WUWT readers may recall this recent story: New evidence of Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact The story below provides much more detail about the Younger Dryas event and the split that has developed in the scientific community over the cause. I’ve added this graph below from NCDC to give readers a sense of time and magnitude of the event. – Anthony
Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 19, Issues 1-5, 1 January 2000, Richard B. Alley
A consideration of many other very important factors that should be considered as well as the “Black Mats and Nanodiamonds”
ABSTRACT:
The genesis of the Younger Dryas stadial (cold interval) remains an enigma. The onset was both climatologically unexpected and extremely sudden. The two principle theories are diametrically opposed and the proponents of both deeply committed. The debate to date has primarily been centred on some unusual “black mat” deposits that may or may not be linked to a cosmic origin. What has been lacking in the wider discussion are all the other important features associated with the Younger Dryas. The following addresses many of these, in hopes of their inclusion in future debate.
AND NOW THE REST OF THE STORY:
The Younger Dryas onset remains a little understood event. The cause of the 1,300 year-long interval continues to be debated. There are two completely different theories that have split the scientific community. One group strongly endorses an overall slowing or complete stoppage of the Northern Atlantic Ocean circulation 13,000 years ago. The other camp maintains that a catastrophic event originating from the cosmos was the cause.
Following on the heels of the mostly milder Bølling and Allerød intervals (interstadials), there was an extremely sudden and severe climate reversal, this was the Younger Dryas, first detected from Danish pollen studies as long ago as the mid 1930’s. Pollen from the Dryas flower, an arctic species lends its name to this very cold interval. The Younger Dryas cold was first thought to have been confined to north-west Europe, with a possible extension to some other localities immediately surrounding the North Atlantic. More recently however, the cold climate shift is seen as world-wide in extent or nearly so.
The Younger Dryas appeared similar to earlier events known as Heinrich events that were prominent in the Pleistocene (approximately 70,000 to 14,000 years ago) (1). Their cause is not altogether clear, but marine cores, primarily in the north-east Atlantic are festooned with layers of sand, pebbles and rock (lithic materials). These deposits arrived in this area carried on “large armadas” of ice that upon melting deposited their lodes onto ocean bottoms. Rapid climate shifts have been linked to ice melt from sea ice and the large continental glaciers that surrounded the North Atlantic. Lower salinity meltwater is less dense than ocean water and tends to float as a freshwater cap over the marine waters, and this is perceived as associated with North Atlantic Ocean circulation disruption. The Younger Dryas is understood to be linked primarily with meltwater almost solely from the great continental ice sheets.
North Atlantic Ocean circulation has been likened to a great ribbon-like conveyor belt (2). Driven by temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline) differences, the thermohaline (THC) circulation is associated with the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). The sinking of the NADW is alleged to result in the drawing north of warmer waters from southerly climes. This provides north-west Europe with its generally mild climate. However all of this is thought to change when the North Atlantic Ocean circulation slowed or stopped.
It has been proposed that a sudden immense amount of fresh water disrupted the THC approximately 13,000 years ago, and the most likely source was eastern North America’s Laurentide Ice Sheet (3). This particular scenario is presumed to have been affiliated with the relocation of freshwater outflow that had been exiting via the Mississippi River with entry into the Gulf of Mexico. Presumably, an alternate route, the more northerly St. Lawrence corridor became available as the Laurentide Glacier retreated (4). As time has passed however, this idea has largely been abandoned. Not only did salinity levels in the off shore waters adjacent to the St. Lawrence remain the same during the Younger Dryas (5), but the St. Lawrence route remained blocked by ice until well after the Younger Dryas ended (6).
Failure of the St. Lawrence River to deliver the melt has lead to alternative freshwater routes proposed. One of these involves the continent of Antarctica. The idea suggested here is that a significant increase in meltwater entry into world oceans took place approximately 14,300 to 14,600 years ago (7). An inundation known as “meltwater – pulse 1a” (mwp-1a) occurred with perhaps as much as 90% of the meltwater volume originating from Antarctica (8). This premise has the Antarctic melt as affecting the North Atlantic region, but with a significant delay (the bipolar see-saw concept where at least Antarctic climate is out of phase with the Northern Hemisphere). The eventual arrival of the Antarctica melt waters is seen then, as making the North Atlantic vulnerable to even modest amounts of meltwater (9). Presumably, the final threshold was crossed 13,000 BP, allowing the North Atlantic to become disrupted (10). Not all researchers share this view, as at least one study assigned a much different date for mwp-1a, and that was shortly before 13,800 BP (11). And although these scientists also conclude slowing or shutdown of the North Atlantic, the Antarctic as a source becomes questionable.
Since the Antarctic theory appeared, a number of other possible North Atlantic meltwater sources have been suggested. The first of these considered meltwater from the Laurentide as flowing northward through the Canadian Arctic via the Hudson Strait before reaching the North Atlantic (12). A second route was proposed more recently, and this was freshwater flowing across Arctic Canada from the main Laurentide source, Lake Agassiz, then down the Mackenzie River and into the Arctic Ocean (13). The first of these meltwater corridors has now been shown to have remained blocked by ice throughout the early Younger Dryas, much like the St. Lawrence (14), and the second pathway, the Mackenzie, required adjustments to both the Laurentide Ice Sheet and the underlying landmass, before model simulations even allowed meltwater flow to take place (15).
As just mentioned, the main Laurentide meltwater source originated in the huge glacial lake, Agassiz. Most research has indicated that there was a significant lowering of the lake approximately 13,000 years ago. The assumption to date has been that most of the water exited by one corridor or another. However, recent research has suggested that Lake Agassiz may not have experienced very much rapid outflow at all. Dr. Thomas Lowell of the University of Cincinnati contends that lake lowering resulted primarily from open lake evaporation when the lake was ice-free and some sublimation when it was frozen (16). However, this too has been disputed by another study that questions the very high rate of evaporation that the Lowell findings contend; this at a time when the climate was presumably very cold (17). The scientists who criticized the evaporation idea however fall back on the now implausible St. Lawrence meltwater route (18).
Certainly a very important question regarding the Younger Dryas is what effects, if any, were felt elsewhere in the world (away from the immediate confines of the North Atlantic). There are some indications that one outcome was similar to the most recent Heinrich event, specifically a warming of one to two degrees Celsius in the western tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean (19). The reason given for this warming is evidence of a response to strengthened easterly trade winds, which causes greater amounts of warm water to be driven into the Gulf of Mexico (20). Well to the west, on the north coast of South America the same stronger trade winds may also have induced ocean upwelling (21).
The evidence for the greater ocean upwelling is increased ocean productivity within the Cariaco Basin (22). However, the very premise of a trade wind induced warmer Caribbean and western tropical Atlantic during the Younger Dryas is now seen as suspect. Recent studies have shown that south-east portions of North America, the Caribbean and western tropical Atlantic all became much drier and colder at this time (23,24). Central America, for instance, shows a 300-400 metre lowering of the subalpine tree line. This is equivalent to a two to three degree Celsius temperature decrease (25). A number of other studies also indicate colder temperatures.
