Guest post by Dr. Don J. Easterbrook
Dept. of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA
In a paper entitled “Current global warming appears anomalous in relation to the climate of the last 20 000 years,” Svante Björck claims that, over the past 20,000 years, there have been no world-wide, synchronous, climate changes until recently and that shows CO2 must be the cause of recent global warming. He claims that:
It is, however, virtually impossible to find evidence for globally synchronous climate events with the same climate signature, for example warmings or coolings.” “When the last ca. 20 000 yr of climate development is reviewed, including the climatically dramatic period when the Last Ice Age ended, the Last Termination, it appears that the last centuries of globally rising temperatures should be regarded as an anomaly.”
“…..no globally consistent climate event prior to today’s global warming has been clearly documented” so ….“we ought to regard the ongoing changes as anomalies, triggered by anthropogenically forced alterations of the carbon cycle.”
This apparent return to the ‘hockey stick’ argument includes denials of the global Roman warm period, the Dark ages cold period, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age.
“The often-cited climate pattern of the last 2000 to 3000 yr with the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Cold ages, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (LIA) seems to be restricted to the NH or parts of it, and does not show up as a global pattern of warmings and coolings. it is important to note that while the LIA was not a period of global cooling.”
Claims such as these can only be considered geofantasy, unsupported by scientific data and contrary to a vast amount of data to the contrary. For example, Björck claims that the large swings in temperature at the end of the last Ice Age, especially during the Younger Dryas (YD), were not global despite many peer-reviewed papers (when peer review meant something) documenting the global extent of the YD. The magnitude and intensity of late Pleistocene climate changes were much, much greater than recent warming and cooling (Fig.1).
Figure 1. Greenland ice core data showing abrupt warming and cooling events during the past 25,000 years. As shown by corresponding expansion and contraction of glaciers worldwide, these were globally synchronous events.
The Greenland isotope ice core data is well correlated with glacier advance and retreat in the European Alps, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, the Rocky Mts., the Cascade Mts., Sierra Nevada, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, and various other places. The global record of non-glaciated areas is also clear in Asia, Australia, New Zealand,, North and South America, Europe, Russia, and elsewhere. There is a vast literature documenting all of these globally synchronous climate changes that Björck obviously needs to read.
The Younger Dryas abrupt and intense climate changes are not only globally synchronous, but are in fact practically simultaneous in both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere (see for example, Easterbrook 2011, Evidence for synchronous global climatic events: cosmogenic exposure ages of Pleistocene alpine glaciations, Elsevier). Figure 2, shows that not only is the Younger Dryas globally synchronous, but that advances within the YD can also be correlated globally, including examples from continental ice sheets in Scandinavia and North America, and alpine glaciers in the Cascade and Rocky Mts. of North America, the European Alps, and the New Zealand Alps, among many others.
Figure 2. Global correlation of phases within the Younger Dryas.
Globally synchronous Little Ice Age glacial advances and retreats are also well documented in the geologic literature, as well as the Medieval Warm Period. Well-defined glacial moraines lie downvalley from almost every glacier in the world!
How Björck can ignore this immense amount of data showing globally synchronous climate changes is very difficult to understand. His claim of no globally synchronous climate changes in 20,000 cannot be considered credible.
richardjamestelford and yet a hand full of trees from one area does provide proof of a global issue , how does that work?
“…..no globally consistent climate event prior to today’s global warming has been clearly documented” so ….“we ought to regard the ongoing changes as anomalies, triggered by anthropogenically forced alterations of the carbon cycle.”
argument from ignorance.
The abundant evidence showing the global extend of MWP and other climate events from many peer reviewed papers is ignored. From the paper itself re. late Holocene:
” In this respect it is important to note that while the LIA was not a period of global cooling” “but a rather complex period of climate change, the last 100 to 150 yr have seen an almost globally consistent warming”
Interesting and why it warmed since 150 years when CO2 human contribution was irrelevant is not clarified.
Good that nowadays such papers are fast debunked in blog reviews the new peer review. Thank you for the site here, keep on the good work!
@- John Marshall says: October 26, 2011 at 2:38 am
“Research from both hemispheres clearly shows that the MWP was a global event.”
