Read on for a new Josh cartoon.
What’s wrong with this image? Well if you are part of The Team (RealClimate and friends), it goes against everything you’ve been publishing. You want the Medieval Warm Period to disappear, and you want a hockey stick at the end showing “unprcedented” warming. The shape below just doesn’t cut it when that’s what you are researching selling.
On the left is temperature in °C, on the X axis, years, with labels from 0AD to the year 2000.
Images like the above don’t sell. With a clear MWP and no hockey stick, there’s no alarm, and no $$ coming in for “further studies”. In the Wake of the Gergis et al retraction, Steve McIntyre notes that one of the “screened out” datasets just happens to be the one with the best resolution and the greatest duration – the Law Dome Oxygen 18 data set (from Antarctica). He writes:
An annual version for two millennia was provided to Gergis (who screened it out.) delD and O18 are closely related and presumably the unarchived del D series will look somewhat similar.
For those that don’t know what this data represents, here’s a quick primer from Wikipedia.
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Oxygen isotope ratio cycles are cyclical variations in the ratio of the abundance of oxygen with an atomic mass of 18 to the abundance of oxygen with an atomic mass of 16 present in some substances, such as polar ice or calcite in ocean core samples. The ratio is linked to water temperature of ancient oceans, which in turn reflects ancient climates. Cycles in the ratio mirror climate changes in geologic history.
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Connection between temperature and climate
The 18O/16O ratio provides a record of ancient water temperature. Water 10 to 15 °C (18 to 27 °F) cooler than present represents glaciation. As colder temperatures spread toward the equator, water vapor rich in 18O preferentially rains out at lower latitudes. The remaining water vapor that condenses over higher latitudes is subsequently rich in 16O.[2] Precipitation and therefore glacial ice contain water with a low 18O content. Since large amounts of 16O water are being stored as glacial ice, the 18O content of oceanic water is high. Water up to 5 °C (9 °F) warmer than today represents an interglacial, when the 18O content of oceanic water is lower. A plot of ancient water temperature over time indicates that climate has varied cyclically, with large cycles and harmonics, or smaller cycles, superimposed on the large ones. This technique has been especially valuable for identifying glacial maxima and minima in the Pleistocene.
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McIntyre adds:
Oxygen isotope series are the backbone of deep-time paleoclimate. The canonical 800,000 year comparison of CO2 and temperature uses O18 values from Vostok, Antarctica to estimate temperature. In deep time, O18 values are a real success story: they clearly show changes from the LGM to the Holocene that cohere with glacial moraines.
On its face, Law Dome, which was screened out by Gergis and Karoly, is an extraordinarily important Holocene site as it is, to my knowledge, the highest-accumulation Holocene site yet known, with accumulation almost 10 times greater than the canonical Vostok site. (Accumulation is directly related to resolution: high accumulation enables high resolution.) The graphic below compares glacier thickness for some prominent sites for three periods: 1500-2000, 1000-1500 and 0-1000. its resolution in the past two millennia is nearly double the resolution of the Greenland GRIP and NGRIP sites that have been the topic of intensive study and publication.
Given the high reliance on O18 series in deep time, one would think that paleoclimatologists would be extremely interested in a publication of the Law Dome O18 data and be pressuring Tas van Ommen on this point.
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But despite the apparent opportunity offered by Law Dome, there has been virtually no technical publication of a high-resolution O18 or delD isotope series.
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A Climategate email shows that Phil Jones asked about the omission of the Law Dome series from the IPCC illustration in the AR4 First Draft. I asked the same question about the AR4 Second Draft. They realized that the Law Dome graphic had an elevated medieval period and thus, including it in the graphic would – to borrow a phrase from the preparation of AR3 – would “dilute the message” and perhaps provide “fodder to skeptics”.
Read the whole report at Climate Audit here
The Team keeps trying to bury this stuff, and Climate Audit keeps digging it up:
Lukey B says: June 14, 2012 at 5:36 am
“What do people think the motivation is to persuade the world that global warming is real? Investment in “green-tech”?….
Partly that. But, that is only a tiny part of it. There is a wide array of beneficiaries:
Governments: all levels: more power, more tax, more budgets, and more bureaucracy – they thrive on any form of ‘over- regulation’ and ‘revenue-sourcing’. And for government regulatory arms (eg US EPA) – power, funds, headcount, and ‘a noble cause’!
Researchers and research establishments (publically funded) – obvious enough, and the ‘synergy and feedback loop’ with the above is also obvious.