One of the more important proxies comes from the Orca Basin within the Gulf of Mexico. This is a very interesting study, dependent upon the assessment of certain specific marine organisms. This has allowed scientists to make some startling conclusions. An organism, Globigerinoides Ruber (a species tolerant of high salinity and cold ocean temperatures), when compared to five other marine species less tolerant of cold and high salinity depicted a sudden change in the Orca Basin ecology 13,000 BP (26). Originally, the Orca Basin was thought to have become much more saline, the result of a sudden diversion of meltwater from the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence corridor. However, the eastward meltwater route has now been shown to have been implausible. Instead, it now appears that the Orca Basin experienced a five or six degree drop in ocean temperature. (27). This has recently been confirmed by a new study that depicts significantly colder SST occurred within the Orca Basin region (28). All of this is consistent with a meltwater pulse continuing down the Mississippi and not flowing into the St. Lawrence.
It is interesting too, that the Younger Dryas is now seen has being a widespread event that extended well beyond the North Atlantic. The cold and predominately dry interval is now documented from all across North America and northward as far as Alaska. South America also experienced a definitive climate shift to a predominately cold and arid regime. This included the Amazon Basin, covering a significant portion of the tropical and subtropical latitudes of South America. Indications of an extreme drop in Amazon River levels to as little as 40% to 60% of present day levels are evident (29). Lake Junin (11° S), a high elevation lake in the northern Andes is a second proxy showing an arid Younger Dryas, as lake levels were at their very lowest for the last 14,000 years (30). Not only did the climate become drier, it appears to have become colder too. Certainly the two to three degrees Celsius cooling, in Colombia is an indicator (31). The aforementioned very low Amazon River level may well have been a response to decreased snowmelt and run-off from a colder Andes mountain chain.
Further to the south in the Altiplano region (15° to 23° S), the climate during cold intervals like the Younger Dryas is expected to be wet (32). However, 13,000 years ago there appears to have been an exception (33). Indications are from the glacier Sajama (18° S) that a retreat of the glacier occurred, much as Glacier Quelccaya had done a little further to the north (both likely responding to a drier and colder habitat) (34). Further, considering once again the very low Amazon water levels, the Altiplano source region also appears to have been experiencing a decrease in precipitation.
Aside from a study from the Great Australian Bight (32° –35° S) (35) and an area near the edge of Antarctica (36) where distinct cooling was evident 13,000 years ago, the remainder of the Southern Hemisphere does not show a definitive warming or cooling trend.
Antarctica, at least the interior portions of the continent, may well be a different matter entirely. Here, the analysis of ice cores depicts a climate out of sync with the rest of the planet. Research suggests that very strong downslope (katabatic) winds prevent weather (climate) from penetrating any appreciable distance inland (37). However, it must be said that conclusions as to the Antarctic climate during the Younger Dryas are far from certain. There are problems having to do with the generally very light snowfall that is a feature of Antarctica.. This prevents researchers from accurately differentiating climate intervals of less than about 2,000 years (38).
One type of methodology that permits past climate to be assessed depends upon the analysis of various gases that become trapped within ice after being deposited as snow within ice sheets throughout the world. The worldwide dispersion of most gases only takes one or two years, this allows comparisons of relative gas concentrations in localities as far apart as Greenland and Antarctica. The alignment of ice cores from low snowfall Antarctic and higher snowfall Greenland permits scientists to differentiate past climate. The problem is that it takes many years for the gas to be completely sealed off from the present day atmosphere. This varies between low snowfall areas like Vostok in Antarctica, where it takes as long as 2,500 to 6,000 years to “close off’ (depending upon the age of the ice deposit) to about 60 to 100 years in Greenland cores (39). The technique, while very good in determining the longer-term glacial and interglacial periods, at least in Antarctica is clearly inadequate for shorter-term events such as the Younger Dryas.
The continued contention that the North Atlantic was the principle trigger of the Younger Dryas has relied heavily upon a number of marine cores from the Atlantic. The first of these cores comes from the Bermuda Rise (EN120GGC1 – (33° 40’ N., 57° 37’ W)), where the analysis of benthic profiles of carbon 12 and 13 isotopes, along with cadmium/calcium ratios theoretically shows North Atlantic Ocean circulation disruption (40). However, a number of problems have been identified that relate to the Bermuda Rise marine core. Before analysis could be done a comparison was required with another marine core, CH73-139C (54° 30’ N., 16° 21’ W.), a core now found to have been affected by a condition called “bioturbation” (an unwanted mixing of the marine sedimentary layers) (41). This prevents precise dating as to the time when the slowing or stoppage of the ocean circulation occurred (42). A second problem with the samples from Bermuda Rise is its location. Rather than sampling the desired amounts of deep water from the North Atlantic and Antarctic, it appears to be sampling an area where a localized mixing of ocean waters took place, that once again prevents accurate assessments (43).
The marine species Neogloboquadriana pacyderma, a polar organism displayed a definitive shift in population approximately 13,000 years ago, both at a marine core, Troll 3.1 (60° 47’N., 03° 43’W.), just west of Norway, and a second core V23-81 (54°02’N., 16° 08’ W.), just off Ireland’s west coast (44). Both of these studies have been drawn upon to deduce that a slowing or complete shutdown of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation occurred 13,000 BP. A third study, that utilizes diatoms, (much more sensitive than Neogloboquadriana pacyderma), is very likely more appropriate in discerning relatively brief cold intervals such as the Younger Dryas (45). This study from the South-east Norwegian Sea does show a definitive shift of five to six degrees Celsius. However, that may or may not necessarily be attributable to North Atlantic circulation disruption (46). The following quote highlights the researchers caution when they stated, “there is evidence that cooling was related to reduced salinities, but this does not prove a direct causal relationship that cooling was directly forced by meltwater events” (47). The shift instead may simply have been the result of changes in the relative number of polar and arctic organisms (48).
The inference drawn is that cold intervals such as the Younger Dryas may well have another altogether different trigger than North Atlantic Ocean circulation. Further to this, a somewhat more recent paper, also by the same researchers that conducted the study in the Norwegian Sea indicates, that a reduction in incoming solar radiation might be the trigger that initiates fluctuations in the polar front in the Nordic Seas (49). It is very intriguing that a reduction in incoming solar radiation may have occurred at a time when during the summer a maximum of solar energy should have been occurring (see ref. 75).
The whole concept of North Atlantic Ocean circulation as having any appreciable influence upon the Younger Dryas is placed further in doubt by the work of Dr. Michael Sarnthein. Dr. Sarnthein has collected a large number of marine cores from throughout the Atlantic sampling the interval back to 30,000 before present (BP).
The conclusion gleaned from his work reveals that the North Atlantic Ocean circulation was operative during the Younger Dryas, and had been so for more than 1,500 years prior to the start of this cold period (50). This is consistent with one other high-resolution marine core from the South Atlantic (presumably a good location to detect North Atlantic shifts) that does not show a slowing or shutdown of the North Atlantic (51).
