Guest Post by Caleb Shaw
My last layman’s paper generated a wonderful and polite peer-review from WUWT readers, teaching me a great deal, not the least of which was that I should avoid using the word “pneumatic” when I mean “hydraulic.” It is in the hopes of receiving a similar polite response that I will venture to ask some questions about a Climate Gospel, even though it is a Climate Gospel that earns most questioners a severe pummeling.
I will attempt to be cheerfully naïve, however in some situations that is not enough. A Texan can be cheerful and naïve all he wants, but, when he is making cheeseburgers out of a Holy Cow in a Hindu village, he is liable to find he has a riot on his hands. There are some things Thou Shall Not Do. Sometimes Thou Shall Not Even Question.
My questions involve those little bubbles in ice cores. It may seem a harmless subject, but those little bubbles are a basement upon which a great many papers have been written, and upon which a great many grants depend. Dare you question the little bubbles, and all sorts of hell breaks lose.
In fact if you poke around the subject of those little bubbles your don’t-go-there alarm will start to go off, along with your I-don’t-have-time-for-this alarm, (if you have one.) However sometimes a man’s got to do what he least wants to do.
As anyone who has raised teenaged daughters understands, there are times when you have “to go there,” despite the fact your don’t-go-there alarm is blaring, and times you have to make time, even though your I-don’t-have-time-for-this alarm is howling.
Daughters teach a man that, despite all efforts to ban bullying and legislate spirituality, ostracism remains mysteriously crucial to schoolgirl adolescence, and the same daughter who was sobbing about being ostracized on Monday may be gleaming with glee over a nemesis being ostracized on Tuesday. Fathers often have to make sense of this emotional and blatant hypocrisy, even if it means turning off the TV just before the big game.
You may be wondering what this has to do with little bubbles in ice caps. I don’t blame you, but bear with me.
Please notice that, in the above example, it is the daughters doing the teaching. They are teaching their fathers about wild swings of emotion involved with having a non-scientific and supposedly irrational thing called “a heart.”
Scientists don’t like being compared with schoolgirls, because, in humanity’s constant battle to balance the heart and head, Science represents the purified essence of the head. However just because Science focuses on the head does not mean Scientists have no hearts. “If you prick them, do they not bleed?”
The only thing a scientist is suppose to be passionate about is being dispassionate, however in their quieter moments most will confess there have been times they’ve failed to be totally objective, and have slapped themselves on the forehead because they were blind to some obvious truth staring them in the face. However even this humbleness underscores an egotism they have about being more objective than most people. Also, if anyone is going to slap their forehead, they prefer it to be themselves. They don’t like it one bit when you compare them with schoolgirls. They get all emotional if you accuse them of being emotional.
Nothing makes people angry faster than accusing them of being angry when they’re not. A calm, peaceful soul can be reduced to frothing and to spitting snakes, because no one likes being falsely accused. You can get them even madder if , after you have angered them by accusing them of being angry when they weren’t, you look smug and say, “See? I told you that you were angry.”
Scientists are no different, and if you tweak them in the right way, then they, who are so focused on the head, will lose their heads and demonstrate they have tremendous hearts. Sometimes the revealed heart is tremendously good, but sometimes it is tremendously otherwise.
Scientists do not like being tweaked in this manner, because that is not what science is all about. Raving is beneath the dignity of science. However, when politics enters the hallowed halls of science, scientists get tweaked plenty, for study is no longer funded for its intrinsic value. A scientist may abruptly be defunded due to an election. Men are jarred awake in their Ivory Towers, as they are confronted by a mentality befitting thirteen-year-old schoolgirls: It matters who is “in” and who is “out.”
Therefore, despite all my shortcoming concerning Physics classes I never took, (or preferred to spend dreaming out the window during,) I do have an understanding others lack, as I approach the delicate subject of little bubbles in an icecap’s ice, because I have been the father of schoolgirls, and know the politics of ostracization and marginalization, and what such things do to the human heart and to human tempers.
