 5d lowstand and much cooler climatic conditions. It was during this regression from the MIS 5e highstand that the North Atlantic suffered an oceanographic ‘‘reorganization’’ about 11873 ka ago. During this same interval, massive dune-building greatly enlarged the Bahama Islands. Giant waves reshaped exposed lowlands into chevron-shaped beach ridges, ran up on older coastal ridges, and also broke off and threw megaboulders onto and over 20 m-high cliffs. The oolitic rocks recording these features yield concordant whole-rock amino acid ratios across the archipelago. Whether or not the Last Interglaciation serves as an appropriate analog for our ‘‘greenhouse’’ world, it nonetheless reveals the intricate details of climatic transitions between warm interglaciations and near glacial conditions.”
Boettger, et al (Quaternary International 207 [2009] 137–144) abstract it:
“In terrestrial records from Central and Eastern Europe the end of the Last Interglacial seems to be characterized by evident climatic and environmental instabilities recorded by geochemical and vegetation indicators. The transition (MIS 5e/5d) from the Last Interglacial (Eemian, Mikulino) to the Early Last Glacial (Early Weichselian, Early Valdai) is marked by at least two warming events as observed in geochemical data on the lake sediment profiles of Central (Gro¨bern, Neumark–Nord, Klinge) and of Eastern Europe (Ples). Results of palynological studies of all these sequences indicate simultaneously a strong increase of environmental oscillations during the very end of the Last Interglacial and the beginning of the Last Glaciation. This paper discusses possible correlations of these events between regions in Central and Eastern Europe. The pronounced climate and environment instability during the interglacial/glacial transition could be consistent with the assumption that it is about a natural phenomenon, characteristic for transitional stages. Taking into consideration that currently observed ‘‘human-induced’’ global warming coincides with the natural trend to cooling, the study of such transitional stages is important for understanding the underlying processes of the climate changes.”
So there we have it, end extreme interglacial climate noise laid out for us. Could this be the Pax Climatica of the plaintiffs? Or would this “Pax” be better described as “The pronounced climate and environment instability during the interglacial/glacial transition could be consistent with the assumption that it is about a natural phenomenon, characteristic for transitional stages.” The Holsteinian is four interglacials back, so not must has withstood these erasures, but the Eemian is the most recent interglacial, and we know it far better. In fact Greenland ice cores do not quite make it to the beginning of the Eemian before encountering massive shearing and then bedrock. You know what that means don’t you? The Greenland ice cap may very well have melted away during the early Eemian…….
But even so, the end of the last extreme interglacial was quite the wild climate ride! Two major migrations of plant species, documenting two thermal excursions in Europe, the second one giving rise, literally to a sea level highstand 10 times the IPCC 2007 AR4 worst case estimate of 0.59 meters anthropogenic. And that is if we use just the lower-end estimate of +6 meters for the second thermal pulse.
The basis for establishment of reasonable doubt………
But the Public Trust Climate might be worse than we thought. If we stick with Hearty (Quaternary Science Reviews 26 [2007] 2090–2112) we come of the second order noise, anthropogenic interpretation noise:
A global aggregation of Eemian sea levels from 12 studies. The range is roughly +4 to +40 meters for the end-Eemian highstand. There’s a fair bit of litigative mileage to be had by the appropriately acquisitive attorney.
Follow this logic. From THE PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE IN NATURAL RESOURCE LAW: EFFECTIVE JUDICIAL INTERVENTION, Joseph L. Sax (1970) we have the following:
“Three types of restrictions on governmental authority are often thought to be imposed by the public trust: first, the property subject to the trust must not only be used for a public purpose, but it must be held available for use by the general public; second, the property may not be sold, even for a fair cash equivalent; and third, the property must be maintained for particular types of uses. The last claim is expressed in two ways. Either it is urged that the resource must be held available for certain traditional uses, such as navigation, recreation, or fishery, or it is said that the uses which are made of the property must be in some sense related to the natural uses peculiar to that resource.”
Allow me to interpret all of this from the perspective of establishing the “Public Trust Climate” at end extreme interglacials:
-
In terms of Pleistocene climate, the Holsteinian establishes the beginning of the “turbulent later half (0.5 Ma to present) in which the amplitude of sea-level fluctuations was much greater, resulting in several major interglacial flooding events.” Meaning that MIS-11, spanning the period from about 428kya to 397kya, was the first extreme interglacial. The latter half of MIS-11 is considered to be the better analogue to the present interglacial in terms of orbital dynamics.