Oceanographer Dr. Carl Wunsch has gone so far as to suggest that the whole concept of a temperature and salinity induced ocean circulation shift is in error, at least in the North Atlantic (52). Dr. Wunsch also believes that the North Atlantic is simply too small to cause significant climate changes in other parts of the world (53). Dr. Wunsch was even more emphatic about the role of the North Atlantic in climate changes when he stated that “you can’t turn the Gulf Stream off as long as wind blows in the North Atlantic” and then goes on to say that “the conveyor is kind of fairy tale for grownups”(54). Dr. Richard Alley seems to echo these sentiments when he questioned how the small high latitude North Atlantic “energy starved polar tail” could possibly “wag the large energy rich tropical dog”(55).
Apart from this, the presence of a less dense freshwater cap may not result in what many scientists see as a cooling at all. Instead, Dr. Richard Fairbanks sometime ago suggested that the presence of a shallow freshwater lid over more saline waters might be subject to rapid warming during the summer and early autumn (56). Thus, instead of the commonly perceived shift to cold associated with the presence of freshwater within the North Atlantic may well result in warming. This of course is the exact opposite of what many scientists currently believe occurred during the Younger Dryas. All of this presumes that there may have been a less saline North Atlantic at this time. However, according to many scientists there was an absence of meltwater entering world oceans approximately 13,000 BP, thereby making this scenario unlikely.
There are in addition a number of other perplexing factors apparent during the Younger Dryas: Carbon 14 (14C), for instance, increased markedly by 70% to 80% at the very beginning of the cold interval (57,58,59). This far exceeds the expected 30% or 35% 14C increase when the North Atlantic allegedly slows or shuts down (60,61). The consideration of possible 14C increases from geomagnetic changes or increased sea ice coverage are also thought to be quite insignificant (62). A second element, Beryllium 10 (10Be), also increased significantly approximately 13,000 years ago. Snowfall at this time in Antarctica and Greenland was much reduced, and it is this that some scientists see as the cause for higher 10Be concentrations (63). The contention is that the snow that did fall removed as effectively the beryllium from the atmosphere, thereby resulting in higher concentrations within ice. However, an alternative view is seen as plausible, and that is simply that there was much more 10Be in the atmosphere during the Younger Dryas (64,65). Both of these elemental forms are known to be products of cosmic events that therefore lend credence to the Impact Hypothesis.
Two other deposits within Greenland and Antarctica glacial ice display interesting characteristics as well. Nitrates are one of these, and though very difficult to analyze, there appears to be little doubt that much of the increase 13,000 BP was attributable to very high amounts in the atmosphere (66,67). A second deposit, ammonium, was also greatly elevated during the Younger Dryas. The predominate origin for Younger Dryas ammonia that arrives in Greenland is North America, and one reason proposed for very high levels is that biological activity remained very prominent because of a continuation of a mild climate (68). However, it is now known that North America did become significantly colder at this time, therefore making greater biological activity extremely unlikely. Thus, there are more questions than answers about the possible origins of the elevated levels of both nitrates and ammonium.
Even more intriguing, and more controversial as well, are a number of other deposits found both in soil and ice, possibly linked to a cosmic origin (69). Associated with an unusual “black mat” deposit found in many of the terrestrial sites, the dates for this layer are very close to the 13,000 BP Younger Dryas beginnings (70). What has garnered most of the attention thus far, are features called “nanodiamonds.” One way in which nanodiamonds are produced is under very high temperatures and pressures (consistent with a cosmic origin). Scientists such as geologist Dr. Allen West contends that approximately 13,000 years ago “ a low density object” entered the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrated explosively, and the remnants of the catastrophe rained down upon the planet (71). The signatures (including nanodiamonds)of this event were left behind throughout a widespread area that includes Europe, the Greenland Ice Sheet and North and South America (72,73,74).
Another perplexing feature of the Younger Drays is that it was a time of increased solar insolation during the summer months. Solar receipt during summer months when received associated with “June perihelion.” Somewhat surprisingly, it is the summer months that are most critical to snow and ice being retained from one year to the next at the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes (75). This particular alignment has occurred forty-two times over the past one million years and the Younger Dryas is noted as the only significant cold interval (76).
Two final features to be noted about the Younger Dryas, is that it took hold, not in decades as was once thought, but rather in as little time as a few years, or even less (77,78). This is but another piece of the puzzle that does not fit with the whole premise of an ocean induced short-term cold climate interval. It may be concluded that an alternative hypothesis, that of a very large cosmic event took place not that far from Earth, 13,000 years ago. All things considered, the evidence that supports this cosmic origin is available in much greater detail elsewhere, though a number of scientific papers are referenced here.
Concluding Remarks:
Despite all of the preceding discussion as to its numerous shortcomings, the North Atlantic Ocean circulation as cause for the Younger Dryas, remains the most widely accepted hypothesis. During the past several years, however, a debate on what is seen by many as a much more plausible trigger, one that involves either a very close comet passage or even a possible impact event that had transpired. To date, the primary focus in attempts to justify a cosmic origin for the Younger Dryas has been almost totally limited to black mat deposits (specifically nanodiamonds), that have been detected in various parts of the world. This is far too limited an approach!
It is the purpose of this paper to attempt to raise the profile of the long list of other very important clues that also require consideration. An in conclusion, a list of many of the most important aspects are listed as follows:
- The North Atlantic Ocean circulation (known as the THC) slowing or shutdown was not triggered by meltwater suddenly shunted down the St. Lawrence, nor was it likely to have flowed north through Arctic Canada. Nor was the continent of Antarctica involved in Younger Dryas forcing.
- Furthermore, dating of significant meltwater entries into the world’s ocean have not been shown as contemporary with the Younger Dryas onset.
- The main marine cores drawn upon as evidence for the THC hypothesis have either proven to be unreliable, or in some other cases only circumstantial.
- And in contrast, with the just mentioned marine cores, are the proxies collected by Dr. Michael Sarnthein that depict the North Atlantic Ocean circulation as operative during the Younger Dryas and much as 1,500 years before the interval, as well throughout the Younger Dryas. In fact, the North Atlantic appeared to have been operative as much as 1,500 year before the start of the interval, and continued right on through the period as well.
- Increases of both 14C and 10Be are much too large to be associated with the North Atlantic Ocean circulation disruption.
- Also, as time as gone in it is becoming increasingly evident that the onset of the Younger Dryas was indicative of atmospheric origins for the event, in that the onset was so very rapid, perhaps in one year or less.
- Finally, it should also be stated that such an extraordinarily severe and long-lasting event occurred at a time when glacial and sea ice expansion took place despite a peaking of solar radiation in the most critical summer months.
Acknowledgements:
My thanks to Steve Garcia and Clint Unwin for their valuable suggestions, and thorough editing of the foregoing paper. Also to Reed Kirkpatrick for keeping me apprised of some specific subject areas.