One can study both the little bubbles, and also the path to marginalization, by taking a hard look at the travails of Zbigniew Jaworowski.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6&p=3
And also looking at a paper he wrote:
http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/Jaworowski%20CO2%20EIR%202007.pdf
A quick perusal of Jaworoski’s paper taught me that all sorts of complex chemistry may (or may not) being going on in those innocent little bubbles, but most of the chemistry was over my head. Not that I couldn’t understand, if I put my mind to it, but I actually had some simple questions, and, until I got those simple questions answered, it seemed I’d be getting ahead of myself if I tackled the complex chemistry.
Therefore I headed to Wikipedia. Not that I trust it as a source, but it often has links to truer sources, and one hopes Wikipedia gets the most basic facts right.
However even in terms of the most basic facts I seemed to be getting a wide variety of answers. For example, how long does it take fluffy snow to be compacted to ice with little bubbles in it? The answers I got ranged from sixty to five-thousand years.
Likely this variance occurred due to the fact Antarctica includes some areas of very dry desert, where snow accumulates very slowly, whereas Greenland is subject to Atlantic gales, and snow can accumulate very quickly. However it was unclear which data-set was being referred to, and that made things rough for a layman like myself. I had to keep switching back and forth from source to source, and then, when I went back to find an important link at the Wikipedia source, “Greenland ice cores,” just a week ago, I found it had vanished, and instead there was this message:
06, 12 September 2011 Timothy’s Cannes (talk | contrib.) deleted “Greenland ice cores” (Mass deletion of pages created by Marshallsumter: questionable creation by now-indeffed editor: see
As a scientific researcher, my conclusion at this point was, “Oh, Drat.”
Unless you are the sort who rushes in where angels fear to tread, do not, I repeat, DO NOT go to that Wikipedia message board. I only went because I wanted to see what ice core data “Mashallsumter” got wrong. As far as I could tell from the morass I waded out into, the reason “Greenland ice cores” was deleted had nothing to do with the data on that page, but rather had to do with some strange beliefs “Mashallsumter” was expressing, and strange research he was involved with, elsewhere in the Wiki-world.
I didn’t much want to know about the fellow’s beliefs and activities, as it seemed to have very little to do with little bubbles in ice, but I couldn’t help notice the marvelous effort that was made to throw “Mashallsumter” from the hallowed halls of Wiki. He was found guilty of both the crime of being original, and the crime of copying. (What is the third alternative?) In any case, “Greenland ice cores” was history, and was history in a hurry, and was deleted history, which hardly counts as history because you can’t find it.
At this point I almost gave up my research, because it occurred to me that something about the study of little bubbles in ice cores makes people weird. I did not want to become weird. However my wife reassured me I had nothing to fear, because I already am weird, and that gave me the courage to forge onwards.
part two tomorrow…
Look forward to Part two Caleb.
18 months ago I wrote what turned out to be a highly controversial and much commented on article entitled ‘Historc variations in Co2 measurements.’
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/historic-variations-in-co2-measurements/
Controversial because in examining this subject the subject of ice cores will rear its ugly head. To get a good idea of the argument it would be best to read the entire article, but the ice core stuff is there in part two, for those with limited time. A read of the comments demonstrate that this thread has become a great source of knowledge on the subject. It attracted what must have been one of the last contributions by Ernst Beck-a hugely controversial figure.
As to the truth of ice cores as a reliable measurement? Personally I doubt their reliability for reasons that Caleb might come up with in his part two.. Those reasons are political as much as scientific in as much ice cores are one of the foundations of climate science.
tonyb
Thanks to all for the interesting comments.
For those interested in the genesis of part one, it began as a single-paragraph-introduction to part two. Then I decided one idea needed a bit more explaining, and then it seemed to me the explanation needed more explaining. And so on.