-
At 399 ± 11ka, the +21.3 meter lagoonal deposits suggest that the grand highstand also occurred very close to the end of the first extreme interglacial, just as it did at the end of the next extreme interglacial, MIS-5e, the Eemian.
-
This establishes that 2 out of the 3 late Pleistocene extreme interglacials suffered their grand highstands just as they were ending, and the third, ours, the Holocene, is at its probable end right now.
This presents a rather wide envelope of natural climate noise as the “public trust climate” at the end extreme interglacials as this would appear to represent the “…natural uses peculiar to that resource.”
There are actually two arguments in favor of the defense to be exploited here. The first is the aforesaid redefinition of the “Public Trust Climate” with respect to its rather wide range of climate noise at the end extreme interglacials from which we must somehow discern the anthropogenic signal as distinct in order to assess what, if any, harm has been done. And second, there is the problem of academic paleoclimate noise, which can be re-stated that even on things which actually have happened, the science is not that particularly well settled, which makes consideration of the science being settled on things which have not yet happened a bit unsettling at best.
In other words two distinct caches of reasonable doubt………
And you don’t even have to get anywhere near the “carbon weeds”………….
William
Mr. McClenney, my take away from your piece is that the Public Trust must preserve the natural uses peculiar to that resource.
So in that sense, people do not as much own property in Florida, but are renting it temporarily. The ocean will one day demand much of Florida be returned to one of its other temporary natural uses as a live reef. The logical extention is that the Public Trust Doctrine should if anything be used to block attempts to prevent a rising sea level. It’s worth a try.
The end result will be to show that the Public Trust Doctrine is a sham in any case. The government routinely sells rights to visit, fish, graze, log, mine, drill, discharge, bury, and even pollute with in legal limits. No one doubts that this is a proper excercise of a government to manage resourses and assets owned by the public. Therefore if the selling of such rights are contrary to the Public Trust Doctrine, it is the Doctrine that must be rewritten to be less absolute.
Judges don’t just say win/lose or guilty/not_guilty. They issue long learned opinions saying why they decided the way they did. I would love to see what the Supremes would do with the AGW fraud. The mainstream media pays a lot of attention to SCOTUS. It could be a turning point,
OTOH, litigation is a crap shoot.
True, but probably not for another 100,000 years or so at the end of the next glaciation. It is more likely as we slide out of this interglacial into the next glacial period that we will see Florida just about double in size and reach all the way to the continental shelf in both the Gulf and the Atlantic. Florida and Cuba will be separated by a narrow strait narrower than the English Channel is today. The English Channel, North Sea, and Irish Sea will disappear and you will be able to walk from Dublin to Paris if you so have a mind to.
Maybe after the end of that glacial period we would see a flooding of Florida for a short period (in a relative geological time sense) but Florida spends most of its time much larger than it is today.
Since it is normal to have extreme fluctuations at the boundaries of interglacials, it follows that anything that interferes with such fluctuations is an abuse of a Public Trust. So mitigation is illegal.
;p
Thanks for the interesting analysis in this article, as a scientific brief.
I am, though, more interested in the legal principles – though I hasten to add that my expertise is in English law rather that any of the laws applicable within the United States. However, my understanding is that the “public trust” doctrine is essentially that some resources should preserved and made available for public use – so it is generally applied in the positive sense of allowing the public use of (in England) such things as public common land, highways and sea foreshores.
The main legal hurdle facing these suits in the US, as I understand it, is that the public trust doctrine has not been used before in the negative sense of seeking to restrict activities (emissions of CO2) in a “resource” (the atmosphere) that is by its nature available to everyone – not only within the jurisdiction of the US federal or state courts, but everyone worldwide.
There is already a developed legal doctrine (the federal common law of nuisance) allowing federal court to abate out-of-state nuisances and pollution. However in American Electric Power v Connecticut the Supreme Court unanimously held that this judicial power had already been displaced by the EPA’s rule-making power; that the legislative branch (so long as it acted by framing these rule-making powers) was the proper branch of government to handle the issue – and that practically it would be very difficult for federal court to handle all the issues involved a judicial nuisance claim.
I think we will find that the “public trust” doctrine, applied in the negative sense of restricting activities, will be held to be no more than another instance of the federal common law of nuisance –therefore also displaced by the EPA’s rule-making power as in AEP v Connecticut. I therefore doubt that any scientific brief will be needed in the “Our Children’s Trust” suits – it will more be needed in the Texas et al challenge to the EPA’s endangerment finding.
commieBob says: October 22, 2011 at 1:38 pm
I understand, but what’s their alternative? They gotta **** or get off the pot some time.