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62) R.B Firestone et al., “Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Impact 12,9000 Years Ago that Contributed to the Megafaunal Extinctions and the Younger Dryas,” (2007): PNAS 104 #41, 16016-16021.
63) Heather Pringle, “Firestorm from Space Wiped out Prehistoric Americans,” (2007): New Scientist 8-9.
64) Ibid.
65) R.B Firestone et al., “Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Impact 12,9000 Years Ago that Contributed to the Megafaunal Extinctions and the Younger Dryas,” (2007): PNAS 104 #41, 16016-16021.
66) W.C. Mahaney et al., (2010) “Evidence from the North-western Venezuelan Andes for Extraterrestrial Impact: The Black Mat Enigma,” http://www.science.com
67) A.V. Kurbatov et al., “Discovery of a Nanodiamond – Rich Layer in the Greenland Ice Sheet,” (2010): Journal of Glaciology 56, 749-758.
68) B. Molfino and A. McIntyre, “Nutricline Variation in the Equatorial Atlantic Coincident with the Younger Dryas,” (1990): Paleoceaography 5, 997-1008.
69) Ibid.
70) J. P. Steffenson et al., “High-Resolution Greenland Ice Core Data Show Abrupt Climate Change Happens in a Few Years,” (2008): Science 321, 680-683.
71) K. Ravillious” Ice Age Took Hold in Less than a Year,” (2009): New Scientist, 10.
Rodney R. Chilton, a climatologist for the past thirty years, is interested in a number of nature’s mysteries, including the enigmatic Younger Dryas. The author resides on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
Well, that was something of a disappointment. Read through the whole thing and it turns out to be basically “we have no idea what caused it”.
And there you have it – evidence of paleolithic SUV’s from space..
Thank you, Mr. Chilton.
crosspatch says:
“Read through the whole thing and it turns out to be basically ‘we have no idea what caused it’.”
But we can make an educated guess: CO2 caused it!
What else could it be?
.
[/sarc] <—shouldn't be necessary. But there it is.
Great paper. Thank you.
Very readable update on the present level of knowledge about the Younger Dryas.
I do think that Crosspatch has missed the point of my submission, as I was attempting to point out the huge weaknesses in the THC (North Atlantic slowing or shutdown) hypothesis. While at the same time I am asking that the discussion regarding the cosmic signals be greatly expanded from just he Black mat deposits and the nanodiamond concentrations. Also. my thanks Anthony for posting my submission
I do think that Crosspatch has missed the point of my submission, as I was attempting to point out the huge weaknesses in the THC (North Atlantic slowing or shutdown) hypothesis. While at the I do think that Crosspatch has missed the point of my submission, as I was attempting to point out the huge weaknesses in the THC (North Atlantic slowing or shutdown) hypothesis. While at the same time I am asking that the discussion regarding the cosmic signals be greatly expanded from just he Black mat deposits and the nanodiamond concentrations. Also. my thanks Anthony for posting my submissionsame time I am asking that the discussion regarding the cosmic signals be greatly expanded from just he Black mat deposits and the nanodiamond concentrations. Also. my thanks Anthony for posting my submission
Sorry this is what I meant to say: I do think that Crosspatch has missed the point of my submission, as I was attempting to point out the huge weaknesses in the THC (North Atlantic slowing or shutdown) hypothesis.While at the same time I am asking that the discussion regarding the cosmic signals be greatly expanded from just he Black mat deposits and nanodiamond concentrations to great many other intersting factors present at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. Also, my thanks Anthony for posting my submission.
The parts I have never liked, and find unsettling, about the Younger Dryas are: that it occurred fairly recently, that the onset was in years, and that we do not have a solid understanding of what produced it.
Or that it was a high current Z-pinch aurora triggered by a coronal mass ejection resulting in severe atmospheric disturbances, not limited to fires on a global scale in the Northern Hemisphere, and a high enough influx of radiation to mortally wound large terrestrial mammals, at least in the northern latitudes.
A. L. Peratt, J. McGovern, A. H. Qöyawayma, M. A. Van der Sluijs, and M. G. Peratt, Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current
Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity Part II: Directionality and Source, Trans. Plasma Sci. v.35, n.4, 2007
Other papers here: NEAR EARTH MANIFESTATIONS OF THE PLASMA UNIVERSE
This is from Anthony Peratt at Los Alamos National Laboratories, not from those who have modified his ideas and posted them on what he calls anti-science websites.
“What has garnered most of the attention thus far, are features called “nanodiamonds.” One way in which nanodiamonds are produced is under very high temperatures and pressures (consistent with a cosmic origin).
But the formation of nanodiamonds is also consistent with the electrical discharges associated with high current aurora.
The northern latitudes would have been bombarded with protons and the southern latitudes with relativistic electrons. Either of these should have altered atmospheric chemistry in predictable but different ways that should be detectable in ice cores from around that time.
To date, the primary focus in attempts to justify a cosmic origin for the Younger Dryas has been almost totally limited to black mat deposits (specifically nanodiamonds), that have been detected in various parts of the world. This is far too limited an approach!
Peratt and associates have cataloged petroglyphs from around the world in both hemispheres that reproduce with considerable accuracy the plasma instabilities that would have been visible at the time in such an aurora. The forms of the drawings are such that they demonstrate a change in geometry that is consistent with the latitude at which they are found, a change that would be expected if artists at different latitudes were copying such a fixed globally visible phenomenon. But more important was an anomaly in their distribution that went unexplained until the discovery by the THEMIS satellite of a breach in the earth’s magnetosphere A. L. Peratt, W. Fay Yao, P. Bustamante, and R. Tuki, The THEMIS magnetospheric breach discovery and an anomaly in the global distribution of petroglyphs; MHD instabilities recorded by mankind in antiquity, Spring Meeting American Physical Society, Denver, Colorado May 2-5, 2009.
The abstract below:
I know that fieldwork has been ongoing since 2010, but I haven’t yet heard the results.
A good paper.
It would have been nice to have included a bit more evidence that the temperature drop was abrupt,
but it reads like science as it ought to be, evidence is weighted and hypotheses are tested against the evidence.
Just because we have not been able to piece together all the clues to provide a satisfactory understanding of the event is no reason to be disappointed.
Imho, just the gradual recognition that this was a world wide event, not just something localized to northern Europe, is a major step forward.
Similarly, the strong evidence from this that colder means drier should help refute the more common ‘global warming = spreading deserts’ claims.
I wonder how much of an effect the other large lakes present in the Northern hemisphere could have had? They are much less studied in the English language literature, mostly due to their location in the former Soviet block. It is known that there was a significant proglacial lake in western Siberia, and I believe in Poland at the time of the Younger Dryas.
I also know that the shift from draining Lake Agassiz into the Mississippi to draining through the St Lawrence was not accomplished in a single step, portions of the Laurentide Ice sheet melted and drained into the Susquahana and Hudson Rivers for long enough to carve notable canyons.