This is just the way my mind works. Sometimes I can totally ruin a well-written introduction, simply by thinking about it. Back in the dark ages before word processors were invented I used to have so many inserts between lines and in margins that my rough drafts became unreadable. Often the easiest thing to do was to start over. Back in those days you had to actually wrinkle up a piece of paper. The delete key was a great invention.
I very nearly deleted this introduction, but decided it was amusing enough to keep.
This brings me to Sparks comment at 9:25 on Oct 31: “I enjoyed reading this and the comments, I don’t understand the point. Sorry, I don’t.”
First, it was written for your enjoyment. If you enjoyed it, you got the point.
Second, you bring up a question which, if I had asked it of myself, would have made me include even more paragraphs, until part one would have turned into part 1A and part 1B.
The short answer is this: Despite a love of science, I reached a point in my life where I had to decide what I wanted to focus on: Fact or Fiction. As a writer, I chose fiction. I lacked the discipline to be a true scientist, but had a surplus of imagination.
What’s so good about fiction? It not just nothing but lies?
No. The best fiction is as concerned with Truth as science is. It focuses on a different aspect, however. (That is why I brought up the battle between the “heart” and the “head.”) Ask yourself why Shakespeare’s works have survived 400 years. There was never any guy named Romeo or gal named Juliet. It’s nothing but a lie, if you want to get all factual, but it holds truth that resonates in people.
Consider the work “Animal Farm.” Can farm animals actually talk and run a farm? No, it’s nothing but a lie. However within the fiction is a criticism of Socialism which would have been as boring as hell to read, if stated as a dry essay. (I wonder if it would even be published, if it was written now rather than back then, considering how many editors deem themselves “gatekeepers.”)
Anyway, I was minding my own business in the world of fiction, gazing at clouds and checking the weather reports, when I became aware strange stuff was happening in the world of weather. Weather was no longer was a topic to talk about when you wanted to avoid religion and politics. In fact the science seemed to be breaking the very rules I obeyed, when I chose “The Arts” rather than “The Sciences.”
That is what has brought me back to scientific fields where I don’t truly belong. It is only because Climate Scientists have started trespassing on MY territory. When they substitute fudge for fact, they are on MY turf. That’s fiction, and I am not going to put up with Scientists crossing the border onto my landscape any more than any scientist should put up with fiction entering their data. Both are cases that muddle the pursuit of Truth.
davidmhoffer says (October 31, 2011 at 8:54 pm); “One morning I was thirty six years old.
That afternoon, my 12 year old daughter gave me a great big hug, looked up at me with her great big eyes, and said, with a great big smile:
‘I need a bra!'”
HonEEEEE!
…well thanks for clarifying that, Volker…
The hallowed BBC ran a 5 minute piece on bubbles in ice of antarctica the weekend. Now I am a long dead physicist and have been interested in climate/weather for some 50 yrs so I won’t claim to fully understand the chemistry but just to note what might seem obvious.
The over enthusiastic scientist, like a daughter and I have 2, cut a slice and said ” look at these bubbles, they are 80,000 yrs old. Then he cut another and said “these bubbles are 800,000 yrs old.
So what I hear you say. Well, there were far far fewer bubbles in the old slice than the more recent slice. Where had the bubbles gone if they are stable. IE If the gas cannot be transposed or change composition over time where have the bubbles gone??
I also have a daughter and severe “bubble trouble”. If it is a choice between bubbles and Beck (historical chemical analysis results) I know which I would put more faith in.
Question – has anybody tried to repeat the historical chemical analysis using the original equipment and methods?
Looking forward to part 2.
GeologyJim and higley7 both mentioned the early CO2 studies of Ernst Beck. I don’t know which is marginally more precise: Beck’s wet chemistry or modern instrumental methods. To me, that question is not even interesting. But first, some background.