@ur momisugly Stephen Rasey, re
“No argument that the Government DOES issue permits to pollute. Ferd’s question is that under the Public Trust Doctrine, where does the Government get the AUTHORITY to sell public assets (clean air, land, water (in theory)) to private entities to despoil them? I think because the Government does this, the Public Trust Doctrine in regard to the ban on selling assets is insubstantial.”
Government’s authority for Public Trust doctrine is the authority of the Trustee, and almost any Trust. The Trustee has the authority and responsibility to manage the Trust for the benefit of the Beneficiaries, according to the terms of the Trust and applicable laws. An example is a country’s coastal area (or State, as the case may be). The Government as Trustee assigns where a port can be built, how large it shall be, and various other restrictions on the port and the waters. Another area is rivers and streams, where California, for example, manages the waters as Trustee of a Public Trust. I’m not greatly familiar with the Great Lakes Region, but I suspect that the various states that border those huge lakes also act as Trustees in a Public Trust doctrine.
The idea is not to allow private entities to despoil the assets, but to protect them from indiscriminate over-use, and to ensure they are available to all persons (the Beneficiaries) for all-time.
For more reading on the history of Public Trust Doctrine, see
http://www.uvm.edu/~gflomenh/PA395-CMN-ASSTS/articles/sax.pdf
First I suffered a cpu meltdown a few months back, and I am not getting into WordPress yet, so the much needed typo fixes may not happen for a while…..Sorry.
Geologist, not a lawyer. But I have been doing environmental litigation support for over 20 years, and even though most of my time is spent cleaning up hazardous waste sites (my calling), I prefer litigation support because of the intensity of the technical challenges. And that is just a layer or so in highly complex litigations.
For those that queried why I did not include any discussion regarding the Holocene hypsithermal, or climate optimum, it was not all that relevant to the argument. The Holocene Climate Optimum (hypsithermal) occurred not that long after the “8.2k event”, a strong cold snap that immediately preceded it. Closer to the initiation of the interglacial than the end.
In terms of Loutre and Berger’s 2003 paper the 50,000 year prediction was based on modeling. It was soon refuted by Lisecki and Raymo (http://www.geology.utoronto.ca/Members/jhennison/Lisiecki%20-%20Raymo%202005.pdf):
“Recent research has focused on MIS 11 as a possible analog for the present interglacial [e.g., Loutre and Berger, 2003; EPICA community members, 2004] because both occur during times of low eccentricity. The LR04 age model establishes that MIS 11 spans two precession cycles, with 18O values below 3.6h for 20 kyr, from 398-418 ka. In comparison, stages 9 and 5 remained below 3.6h for 13 and 12 kyr, respectively, and the Holocene interglacial has lasted 11 kyr so far. In the LR04 age model, the average LSR of 29 sites is the same from 398-418 ka as from 250-650 ka; consequently, stage 11 is unlikely to be artificially stretched. However, the June 21 insolation minimum at 65N during MIS 11 is only 489 W/m2, much less pronounced than the present minimum of 474 W/m2. In addition, current insolation values are not predicted to return to the high values of late MIS 11 for another 65 kyr. We propose that this effectively precludes a “double precession-cycle” interglacial [e.g., Raymo, 1997] in the Holocene without human influence.”
The last sentence summed up an intense discussion on about 5 million years of globally distributed ocean sediment cores, widely cited as the “LR-04 stack”. As far as I can tell, that more or less ended it. I cover this in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/30/the-antithesis/
Again, this was intended primarily for attorneys. As difficult to understand as it may be for some, this is actually the 30,000 foot view zoomed into focus to the very ends of each previous extreme interglacial. The previous two appear to have gotten a bit uber-wobbly at their ends, and by what mechanism is this distinguishable from the Public Trust Climate at an end extreme interglacial?
Peter Miller says:
October 22, 2011 at 2:18 am
Heresy!
How dare you suggest there are natural climate cycles and then provide a perfectly reasonable and logical explanation for them.
———-
Your interpretation of the article may be based on a misunderstanding. That’s not your fault as it seems to be someone trying to be clever rather than clear.
The whole natural cycles argument is a logical fallacy. in other words: —X happened for such a reason in the past must mean that X is happening for the same reason—- now is just bad reasoning.