A very interesting read. Thanks, Dr. Chilton, Anthony.
We clearly see that the Cosmic Impact proponents are slowly
but surely gaining ground, providing more and more evidence……
……whereas the Ocean Streaming storyline tellers are unable
to put additional prove on their scales….Fact, see above: They lose
one argument after the other…..
JS
Well we don’t know what caused it, but do we know what caused the rapid temp increase that ended the younger dryas?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
This abrupt temp increase of 10c in a decade occuring in Venezuela and Greenland at the same time must also be very unusual?
I just wish that someone here could give a suggestion for this huge temp increase over such a short time span.
BTW makes our modern warm period of 0.7c in the last 100+ years look a bit wimpy at best. Also the mod WP comes at the end of a minor ice age, so what would we expect?
Very interesting puzzle. But, hey, if you want the science settled, figure out what you want the answer to be and then call in “The Team”. :<)
Considering all the confounding issues raised with each piece of evidence offered to explain the Younger Dryas event, it is quite remarkable that AGW forecasts can be made and believed with such high levels of confidence. On the other hand, the catastrophic consequences of AGW are always vague and forever just a few years away. Just enough to energize the believers, pressure the politicians and keep the government money flowing.
I found it to be a fascinating read and well worth the time I spent. Thank you Mr. Chilton, and thank you Anthony for giving Mr. Chilton a podium to present his work.
IMO, the discussion about the YD event is talking about the cart before the horse. If one can explain the climatic phenomenon that occurs roughly every 1200 yrs throughout the glacial cycle, then one is ready to discuss the YD event. The NH (GISP2) shows such a fast rate of temp increase preceding the YD event, which we misinterpret as the entering of the interglacial, but which IMO is just another of the 1200 yr cycles, with it’s switch like behavior, jumping up 12-15 degrees, and then a jumping down (same rate like a switch) back down 12-15 degrees (and sometimes doubled up like at 45kyr, 38kyr and the precursor to the YD event, and also like the switch like jump up after the YD event, followed by the subsequent long slow entrance rate into the interglacial. You can see the long slow background rise into the interglacial behind the spike that occurs before the YD event. If the preceding ramp up to the YD event was long and slow, like the Vostok entrance into the interglacial, or the rate which occurs after the recovery from the YD event, and the dropout occurred, then I would say the YD event is the anomaly. IMO, the 1200 yr spike is the anomaly, unexplained and not understood, and without the understanding of what is “forcing” this switch like behavior, one cannot possibly understand what happens when this forcing is removed. Someone, please explain the incredible rate of temp increase that occurs at the recovery from the YD, and the subsequent return to the normal slow rate of interglacial entrance, and why the fast rate matches all of the previous 1200 yr spikes in the glacial record.
http://s852.photobucket.com/albums/ab89/etregembo/?action=view¤t=GISP2_Vostok_50K.jpg
Questions:
1. What causes the 1200 yrs transients, with their fast ramp up and ramp down rates (much faster than the normal rate entering and exiting the interglacials.
2. Is the abnormally fast entrance rate into the interglacial, either before or after the YD event, depending upon ones interpretation, actually the entrance into the interglacial, or an unfortunate 1200yr transient, with it’s switch like behavior, making the YD event look so anomalous(riding on top of the slower rate entering the interglacial)?
Inquiring minds want to know…
P.S. Not saying the meteor didn’t occur, or possible glacial lake releases didn’t happen, just that the event is likely misinterpreted due to the lack of understanding of the 1200 yrs spikes that dominate the glacial period in the NH (GISP2) with their incredible ramp rates at both entrance and exit.
It’s like understanding oceanic cycles (PDO/AMO/ENSO) before subtracting them from the temperature record beforing analyzing residuals…like the sun and CO2 or Cosmic Rays or whatever floats your boat.
Somewhat surprisingly, it is the summer months that are most critical to snow and ice being retained from one year to the next at the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes (75).
Why should this be surprising?
You don’t mention the Taylor Dome cores, which show Antarctic synchronization with NH Younger Dryas.
https://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/bender/lab/downloads/Steig_et_al_1998_copy.pdf
But very interesting. Thanks very much for this summary. Science is about exploring uncertainty. A point that seems to be lost on the AGW crowd.
There is a much simpler story although it doesn’t specify a cause.
The beginning of the Younger Dryas where the temps dipped is when Noahs flood occurred. The end of it where temps went back up is below.
Gen 10:25 To Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided, and his brother’s name was Joktan.
It was during the time of Peleg that temps warmed and sea levels went up. This is when he land bridges were inundated. There is approx a 400 yr gap between the flood and Peleg and it all happened 4500 – 4000 BP.
Now the flaming begins 🙂
Well, that was something of a disappointment. Read through the whole thing and it turns out to be basically “we have no idea what caused it”.
That is what real science is like sometimes. Very darned interesting.
If something big passed through our solar system at that time, might it not be observable today? A rapid increase in C-14 and Be-10 indicates a near by energetic event, a VERY energetic event. What would be other indications of such an event.
Those are good questions to ask.
To add to GuarionexSandova comment, a popularexplaination of the electric universe is set out in “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps: The True Origin of Species”, by Robert W. Felix, including the black layer, the diamonds and the temperature drop.
There are so many theories. About the comet theory: It is speculated that the effect of a comet on atmospheric nitrate, and a estimates of its consequence for atmospheric ammonium, providing a test for the occurrence of a bolide at the onset of the Younger Dryas. Comets break down N2 in the atmosphere to nitrate (NOx), increasing nitrate concentration. Greenland cores do show ammonium increase at the onset of the YD – when nitrogen and hydrogen form ammonia, and the hydrogen would have come from the ice sheets. Its pure speculation whether it was a bolide forcing or a freshwater forcing, but in either case, it would only be a short lived affair – a sudden spike. Yet the YD was a millenia-long event….
no one ever seems to question the internal thermodynamics of the earth, as to whether there might be a hot spot in the earth’s core that causes sudden big freezes, mainly in the northern hemisphere, in what seems to be almost precise timescale resolutions on the temperature reconstruction of the last several hundred thousand years
thank you very much for posting. i have a scientifically minded teen and have used this article to demonstrate “the way science is done”.
If a comet entered the atmosphere it might account for a large influx of “melt”water. Perhaps causality is cosmic. Maybe the comet’s “melt”water was massive and caused a thousand year suppression of the N Atlantic circulation.
Looking at the GISP2 data, Colder is dustier.
http://www.gisp2.sr.unh.edu/DATA/fancy.html
I’ve been arguing that the recent Arctic sea ice melt is caused by increased solar insolation + decreasing surface albedo from particulate deposition.
When you have multiyear accumulation of ice, glaciers or sea ice, dust and other particulates are embedded in the ice. Solar insolation melts (and sublimates) ice from the top, resulting in accumulation of this material on the ice surface progressively decreasing albedo. A positive feedback.
This appears to me to be a plausible mechanism for rapid warming from periods of extensive ice cover, such as the end of the Younger Dryas.