Precision means doing the ‘same’ measurement many times, and getting reasonably close agreement. It’s kinda like target-shooting with a revolver. If you manage to get a 1-inch group at 25 yards, then your precision is good. But that doesn’t mean that your accuracy is good. It’s very possible that your tight group is on the target’s outermost ring, rather than the bulls-eye that you were aiming at.
Anyway, precision is not the issue here. The issue is sampling error.
I’d expect there to be fairly large variations in measured values of CO2 taken in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. And if my aging brain remembers correctly, that was in fact the case. If you had taken two CO2 measurements on two successive days, and if the wind had changed direction in the interim, I’d expect that you’d get significantly different values. Why? Forest fires, industrial smokestacks, cooking fires, etc.
Our present Mauna Loa-based system is much better. And it would continue to be much better even if we switched back to the slower wet chemistry methods that Beck used. Why? Much less man-made CO2 and forest-fire CO2 to gum up the works when we’re using that measurement as a proxy for global average CO2 concentration.
I don’t know what the global average CO2 concentration in the late 19th Century was, and I don’t know how I’d make that determination today. Perhaps geologists could help us to answer that question.
Nick Stokes:
At October 31, 2011 at 8:51 pm you malign the great Zbigniew Jaworowski when you write.
“He isn’t a climate scientist.”
Really!? If that is so then nobody who works on ice cores is a “climate scientist”.
I have the honour of having known and worked with Zeb for decades. When illness prevented his attendance at the first Heartland Climate Conference he gave me the privilege of presenting his paper on the problems with ice core data on his behalf.
He is the ‘father’ of ice core studies and he travelled the world obtaining ice cores which he analysed before many who now study ice cores were born. He invented and developed most of the techniques used in ice core studies. Simply, he is probably the world’s greatest authority on ice core studies, and all who now study ice cores learned most of their job from his work.
And he was shocked when he read the (deliberate?) mistakes being made by ‘climate scientists’ working with ice cores.
You say;
His regular job was/is
“Zbigniew Jaworowski is chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw and former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (1981–82)”
Yes, it was. And he developed ice core studies as one method to determine how and where radiactive materials dispersed. When the Chernobyl accident happened the UN appointed him to investigate the dissemination and effects of substances released from the damaged plant. That was at the height of the Cold War, and Zeb was on the same side of the Iron Curtain as the Chernobyl accident, but nobody – and no government – commented on Zeb’s appointment because everybody knew Zeb was the outstanding scientist of knowledge, ability and integrity for the job.
Nick Stokes, your posts on WUWT are often reprehensible. Your attempt to defame the great Zbigniew Jaworowski is disgusting. He is my friend and in light off his age and present health I do not intend to inform him of it, but I demand that you apologise.
Richard
There is nothing more satisfying than seeing a core foundation of an accepted theory being demolished, as it means more theories can replace it, some may be better, some may not. But at least is allows progress to be made. These pauses while scientists all agree are what holds us all back. I am just hoping that the folk working on the Opera experiment in Cern do break the speed of light as it would open up that field of science to new ideas as well.
Sometimes less is more . . .
Dear Caleb,
I have looked at the basic assumptions of Jaworowski. His opinion is based on his knowledge, which ended in… 1992. Since then he obviously didn’t read any scientific literature, or he wilfully ignored it. Many of the objections he had were answered by the work of Etheridge, already in 1996, who worked on three ice cores at Law Dome. They used three different drilling techniques, wet and dry (no difference in results), measured CO2 levels in still open bubbles top down until closing depth (no difference between CO2 in ice and firn at closing depth) and they had an overlap of about 20 years (1960-1980) between direct measurements at the South Pole and in the ice core (no difference beyond the accuracy of the measurements). See:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1996/95JD03410.shtml
unfortunately behind a paywall…
Jaworowski is completely wrong on at least two important points:
– He alludes that CO2 is migrating out of the bubbles during storage. But we measure 180-300 ppmv in the bubbles while the outside world is at 390 ppmv. That simply is physically impossible.