Since new causes have arisen the same effect can be produced in a different way.
Let’s have a bit more fun with the legal metaphor. Let William McClenney assume the role of a lawyer for the defense.
Here is the story:——
A woman is found dead in her apartment. She has a history of epilepsy. Her husband is arrested for murder.
Many of you murder skeptics are friends of the husband and claim that the only possible way she could have died is due to a fall arising from an epileptic episode.
This logic is bogus. William McClenney on the other hand uses a more sophisticated argument: that the husband cannot be proven to be guilty and there are plausible alternative reasons for the death apart from the husband’s possible actions. This logic is correct.
But being a good lawyer he has told the jury to ignore all the other evidence. These include:—
1. The woman had a bullet hole in her head,
2. The bullet plucked from her brain had rifling marks matching a pistol owned by the husband
3. The gun had the husband’s fingerprints on it
4. The husband’s hands had propellant on them
5. The footprint in a pool of blood matched the husband’s shoe.
The murder skeptics have explain-aways for all of these things, including suicide by the woman and incompetence and corruption by the police.
The take away message is: that was then this is now. Just because cycles accounted for climate change in the past IS NOT PROOF they are responsible for climate change now.
Myrrh says:
October 22, 2011 at 1:28 pm
sleight of hand ‘experiments’ taught in classrooms
they’re calling our basic building block food a poison contrary to traditional physics designations of what gases are toxic.
———
Speaking of “sleight of hand” no one is calling carbon a poison and no one is calling CO2 in its atmospheric concentrations a poison. It seems you make stuff up.
I am most interested in why the concensus is that the Holocene Interglacial is spent and about to plunge into the realm of Ice Age. Is this the best pattern match, or is it the best educated guess?
crosspatch says:
October 22, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Thank You very much, Crosspatch!
Mike McMillan says:
Excellent job of putting things in time perspective. Very clarifying. Are you really a lawyer?
William McClenney says:
. . . Geologist, not a lawyer. But I have been doing environmental litigation support . . .
Profound apologies. Insult not intended.
LazyTeenager says:
Let’s have a bit more fun with the legal metaphor. Let William McClenney assume the role of a lawyer for the defense.
Here is the story:——
A woman is found dead in her apartment. She has a history of epilepsy. Her husband is arrested for murder.
Let’s revise to a more appropriate metaphor.
The woman is not dead. She’s been that way for several billion years. The police want to tax the husband as punishment.
Lazyteenager
Geologists (not those working for government, as they have their opinions decided for them – or they lose their jobs) are the most sceptical of all for good reason – they have studied the past and understand the concept of natural cycles, which include climate cycles.
I, like most sceptics, detest the ‘climate science’ scare industry of grant-addicted individuals who need to distort their science’s data and findings in order to continue their comfortable lifestyles. These people are totally conflicted in that if they do not produce a continuous stream of scare stories, they would soon be out of a job – and they know it! So, they act accordingly.
The world has been warming (the last decade is an exception) for the past century – this is part of a natural cycle and almost none of it has anything to do with rising carbon dioxide levels.
A few months ago Anthony produced an article comparing the current warming cycle with other ones in this inter-glacial period. It was no surprise to see it was about average and nothing to get excited about.
My comments were obviously meant to be sarcastic, ridiculing the purveyors of ‘climate science’. They generally deserve only ridicule for practices that would not be acceptable in any real field of science.
rbateman:
The rather complicated issue of the Holocene relative MIS-11 and MIS-19 is discussed in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/30/the-antithesis/
LazyTeenager says:
October 22, 2011 at 9:35 pm
“The take away message is: that was then this is now. Just because cycles accounted for climate change in the past IS NOT PROOF they are responsible for climate change now.”
AR4 fingers anthropogenic causes for climate change on the basis of no other known cause. Here the historic record shows “But even so, the end of the last extreme interglacial was quite the wild climate ride!”, with no known cause.
I think what it suggests is not knowing the cause is a problem for the prosecution. The second issue goes to prospective harm. If we are at the end of the interglacial can we know that harm will be caused when we aren’t even certain of what has caused the recent warming?
For a direct carbon tax to have its desired effect of reducing energy consumption, it must inflict pain on energy consumers in a sufficiently broad variety of ways, and in a sufficiently large total magnitude, so as ensure they respond with the desired behavior.
A direct carbon tax also has to have immediate consequences for everyone who pays it, and that means it has to be a simple tax on consumption with no relief for anyone affected.