Ice age – What ice age?
Here’s a link to a really skeptical article: http://www.blavatsky.net/science/atlantis/emails/ice_age.htm There is ‘evidence’ that the ice ages, as we understand them, did not happen.
The first thing that attracted my attention when I found the above link was the name Blavatsky. “Verrry interesting” The new age movement might be termed “Blavatsky for dummies”. In other words, although I do not personally have the knowledge and skill to refute the information and conclusions in the above linked article, I’m darn sure it’s garbage. It is, isn’t it? Help …
Every day taht passes I’m being proven more correct. The Younder Dryas event was in fact the destruction of Atlantis. It is chronicled in Otto Mucks amazing book the Secret of Atlantis. The chesapeake bay craters are the remnants of this = The sargasso sea eel migrations are also proof.
commieBob;
I’m darn sure it’s garbage.
>>>>>>
It is worse than garbage. The article rests upon this argument:
********************
A first and perhaps prime fact you need to know is that ice does not go uphill. Water doesn’t and ice doesn’t and glaciers don’t. Even over level ground ice doesn’t go very far. Specifically it goes up to 7 miles on level ground. Ice just can’t push ice further than that. If pressure is applied to push more than 7 miles worth of ice then it gets crushed or melts instead.
A look at the map shows that the ice would have to be pushed much farther than 7 miles.
With just this info you can see, the ice-age didn’t happen!
********************
An “ice age” happens when the total amount of snow that falls in winter exceeds the amount that melts in summer. If that happens over a large area, you get a large ice sheet, it doesn’t have to “travel” to get anywhere. As for the 7 mile limitation, it all depends on speed. If the ice only moves a small amount year over year, then no crushing or melting occurrs. FAIL on the first two points of the article, no further reading required to conclude that it is drivel.
<i.commieBob says:
June 16, 2012 at 7:21 pm
It’s nonsense. It confuses mountain glaciers with continental icesheets (and various other things). With radar sensing we now know that both Antarctica and Greenland contain large below sea level basins. Ice keeps accumulating in these basins until it overflows the surrounding mountains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Topographic_map_of_Greenland_bedrock.jpg
The Younger Dryas type abrupt cooling event is a cyclic event. A extraterrestrial impact cannot cool the planet for a 1000 years. An extraterrestrial impact is not cyclic.
The Younger Dryas is a Heinrich event. I have looked at cause of the Heinrick in detail. They are caused by a pseudo cyclic interruption to the solar magnetic cycle. There is as I have noted before abrupt changes to the geomagnetic field that coincide with abrupt climate change events. A interruption to the solar magnetic cycle is the serial abrupt climate changer. The abrupt change to geomagnetic field affects planetary temperature by Svensmark’s mechanism. The affect of on the geomagnetic is dependent on the orbital parameters. The interglacial periods have all ended abruptly. There are cycles of this peculiar Heinrich events in the paleoclmatic events in the paleorecord.
Obviously there are other possible phenomena that will leave high temperature burn marks on the surface planet.
There are a suite of different astronomical anomalies that are explained by what is the source of this cyclic solar change. What is observed explains for example the spiral galaxy rotational anomaly, the extreme high temperature gas that occurs in intergalactic space between galaxy clusters, (basic calculations indicate the very high temperature gas should have cooled, there is no mechanism that can heat the gas to the temperatures observed or can heat such a large volume on intergalactic gas) the long term cyclic increasing radiation from quasars (there is no physical explanation for what can cause the quasar radiation to cyclically change on periods of a year and to increase in magnitude with time. The radiation increases in magnitude until there is an event the resets the cycle) , magtars, quasar redshift morphological changes, the reason why “black holes” have a maximum mass of around 10^10 solar masses) the lack of spiral galaxy redshift morphological changes and so on. (i.e. When very large objects collapse what forms is not a black hole but rather a physical object that is unstable that changes with time. Think of a galaxy with a large number of these objects. The massive “black” hole that is the source of quasar radiation is just a very large example of one of these very large objects.
As one cannot in a lab create the conditions in a “black” hole is assumed. There are series of paper that discuss both the quasars observations that are not explained by the standard model (classical black hole and with a dust rotating dusk disk. For example naked quasars, quasars that emit radiation but do not have a dusk disk, and the observation of a massive magnetic field that occurs above the quasar, and so on.) and the physics of the objects that form in an extremely large object collapse.
It appear the solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted. If it has, I will start a thread to explain what is observed.
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144308
ABRUPT CHANGE IN EARTH’S CLIMATE SYSTEM
Abrupt shifts between warm and cold states punctuate the interval between 20 to 75 ka) in the Greenland isotope record, with shifts of 5◦–15◦C occurring in decades or less (Figure 1). These alternations were identified in some of the earliest ice core isotopic studies [e.g., (22)] and were replicated and more precisely dated by subsequent work (23). Further analysis of diverse records has distinguished two types of millennial events (13). Dansgaard/Oeschger (D/O) events are alternations between warm (interstadial) and cold (stadial) states that recur approximately every 1500 years, although this rhythm is variable. Heinrich events are intervals of extreme cold contemporaneous with intervals of ice-rafted detritus in the northern North Atlantic (24–26); these recur irregularly on the order of ca. 10,000 years apart and are typically followed by the warmest D/O interstadials.
Both Heinrich and D/O events exhibit clear global impacts. These patterns have been summarized in several studies [e.g., (26, 34)]. Although the pattern of influence appears to differ between these types of anomaly, a clear interpretation of these differences, particularly in terms of distinguishing physical mechanisms, has not been developed. As Hemming (26) notes, different global patterns of impact may simply reflect proxy-specific or site-specific limitations such as sensitivity and response time. In general, however, a cold North Atlantic corresponds with a colder, drier Europe, weaker Asian summer monsoon, saltier northwestern tropical Pacific, drier northern South America, colder/wetter western North America, cooler eastern subtropical Pacific, and warmer South Atlantic and Antarctic. Table 1 summarizes the main impacts of a cold North Atlantic (stadial) on key regions and systems.
With all due respect, most of your LIS references are extremely old and do not adequately reflect the state of modern understanding of LIS dynamics and decay. In particular, nobody would challenge the opening of the St. Lawrence at the time of the Younger Dryas, that is well established by Champlain Sea acoustic soundings and proxy evidence. The questions rather are more focused on the precise discharge routes, magnitudes and timing through Western Ontario – Thunder Bay – Lake Nipigon region wherein the numerous geomophological anomalies lie. Also questions still remain on the Northwest discharge routes that can only be answered by meticulous isostatically adjusted and LIDAR enhanced analysis of the Herman era GLA strandlines back up through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, work that is still in progress. Your confidence is premature.
GuarionexSandoval says:
June 16, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Or that it was a high current Z-pinch aurora triggered by a coronal mass ejection resulting in severe atmospheric disturbances, not limited to fires on a global scale in the Northern Hemisphere, and a high enough influx of radiation to mortally wound large terrestrial mammals, at least in the northern latitudes.