– He accuses Neftel of using an “arbitrarely” shift in timing to allign the Siple Dome ice core CO2 with the Mauna Loa data. But he used the age of the ice layer, while the average gas age is (much) younger. He insists that the ice age and gas age are the same, while the difference was measured in the Law Dome ice/firn already in 1996.
These two points are already enough to ignore Jaworowski as ice core “specialist”.
See further:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
BTW, even if CO2 is hiding in clathrates or liquid veins of the ice, that doesn’t matter for the newest measurement technique: total sublimation and cryogenic freezing of all ice and subsequent selective measuring of the different components. This technique decomposes all clathrates and measures all CO2 and air components. The conventional technique by crushing the ice under vacuum at -20 degr.C over a cold trap (to remove water vapor) gives the same results.
Are you secretly one of those unemployed writers for the recently defunct All My Children?
You certainly have a knack for “the hook”.
Ps If you run into Susan Lucci, give her a little pinch for me.
My experience indicates that daughters and grey hair are synonymous…
Looking forward to Part Two… and keeping my fingers crossed you might provide some answers to the questions raised by Hans-Joachim Zillmer regarding the Greenland Icecore Project – GRIP where a bore core of 3,028 meters was extracted before bedrock was encountered.
1) If this ice core represents 250,000 years then each year’s snowfall has been compressed into 1.2 centimetres of ice [on average].
Is this true?
Is this valid?
How old really is the ice cap?
2) The uppermost sections display 14,500 distinct layers which are assumed to represent a year.
Is this true?
Is this valid)
Can more than one layer accumulate in a year?
How many years do these layers really represent?
3) How does anyone determine the age of the ice beneath the layered section?
4) Are the last 100,000 years of the ice core really compressed down to only 1 millimetre annually?
5) Do we really know the fluid dynamics of deep ice?
6) Do we really know the chemistry and dynamics of gases and particles buried in deep ice?
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Your post at November 1, 2011 at 2:12 am preempts Part 2 of Caleb’s posts. But I think it important to point out to those who do not know that you have much ‘invested’ in your belief that ice core data are Gospel Truth: your claims concerning an anthropogenic cause of recent atmospheric CO2 rise rely on that belief.
Your entire post is – to say the least – debatable and some of it is offensive in the same manner as the post from Nick Stokes. The work of Letheridge does not refute the factual statements of Jawarowski.
And all your other assertions are plain wrong, for example you say;
“- He alludes that CO2 is migrating out of the bubbles during storage. But we measure 180-300 ppmv in the bubbles while the outside world is at 390 ppmv. That simply is physically impossible.”
Your claim of “physically impossible” demonstrates your willful ignorance. Surfaces of ice and ice crystals are coated in a liquid phase (i.e. water) at all temperatures down to -40 deg. C (incidentally, this is why ice is slippery). And CO2 dissolves in water. So, CO2 certainly will migrate out of bubbles: it will dissolve and then experience ionic diffusion through the intergranular (i.e. between crystal) zones.
Simply, your assertion that the bubbles trap the CO2 is an assertion of a physical impossibility (and I have good reason to suspect that you know it is).
All your other points are equally fallacious.
Richard
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 1, 2011 at 2:12 am
– He alludes that CO2 is migrating out of the bubbles during storage. But we measure 180-300 ppmv in the bubbles while the outside world is at 390 ppmv. That simply is physically impossible.
Sorry, but you forgot one thing:
The only point where ice cores show the real value is at the top layer.
As soon as that layer was covered by new snow/ice and is exposed to pressure, it loses CO2 by outwashing, degassing and diffusion.
The deeper the lyer goes, the lower the CO2 values will be.
And the more you get wrong CO2 values for the past!
If your ice core shows i.e. 280 ppm at 10000 years in the past, the real value at that time could also be 380 ppm. If you will drill the core 2000 years in the future, you’ll get the same results.