A revenue-neutral type of carbon taxation scheme is not likely to inflict enough pain on enough people, or with a sufficiently broad distribution of social and economic impacts, so as to achieve its desired effect of quickly reducing energy consumption.
William McClenney says:
October 23, 2011 at 4:51 am
Read through that again. What I get out of it is a very high potential to make a mess of things, should man decide to embark on climate alteration. That CO2 has ample evidence as an insulation against cooling, but so far has little to no evidence to initiate/accelerate warming. The link for fig 34 is broken and only the smaller jpg is available.
William McClenney says:
October 22, 2011 at 5:06 pm.
For those that queried why I did not include any discussion regarding the Holocene hypsithermal, or climate optimum, it was not all that relevant to the argument. …
… Again, this was intended primarily for attorneys.
Hi William,
I do not really understand what your point or intension here is.
There are a lot of data available about the terrestrial climate history, but there are only a very few logical conclusions or valid arguments from that data by scientists which explain the terrestrial climate history as understandable physically processes. If this is true, then I do not see any necessity to speak to attorneys.
Physics deals with natural forces and processes in which energy will be moved. From the history of terrestrial climate in a time span of some million years it is well known that the global Earth surface temperature has increased often by approx. 8°Cel. in some few years. And this temperature has relaxed often down approx. 8°Cel. in 94.5ky. This saw tooth profile was found many times in a time range of 1000 ky, but also other periods of 150 ky, 126 ky, 75.5 ky, 41.2 ky, 23.6 ky and 19 ky cycle length were found with the same saw tooth profile, but minor temperature amplitude. These times are from Bassinot et al, (1994) [MD 900963].
This behaviour looks like a geometric multimode saw tooth oscillator and if we assume that the mode number 1 (n=1) is related to a time of 377.134 ky, then other modes of n=1.5 has 150ky, n=1.75 has 126 ky, n=2 has 94.5 ky, n=2.25 has 75.5 ky, n=3 has 41.2 ky, n=4 has 23.6 ky, and n=4.5 has 19 ky cycle length using the formula
tn [ky] = pow(n,-2.0) * 377.134 ky
Such multimode oscillator must have a geometry of a big size, and it seems that this oscillator cannot be found on our little Earth. But in solar physics it is known that because of the big size of the sun and the density a single photon takes about ~190 ky from one atom in the centre of the sun to other atoms until it reaches the surface of the sun.
A resonance of a mode n=1 takes then ~380 ky.
Taking the relative power of the named modes and a simple geometric saw tooth profile it is very easy to simulate a temperature spectrum of about 1000 ky.
Because the absolute time calibration neither for the diffusion time of the solar photons are known nor the absolute time calibration for the sample of Lisieki et al. (2005), it is remarkable – if I scale down the time calibration of the Silieki et al. (2005) data by a factor of 1.225 – that here is a good correlation to recognize.
The idea of this diffusion resonance modes in the sun is suggested by Prof. Ehrlich: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0701117] “Solar Resonant Diffusion Waves as Driver of Terrestrial Climate Change”.
This graph shows both functions:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/bentic_f_graph.gif
It is visible that only about 9 events of an increasing temperatur sstem of about ~8°Cel. in 1000 ky are happened and today the last big step was about 20 ky ago.
Because it is clear that with such big step in the global temperature from an Ice Age a lot of melting water from the land is streaming in the oceans, it explains the time coherent increase of the sea level. And because the Earth has still this high sea level, this water has to be filled the land again first with snow out o the oceans before the sea level will rise again.
And this means simple that we have a linear decreasing sea level for the next ~50 to ~70ky.
s. more
V.
LazyTeenager says:
October 22, 2011 at 9:35 pm
1. The woman had a bullet hole in her head,
2. The bullet plucked from her brain had rifling marks matching a pistol owned by the husband
3. The gun had the husband’s fingerprints on it
4. The husband’s hands had propellant on them
5. The footprint in a pool of blood matched the husband’s shoe.
6. The neighbor had a $90 billion dollar insurance policy on the woman’s life.
7. Her husband had nothing to gain.
Most likely: The neighbor shot the woman and doctored the evidence.
Motive, means and opportunity are the key ingredients in establishing guilt.