The aurora is not a high current Z-pinch or electric discharge and the giant ‘breach’ in the geomagnetic field is just ordinary magnetic reconnection that actually goes on all the time, In plasma physics, electric currents are caused by stresses in the plasma and electric fields are caused by relative motion between the plasma and the magnetic field.
William says:
June 16, 2012 at 7:55 pm
The Younger Dryas is a Heinrich event. I have looked at cause of the Heinrich in detail. They are caused by a pseudo cyclic interruption to the solar magnetic cycle.
There has never been an ‘interruption’ of the solar magnetic cycle [which is self-sustaining] and even if there were one, any effects would be extremely minor.
Well written article. Kept my interest to the very end.
While reading, I remembered that a repeat of the the supposed ocean circulation shutdown of the Younger Dryas was the premise of the comedy “The Day After Tomorrow”. As the prehistoric shutdown was the only semi-plausible scientific point in the movie, I’m saddened to see it questioned here. 🙂
However, according to many scientists there was an absence of meltwater entering world oceans approximately 13,000 BP, thereby making this scenario unlikely.
————
Well there must have been very large amounts of meltwater. It’s just uncertain whether there was a very sudden release and if there was was it enough to affect ocean circulation.
Apart from nits like this I found the article vet informative, though a but confused about cosmic events. Like was it an impact or was it some uptick in cosmic rays or what?
I fail to see why it has to be one or the other. The Earth is warming for thousands of years so those mile high ice packs on North America are building up large lakes of fresh water. Space debris impacts burst open the ice dams releasing a huge flood of fresh water into the Atlantic. The conveyor shuts down.
Nice idea but how do you find the impact zone? When the ice dam got hit it would all have melted away and been diluted and washed out to sea? Maybe some trace on the ocean floor of cosmic debris but it would be so diluted that it probably wouldn’t stand out.
RM says:
June 16, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Nice idea but how do you find the impact zone? When the ice dam got hit it would all have melted away and been diluted and washed out to sea? Maybe some trace on the ocean floor of cosmic debris but it would be so diluted that it probably wouldn’t stand out.
If it were an airburst over a substantial amount of ice, any cosmic debris would be carried away and scattered by meltwater.
Others have questioned how a cosmic event could have such a long tail – 1,300 (?) years – or did something cosmic last that long?
The glacial fresh water flows don’t seem to be good candidates either unless there is some additional component not being investigated. Still some say the great ocean circulation has a transit time of about 1,600 years. Thus, a pulse, once started, might last a long time.
I don’t see in the paper any mention of the release of glacial lake water through the Mohawk River into the Hudson R. north of Albany. This is mentioned here . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_Lake_Iroquois
. . . with reference #3 being an investigation of this being a trigger for the Younger Dryas episode.
Abstract here:
http://www.mendeley.com/research/catastrophic-meltwater-discharge-down-the-hudson-valley-a-potential-trigger-for-the-intraallerd-cold-period/
“. . . a short-lived (<400 yr) cold event (Intra-Allerod cold period) that began ca. 13,350 yr B.P.”
{funny – only a geologist would think of 400 years as short-lived}
This is a nice summary of PART of the YD story, but it lacks some of the most important aspects that relate to the glacial and ice core data. Perhaps a more accurate title might have been “The rest of part of the YD story.” The YD is a very important climatic event because it demonstrated that very abrupt, intense climatic changes could take place that are unrelated to Croll-Milankovitch slow orbital changes. It essentially spelled the death of the Croll-Milankovitch theory of the cause of Ice Ages. Attempts were made to save the theory by invoking the North Atlantic Deep Ocean Current changes that purported to explain such abrupt climate changes by turning the deep ocean current on and off with large influxes of fresh water from North America into the North Atlantic. However, this theory also fails because abrupt climate changes occur in both hemispheres simultaneously, whereas the Southern Hemisphere should lag the Northern Hemisphere by hundreds of years if the theory is valid. Some of the details of this may be found in http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/easterbrook_geologic-evidence-of-recurring-climatic-cycles.pdf
This part of the YD story is too long to detail here, but I’ll put a together a summary in the next couple of days. It’s an intriguing story.
What is the policy impact of the Younger Dryas cooling event?
Given the Younger Dryas happened so suddenly and given that if something similar happened again the consequences would be extremely bad for mankind, it seems to me a good risk management strategy would be to get as much insulation around the planet as possible and get rid of those hazardous polar ice caps as quickly as possible.
Would a rational risk management approach be to burn more fossil fuels?
Many times I have seen the impact idea for the Younger Dryas time period questioned due to the lack of an impact crater of the correct age.
A couple of items come to mind when I hear that;
Willamette Meteorite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willamette_Meteorite
And there is also the Cape York meteorite(s)… also with no associated crater and of about the right age.
It would be interesting if they could nail the age estimates down to a higher resolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite
Forget about the Atlantic. It is merely a longitudinal Tethys whose only claim to fame is its outlet for Arctic bottom water (which will continue to feed the THC regardless of surface salinity).
There are several well documented ice dam floods in the Columbia River basin that released enormous amounts of freshwater into the Pacific without noticeable effect.
THC bottom water is also formed in the Antarctic gyre.
The 14C excursion is interesting and news to me. I keep saying, despite the snickers, cosmic rays convert Nitrogen to 14C…
Well, I haven’t got around to reading it yet; looks like a chore; but looks like I do need to read it, so thanks for posting that encyclopedic Twoot about it.
“”””” BUT !!!!. the darn NCDC graphic, first pic is shrieking in my ear !!
What the hell is all that carry on at 1450 BP; Who Dat ? and howcum, nobody seems interested in what that is and what caused it. So what if that carry on at -1450 is actually cause and effect related to the YD 150 years later; that’s what I want to know ??
And I’m still waiting to hear who exactly, Younger and Dryas were.
But thanks for the keep awake tome.
A solar magnetic excursion can only be assumed to have ‘minor’ effects on climate if we decouple that perturbation from the gravitationally-derived kinetic energy within the atmosphere. But that is a ridiculous thing to do and without going into details of why, it is this mistake that results in our incomplete understandings of tornadoes, the polar-annular modes, and the QBO, [to name a few examples]…we think we have the idea but thats because we parameterize. The Younger Dryas may or may not have featured cosmic involvement, but one things for sure..geomagnetic activity of some sort appears to have been the trigger. The answer lies in global circulation, it is quite unusual that we overlook the conteractive nature of the internally resonant behaviors in the north/south south annular modes (at time-specific intervals)…
Very interesting. Much food for thought.Look forward to the follow up.
It is worth pointing out to regular readers of WUWT that the the Little Ice age -marked on the graph-is frequently msunderstood. Matthes, a glaciologist who coined the phrase as recently as 1939, meant it to refer to the last 4000 years or so, when there have been warm periods but essentially we are still in a little ice age compated to the previous few thousand years. He thought the present warm period-at the time of his writing-i.e the 1920’s and 1930’s, was merely yet another brief warm period between the main ice ages such as the younger dryas.