Research from both hemispheres clearly shows that the MWP was global, but not synchronous or as warm as now globally – only in some regions and with a N-S lag…
@- KnR says: October 26, 2011 at 4:22 am
“….and yet a hand full of trees from one area does provide proof of a global issue , how does that work?”
It dosn’t.
But then the claim that a handful of trees from one area provides ‘proof'(sic) of a global issue is unsupported by ANY scientific research and would appear to be a figment of the imagination ?
Izen,
Thanx for your opinion. But the MWP was warmer than today, as were several other even warmer times during the Holocene. Sorry if that ruins your belief in CAGW.
@- Smokey says: October 26, 2011 at 7:40 am
“Thanx for your opinion. But the MWP was warmer than today, as were several other even warmer times during the Holocene.”
What evidence is there for a GLOBALLY warmer climate?
SOME regions were warmer than now, some were colder and the evidence – uncertain as it is – it that those warm periods were not simultaneous and only local.
It is foolishness like this that make my geolscience blood boil. Björks’ paper is not science, it is pseudoscience. Esterbrook is far to kind in his review. I wrote an essay yesterday at my blog Called Shoddy Science,(http://retreadresources.com/blog/?p=904) It is not about Björks but about Pasture and others. Unfortunately Björks’ work fits right in. He is in good company however at least from the history of science point of view.
KnR says:
October 26, 2011 at 4:22 am
richardjamestelford and yet a hand full of trees from one area does provide proof of a global issue , how does that work?
———
Only in your imagination
Wow. Just Wow.
I once worked as a contractor for a government agency. All incoming correspondence had to be imaged. We got a document one day that was a book really. Hand written with various implements (including crayon), it included dozens and dozens of polaroids of dead and mutilated rats. Written by, apparently, a mentally disturbed homeless person the tome claimed (in almost scientific sounding terms) that it proved that aliens were coming down to Earth and slaughtering and experimenting upon the rats – then they ate their brains. The “treatise” went downhill from there. It really didn’t make much more sense than that.
And neither do you.
Stripped of its religious overtones, the only true “gigadeath” events are the 4 Horsemen – Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. I think we can do something about the first 3. The 1.21 gigawatts hasn’t fried us yet, nor will it.
You do know that Earth is a giant rock traveling through space, right?
It genuinely frightens me to think people like this are voters.
Isn’t he really arguing that to our knowledge no warming in the past 20.000 years was ever caused by co2?
“…..no globally consistent climate event prior to today’s global warming has been clearly documented” so ….“we ought to regard the ongoing changes as anomalies, triggered by anthropogenically forced alterations of the carbon cycle.”
Per
Izen,
Youu must live in a bubble. There are reams of evidence supporting the fact of the global MWP:
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
Got plenty more evidence if you want it.
I don’t see this linked here, but it might be worth repeating if not, and bringing up if so:
the CO2 Science MWP database of studies is fantastic. It covers as many studies into the proxies of the MWP as possible, and several more. Interesting note – the ability to claim there was only warming in the Northern Hemisphere might be because there is far less data collected in the Southern Hemisphere. It might have something to do with travel and the development of those nations? No clue, but here is the link:
http://www.co2science.org/data/timemap/mwpmap.html
And it has a fantastic comparative bit built in that lets you see the warming side by side for different studies.
Enjoy!
It would appear that science can produce numbers which can be interpreted whichever way one wants. Much like profit and loss accounts from companies, amazing what you can do with numbers.
History shows that Hannibal could not have crossed the Alps in todays climate as he would have found snow and ice blocking his route, so it was warmer then by a fair extent.
The Vikings were farming on Greenland in the MWP, that was still very much part of the Viking history taught in Norway up to at least the late 70’s when I was studying there.
All of a sudden these issues are “forgotten” by those who make a living out of this, as they alone would totally destroy the theory that the world has never seen anything like this, like this being .6 degr C warming caused by the UHI effect. I guess they are right in the MWP or in Hannibal’s time the UHI would have been non existent so we are seeing something never witnessed before.
Let’s move those thermometers and this whole issue will disappear.
Harvey Harrison says:
October 25, 2011 at 3:20 pm
This used to be an open and informative website but recently has devolved into personal attacks on the people at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ controversy…..