Motive – $$
Means – Pal Reviewed Science
Opportunity – IPCC
rbateman:
The head of the geology department came up to me in Geology 101 lab and what I remember of that discussion is that he said they had really two main groups of folk that come through there, splitters and lumpers. Splitters were those with a keen eye for detail, able to see things right down the the gnat’s a$$. Lumpers were the rapid arm movement, big picture types, detail more or less anathema to them. But every once in a while one would come along who could see things right down to the gnat’s a$$ and recognize how that just changed the big picture. He asked me if I knew what they were called. I did not. He said they called those geologists.
So what I am attempting to do here is by looking at the details of what we see has happened at the end of the other recent extreme interglacials for a pattern. We already know the big picture of the post-MPT ice ages and interglacials. We know the big picture is now 100kyr ice age/interglacial couples, those pesky little ~400 foot swings in sea level that happen that regularly enough that you can set your geologic watch by them. But as we get into the messier, less well preserved detail packages that still remain around the world (not erased by the next and the next interglacial) the pixels begin to populate the big picture. And change it.
The debate over which came first, the chicken or the egg, was more or less put to rest several years before “An Inconvenient Truth” aired. On the major transitions, the ice age terminations, Mudelsee (Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 583-589) states it best in his abstract:
“Over the full 420 ka of the Vostok record, CO2 variations lag behind atmospheric temperature changes in the Southern Hemisphere by 1.3 +/-1.0 ka, and lead over global ice-volume variations by 2.7 +/-1.3 ka. However, significant short-term changes in the lag of CO2 relative to temperature, subsequent to Terminations II and III, are also detected.”
Therefore CO2 not the agent provocateur at the largest climate changes. Continue down the rabbit hole of detail and you will soon come to what are known as millenial variations, or the D-O oscillations. Same problem. CO2 not the agent provocateur on all that we have detail for from the Greenland ice cores. In fact it seems to function, assuming of course that it does actually have a climate function, as more of a climate security blanket.
In fact it may only be coincidence, nothing more.
But agent provocateur? Well, there is indeed evidence available from significant counterintelligence activities. No, not counterespionage, intelligence operating in reverse, but naturally. We have the new math (matheMANNics) from which algorEithms may be constructed capable of using even red noise to produce the desired counterintelligence. I first encountered an early primitive form of this agent provocateur 20 years ago in a toxic tort in Australia. In this case the opposition had produced a report in which they stated that “although significant levels of total chromium were found at the site, the more dangerous to human health hexavalent chromium was not identified in any sample.” This, at it turned out, was true. All one needed to do to verify it was to flip back to the raw data (nearing extinction) to see that they had never sent even a single sample for hex chrome analysis. So guess what? They didn’t even look for it, no wonder they didn’t find it! The attorneys here may wish to chime in on whether or not this constituted fraud.
So keeping one’s eyes firmly on the pea is just about the only defense any of us really has against the primitive and more evolved counterintelligence of this sort. But the chances are rather poor that more than just a small number of us will succeed in this. Numerically it is about 11.1% based on the Nine Times Rule. The 9TR was the result of a study I read as an assignment in a graduate course in psychology: the human being is nine times more susceptible to rumor than it is to fact. With 88.9% of us more permeable to rumor than to fact, “Houston, we have a problem…..” Counterintelligence activitists have a lot of fertile ground to plant……..and they know it.
“The Antithesis” was both a reminder and a warning that the mind is like a parachute, it must be open in order to function. A reminder that the big picture is always a compilation of the details which can actually result in the exact opposite conclusion than the one anticipated. The warning I will caricature from one of my favorite character comedians, “Mr. T”.
“FOOL!! What you doin? Takin’ the climate security blanket OUT of the atmosphere at the probable end of an interglacial? Did you bump your head?”
Step back, take in the bigger picture once again, and populate it with Boettger et al’s “Results of palynological studies of all these sequences indicate simultaneously a strong increase of environmental oscillations during the very end of the Last Interglacial and the beginning of the Last Glaciation.”, and the whole thing begins to take on the character of Crocodile Dundee’s two fleas arguing over who owns the dog they are riding on.
In the final analysis this is all a rather simple signal to noise ratio problem. Take AR4’s worst case estimates, those that still survive, and look at them in relation to what might happen for the third time, naturally, at an end extreme interglacial, and it isn’t just a simple signal to noise ratio problem anymore, it’s a pathetic one.
The defense rests (for now :-).
ferd berple says:
October 23, 2011 at 11:34 am
Motive, means and opportunity are the key ingredients in establishing guilt.
Motive – $$
Means – Pal Reviewed Science
Opportunity – IPCC
Very good Fred. Hadn’t thought of that…..