The UN, The World Bank, NGOs: added roles, power, control and MONEY, head count, bureaucracy. In fact, it provides all that they live and exist for. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/12/from-rio-20-the-future-we-dread/
Financial institutions, banks, traders; this to them is another huge source of trading funds to slosh around the world in churning tides of profit generating trading. Well illustrated here (Yep, about 99% of it is future trading, or worse, options on futures!): http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/global-carbon-market-hits-176-billion-in-2011/
Green and conservation groups; a wonderful world saving cause and another reason to exist. And a source of funding so long haired sandal wearing layabouts can continue to live their dissolute existence while giving themselves the illusion they are actually doing something.
And no, it does not mean there is a conspiracy afoot. What we have here is a loosely aligned array of groups utilizing (in some cases subconsciously) a common lever to achieve their own ends. It just happens to be something which entirely matches the reason they exist, so asking questions re the validity of the science is not considered or tolerated.
I think all should consider what is actually happening:
“A recent NASA study may provide some new information on why the human produced greenhouse gasses are not destroying the planet. During the past ten years, NASA has been collecting atmospheric data from their Terra satellite. Their data shows that when the earth heats up, the atmosphere is able to channel energy and gasses out into space much better than they had previously believed.”
and from James Lovelock, leading environmentalist and one of the initial AGW alarmists and author:
“in a recent interview in April of 2012, Lovelock stated, The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened. The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.”
Lucy Skywalker says: June 14, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Yes, I too wondered where Tas van Ommen’s “publicly avilable” data are…
Paywalled.
If this is the longest and best paleoclimate indicator that’s never been published, why doesn’t Watts or McIntyre publish it?
And by “publish,” I mean submit it with “computer codes” and all supporting data, to a real journal for real review by people that know the science.
Of course, then Watts or McIntyre would be in the position of having to defend it against people who actually know something. I’d pay to see that.
We could start with just a wee bit of common sense, of course. We know what temps have been like for the last 150 or so years… How does this reconstruction compare to the instrument record? If it varies significantly from the instrument record over the last 150 years, then we ask, “What are we missing?” Is there some reason WattsUpWithThat didn’t bother to include the instrumental comparison here?
Nick Stokes says:
June 13, 2012 at 2:18 am
“As I recall, d18O correlates negatively with temperature.”
I recalled coral numbers – I was wrong here.d18O in ice goes the other way.
Nick Stokes retracted his first post honestly – but folks kept on attacking him. Read the thread a bit more before unloading opinions and ad-homs!
@Lucy Skywalker:
> Can anyone help?
I contacted Tas van Ommen (via IceReader) and he kindly responded with links and helpful information. Tas was right, these records and data, though somewhat “hidden in plain sight”, are indeed ‘publicly available’ (after you request and receive a free account for downloading).
The data is on an Australian AADC server, for which you will have to request a user account (which was approved instantaneously for me). This NASA/Goddard link will get you to the AADC login, after a few clicks and registration processing:
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/KeywordSearch/Metadata.do?Portal=GCMD&KeywordPath=Parameters|PALEOCLIMATE|ICE+CORE+RECORDS|ISOTOPES&EntryId=[AADC]ASAC_757_LD_d18O&MetadataView=Data&MetadataType=0&lbnode=mdlb5
The meta information with the file explains that the date column is indeed time before present (BP), where present is 2000. The most recent datapoint has a value of 4, thus represents 1996 etc.
Also, contains a note that points older than 700BP are computed via a different data-flow model, presumably because the annual stripes have diffused together.
Anthony’s title for this post had me thinking this dataset would also be high-resolution. Not so.In fact the entire dataset is rather low-resolution, point estimates are 4-years apart.
Having said that, I should point out that the site itself is a ‘high-accumulation’ site, meaning a lot of snow, on the order of a 1 meter per year or so. So the original ice core itself, which the d18o dataset represents, certainly could provide a lot more samples of higher resolution than this highly processed and homogenized d18o data.
😐
I said:
> Also, contains a note that points older than 700BP are computed via a
> different data-flow model, presumably because the annual stripes have
> diffused together.
… so you have to be really careful in comparing present-day conditions (timeBP << 700) with the points representing the MWP, which are greater than 700 years, because two different estimation models are being used, which haven't necessarily been optimally calibrated for such comparisons. Also, as the metadata reveals, the reliability of the estimates degrades with time. So the oldest sample values (with BP=2100 representing 100 BC) have a temporal uncertainty of decades!
As I seem to have the last word on this post, I will merely agree with the most of you that it would be gratifying to learn that those two big bumps do indeed represent a MWP warmer than the current 'unprecedented' warm spells. Gratifying in restoring confidence in government-run science, because "global warming" does indeed seem to be over-hyped by the government(s).
But wanting something shouldn't be interpreted as a proof of what you want. Let's see some solid proof before declaring any kind of 'victory' here.
😐