By distortion from pressure, outwashing, degassing and diffusion, you will *always* have a hockey at the stick, no matter which time you would have drilled the core.
Let me show that in a draft image:
http://www.umweltluege.de/images/co2_diffusion_2.jpg
Never forget, the famous SIPLE/Vostok etc. hockey graph is only a snapshot of a timeline!
“He isn’t a climate scientist.”
That surely is the silliest comment ever but at least it indicates the mindset of the AGW brotherhood.
We are not talking about The Climate, we are just talking about bubbles in ice. How the final results are interpreted in a climate model is another matter. One does not have to be “A Climate Scientist” to read a thermometer, measure a wind speed, test a pH sample or resuscitate a half drowned polar bear…
Richard S Courtney says: November 1, 2011 at 2:00 am
I said Dr Jaworowski isn’t a climate scientist. That’s not maligning him – I’m not one either. In so far as he has written on ice core analysis, he can maybe claim to be a glaciologist.
Wonderful stuff, Caleb, but, tch, tch, you can’t have a third alternative; you can have one option or an alternative one, or alternate between them, but after that you have to talk of third, fouth etc options/courses of action or why.
But I’m just a nitpicking Scotsman……………. .
But can’t wait for tomorrow.
I always preferred clear ice in my cocktails, http://www.instructables.com/id/make-crystal-clear-ice!/
.But the Antarctic Ice Cores would make an interesting conversation ice. I would have to start with just the right temperature water at the right air pressure to get the carbonic acid ratio just perfect for bubble distribution and count.
Served with carbonated ice cream, http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2005/08/28/mit_crew_churns_out_ice_cream_with_sizzle/ it could be an interesting party.
Caleb,
Very well presented! I look forward to Part Two!
The bubble folk have also been quite rude to the authors of stomata-derived CO2 reconstructions. Wagner et al., 1999 drew a very hostile response from Indermühle and other bubble folk. All Dr. Wagner-Cremer did to them, was to falsify one little hypothesis…
If you smooth the MLO and stomata CO2 with a 30-yr filter, they tie into the Law Dome DE08 ice core quite nicely… Fig. 1.
The deeper DSS core has a much lower temporal resolution due to its much lower accumulation rate and compaction effects. It is totally useless in resolving century scale shifts, much less decadal shifts.
The bubble folk correctly assume that resolution is dictated by the bubble enclosure period. However, they are incorrect in limiting the bubble enclosure period to the sealing zone. In the case of the core DE08 they assume that they are looking at a signal with a 1 cycle/1 yr frequency, sampled once every 8-10 years. The actual signal has a 1 cycle/30-40 yr frequency, sampled once every 8-10 years.
30-40 ppmv shifts in CO2 over periods less than ~60 years cannot be accurately resolved in the DE08 core. That’s dictated by basic signal theory.
There’s nothing really “wrong” with the bubbles. The problem is that the bubble folk don’t have a firm enough grasp of the resolution limits of those bubbles.
The incorrect assumption of a 3C ECS to CO2 is entirely driven by a spectral mismatch of temperature and CO2 data.
Aahh, Ice bubbles…… Aren’t they some sort of tiny crystal balls?
Caleb,
First it was turtles all the way down.
Now it is bubbles all the way down.
Thanks for your part one.
John
Not sure about the science behind the tiny bubbles, but the following science may reassure some of you that there are chemical reasons for your sons’ and daughters’ behaviors. (Internal chemistry, not the other.)
http://www.parade.com/news/2010/11/28-inside-the-teenage-brain.html
I’m going to comment in the same line as the blog post.
Couldn’t someone just pass wind and trap it in an ice cude, leave it for say a month then defrost it and see if it still smells?
Please remember I’m trying to get a climate grant so this maybe just what Stanford or some such Uni is looking for for new revenue streams, if you could make the cheque out to Mr Udgunda of Nigeria please.
/sarc off.
wiki has a historical log you can pull the reference from.