Rather than argue about the indirect effects humans might have on the planet via CO2 take direct action on direct effects. Prime amongst these is gross heat output. We humans produce somewhere in the neighbourhood of 17 terawatts of heat continuously (85% from fossil fuels) and all that heat must be having some effect.
With difficulty the gaseous and particulate by-products of burning fossil fuels can be cleaned up and clean nuclear developed but that does nothing about the gross heat.
The mystery is; why is all that heat not having more of an effect?
________________________________________________
Harvey, I suggest you take a good hard look at figure #1.
Then think about the following peer reviewed paper from 2007.
Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
A couple of degrees increase in temp do not worry me nearly as much as the 10C or more drop we KNOW is waiting somewhere in the future.
izen says:
October 26, 2011 at 2:15 am
“I don’t see what the problem is that some people seem to have with the conclusions of this paper.
The LACK of credible evidence for a globaly synchronous change in temperatures during the MWP, Roman or Minoan warm periods, the Holocene optimum or the Younger Dryas events is well known.”
Izen, if one takes only the sea level as proxy is enough to debunk this. The romans were planning in advance building shipyards waiting for the water to rise?
The study shows there is not much correlation to the climate on one island in the mid of Atlantic? How much did the climate change nowadays on the island lying some 2500 from the nearest shore? Zero, nada.
http://www.climatetemp.info/tristan-da-cunha/
Good place to spend the holiday to study climate.
Isn’t it true that the “current warming” is generally not evident in the southern hemisphere to any great extent? I know it is not evident in the United States where most of the country has cooled in the last hundred years according to the longest record rural stations. wouldn’t this mean this one isn’t global either by the same standard?
Correct, Anna, except it passed journal peer review, and so now it’s accepted science. This is the sad state to which those who politicized climate science have brought us, that such obviously false arguments pass review.
There is a hockey stick alright … one with the blade pointed downward. The handle began about 10K YBP, we are on the handle, headed for the blade.
Absolute rubbish.
There have been at least 7 periods in the last 11,000 years warmer than now in the current inter-glacial era, (all occured without any increase in the CO2 levels).
(The last 4 interglacial periods were also warmer than our current one).
Data taken from the greenland ice sheet shows this, (Alley,2000) GISP2 (US Govt. ice core data).
See; http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#An overview to get things into perspective
And; ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/
And; Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19, 213-226.
CO2 has either no relationship or an inverse one to temperature.
The Earth’s temperature is regulated through a negative feedback mechanism involving the OLR (Outgoing Longwave Radiation), and has for billions of years. The OLR can vary be 80 Wm2 over a 6-month timescale (as it did in 2010/11); saying the our human emissions (that total less than 2 Wm2 of warming) control the climate is rediculous.
As far as the Earth’s climate goes, human CO2 emissions are Irrelevant.
-Robert Holmes
Robert Holmes says:
October 26, 2011 at 6:33 pm
Absolute rubbish.
There have been at least 7 periods in the last 11,000 years warmer than now in the current inter-glacial era, (all occured without any increase in the CO2 levels).
————
Would you accept a global temperature estimate based on a single monitoring station? So why do you think that a single point on Greenland can meaningfully represent the whole world?
richardjamestelford says:
October 27, 2011 at 4:32 am
There are many not just Greenland showing the same thing all over the world. With greenland having similar trends as global temperatures during the instrumental record. The ice cores in both hemispheres show a similar trend. This is one of the most ignorant papers ever reproduced and as though not looked at any of the many hundreds of peer reviewed papers showing changes in all different regions of the globe.
Africa, Asia, New Zeland/Australia, Europe, North America and oceans not good enough?
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
How about Antarctica too?
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/regions/antarctica.php
Posted on October 25, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Guest post by Dr. Don J. Easterbrook
Dept. of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA
In a paper entitled “Current global warming appears anomalous in relation to the climate of the last 20 000 years,” Svante Björck claims that, over the past 20,000 years, there have been no world-wide, synchronous, climate changes until recently and that shows CO2 must be the cause of recent global warming.
Svante Björck says: „as long as no globally consistent climate event prior to today’s global warming has been clearly documented, and considering that climate trends during the last millennia in different parts of the world have, in the last century or so, changed direction into a globally warming trend, we ought to regard the ongoing changes as anomalies, triggered by anthropogenically forced alterations of the carbon cycle in the general global environment.”
T. Kellerhals et al. (in his) : “We present a reconstruction of tropical South American temperature anomalies over the last 1600 years. The reconstruction is based on a highly resolved and carefully dated ammonium record from an ice core that was drilled in 1999 on Nevado Illimani in the eastern Bolivian Andes.”
More about that stuff later.
A good site about valid arguments one can find here
Fallacies:
Ad hoc
“ there is a difference between argument and explanation. If we’re interested in establishing A, and B is offered as evidence, the statement “A because B” is an argument. If we’re trying to establish the truth of B, then “A because B” is not an argument, it’s an explanation. The Ad Hoc fallacy is to give an after-the-fact explanation which doesn’t apply to other situations. Often this ad hoc explanation will be dressed up to look like an argument.
Argumentum ad ignorantiam (Argument from ignorance)
“Argumentum ad ignorantiam means “argument from ignorance.” The fallacy occurs when it’s argued that something must be true, simply because it hasn’t been proved false. Or, equivalently, when it is argued that something must be false because it hasn’t been proved true. > “Of course the Bible is true. Nobody can prove otherwise.” “A flood as described in the Bible would require an enormous volume of water to be present on the earth. The earth doesn’t have a tenth as much water, even if we count that which is frozen into ice at the poles. Therefore no such flood occurred.” “Either man was created, as the Bible tells us, or he evolved from inanimate chemicals by pure random chance, as scientists tell us. The latter is incredibly unlikely, so …” <
Converse accident / Hasty generalization
“ This fallacy is the reverse of the Fallacy of Accident. It occurs when you form a general rule by examining only a few specific cases which aren't representative of all possible cases. “
Ignoratio elenchi / Irrelevant conclusion
“The fallacy of Irrelevant Conclusion consists of claiming that an argument supports a particular conclusion when it is actually logically nothing to do with that conclusion.”
Red herring
“This fallacy is committed when someone introduces irrelevant material to the issue being discussed, so that everyone's attention is diverted away from the points made, towards a different conclusion.”
Just basics.
T. Kellerhals et al. (Kellerhals, T., S. Brütsch, M. Sigl, S. Knüsel, H. W. Gäggeler, and M. Schwikowski (2010), Ammonium concentration in ice cores: A new proxy for regional temperature reconstruction?, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D16123, doi:10.1029/2009JD012603.) says (Abstract):
“We present a reconstruction of tropical South American temperature anomalies over the last ∼1600 years. The reconstruction is based on a highly resolved and carefully dated ammonium record from an ice core that was drilled in 1999 on Nevado Illimani in the
eastern Bolivian Andes.“
Here is Fig. 7 of their work:
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/4681/kellerhals.png
BTW. A simple evidence is that not only well known ‘global’ temperature reconstructions of A. Moberg et al. (and many others) exhibit a similar temperature pattern for the last (two) millennia as the pattern of T. Kellerhals et al. from the Bolivian Andes, but both temperature proxies and many other easy can be computed out of solar tide configurations of some two or 6 or more celestial couples for +- 3000 years (-5000 years + 1000 years).
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/ghi_6_kellerhals.gif
Beside a verification of the terrestrial climate for some 5000 years it is possible to compute the climate for the next 1000 years, because for this there are precise NASA ephemeris available,
Maybe another fallacy results in problems in this time of authorities who possibly are not authorities in all science disciplines.
Argumentum ad verecundiam (Appeal to authority)
”The Appeal to Authority uses admiration of a famous person to try and win support for an assertion. For example: “Isaac Newton was a genius and he believed in God.” This line of argument isn’t always completely bogus when used in an inductive argument; for example, it may be relevant to refer to a widely-regarded authority in a particular field, if you’re discussing that subject. For example, we can distinguish quite clearly between: “Hawking has concluded that black holes give off radiation” and “Penrose has concluded that it is impossible to build an intelligent computer” Hawking is a physicist, and so we can reasonably expect his opinions on black hole radiation to be informed. Penrose is a mathematician, so it is questionable whether he is well-qualified to speak on the subject of machine intelligence.”
Unfortunately consumers like more the fight of authorities in the arena than strong arguments.
V.