WE are in a relatively benign climatic period at present which is likely to turn out to be a relatively brief interval in the geological scale of events.
tonyb
I love the smell of science…
Thank you for a fascinating read.
Love mysteries, millions of recorded observations seems a good place to start such as the links provided by:
GuarionexSandoval says:
June 16, 2012 at 5:12 pm ~~~~~~
then the nano diamonds, anomalous beryllium, nitrates and ammonia plus widespread fauna and flora kill-offs, plus dramatic colder climate. I see where this is heading but am loath to mention close encounters of a celestial body on a science blog. 😉
I am pleased to see this saga continuing to unfold with general courtesy and general refrain from “Anthony! this is pseudoscientific drivel! it gives your work a bad name!” etc etc. Such measured response is AFAICT far more truly scientific 🙂
With that, a few things to mention:
(1) I’d like to endorse the book “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps: The True Origin of Species”, by Robert W. Felix. This book too is a good collection of a lot of evidence that has patterns that deserve looking at more closely. It is catastrophist. But without bad science or transcendental rants AFAICT. The only thing bordering “rant” is in the title: “true origin of species” but the book does contain significant evidence about the repopulation of species AFTER species-wiping-out catastrophic events. It may have faults. It may draw upon itself the wrath – and the measured criticisms – of the relevant orthodox gatekeepers – as does so much important ground-breaking material. It may not be “the answer”. But it has evidence well worth considering IMHO, and is a good read. I found it here, at WUWT, several years back. Thank you Anthony.
(2) remarks bordering on El. Universe material: I know this area is contentious here, liable to rouse endless bitching, and liable in consequence to very understandably rouse Anthony’s ire. But I personally also think it is rather crucial to understanding Younger Dryas. So – “handle with extreme care” and stay very brief, relevant, evidence-based, and scientific in attitude please, I don’t want to see the gradual unfolding of understanding stopped by a few selfish bitchers on all sides.
(3) even more, please hold back on “atlan..s” material. Email me privately on this one, if you believe you have significant relevant evidence Please keep it out of this thread.
Thank you Anthony a million for allowing these sometimes-difficult-to-handle frontier discussions. It’s an essential part of the reason I keep returning to this blog – taken together with the rest. And I am sure this is true for many others too.
Nice piece of work and a lot of effort to tell us where we are on the Younger-Dryas cooling. Very informative.
If you want a good and exciting read (not peer-reviewed) of evidence for the cosmic event, try “The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes – Flood, Fire and Famine in the History of Civilisation” by Richard Firestone, Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith (ISBN-13: 978-1-59143-061-2 and ISBN-10: 1-59143-061-5) published in 2006 by Bear & Company.
Why use years before present? Your present is already my past, at least BC and AD are based around a fixed moment in time.
commieBob;
I’m darn sure it’s garbage.
You’re probably right.
The “ice-age cannot have happened” point of view is erroneous. It
mistakes ice-sheets for glaciers.
New Zealand has two large (for New Zealand) west coast glaciers in its
South Island: the Fox and the Franz Josef Glacier. The FJ is possibly the
fastest glacier in the world for its advances and retreats. It is reputed to
have reached the Tasman Sea at its farthest or longest extent which is
about 19km or 12 miles from its current termination, across almost level
ground (1820s, I think …). That’s a bit more than the article’s 7 mile limit.
It depends on speed and lubrication from melt-water.
In his response, davidmhoffer points out how the ice sheets of an ice-age
form:
——————————
An “ice age” happens when the total amount of snow that falls in winter exceeds the amount that melts in summer. If that happens over a large area, you get a large ice sheet, it doesn’t have to “travel” to get anywhere. As for the 7 mile limitation, it all depends on speed.
——————————
Another problem with the article is: we are still in the ice-age which started
2.4-2.5 mega-years ago when something turned the refrigerator on.
The Earth’s normal state is no polar ice caps and no glaciers (with possible
exceptions of the Himalayas and Andes which are pools of cold) A glaciation
is not an ice-age. An inter-glacial warming is not the end of the ice-age.
An ice-age is comprised of several glaciations with inter-glacial warmings
punctuating them.
We are in an inter-glacial warming, one of several since the refrigerator was
turned on, called the Holocene. It will end—rather abruptly if its predecessors
are any example.
.
commieBob says:
June 16, 2012 at 7:21 pm
I strongly suggest you immediately consume vast quantities of alcohol in the hope that your brain will be wiped clean of the simplistic unscientific drivel presented in your link!!
Of course, as a rational person – I’m sure you must have already pressed the reset button after reading others comments!! Thanks for the link though – it did make me laugh!
What caused the warming before the Younger-Dryas?????
Thanks, Richard, for an interesting article.
It’s interesting that researchers seem to concentrate on the drop in temperatures which led to the Younger Dryas. Do you have any thoughts on why the temperature suddenly rose about 14,500 years ago?
This post illustrates one of the reasons why WUWT is so welcoming and open to all views and why it’s “The world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change”
Indeed, let’s stay tuned. It ain’t over til the fat lady sings.
The 10Be level increase is interesting as it shows increased cosmic ray activity. Those familiar with the Svensmark Hypothesis will realize that increased cosmic ray activity will increase low level cloud formation thus cooling the surface. That coupled to reduced solar activity could help cool further.
The Younger Dryas is considered to be a cold interval, but is such an interpretation fully correct, or is it a simplification of what was going on?
There was an abrupt and significant temperature increase about 15k before present. What caused this? Was this an anomaly? Is the cold spell between say 13.5k to 12k before present (ie., within the heart of the Younger Dryas) simply a continuation of the cold temperatures seen about 20k to 16k before present?
It may be that the Younger Dryas is not as anomalous as presently postured, and the real issue is what caused the abrupt warming about 12k before present (and was this the same driving force behind the warming observed some 3,000 years earlier)?
In other words, there appears to have been a climatic shift which started to take off around 15k before present but it spluttered and failed and only over came the hurdles around 12k/11k before present when it stabilised and took hold around the Holcene optimum.
Jimbo says:
June 17, 2012 at 2:52 am
This post illustrates one of the reasons why WUWT is so welcoming and open to all views and why it’s “The world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change”
Indeed, let’s stay tuned. It ain’t over til the fat lady sings.
Stay tuned, indeed — maybe RC will realize that the “problems” warming will bring won’t hold a candle to the ones colding will bring.
RC referenced above is, of course, Rodney Chilton. I’ve got no such hopes for the Other RC…
A poster here, on another thread, shot down the ” closing down of the Atlantic Conveyor System” very easily. It is a total nonsense idea with no basis in Science, physics or any other science. Place a weir across the Amazon, Will the river stop? No, perhaps whilst you build the weir, it will locally. However, the Atlantic conveyor has no banks or boundaries, it keeps flowing driven by huge forces. A fresh water layer would just be that. The circulation untouched. It is obvious that scientists have not really looked at the claim.
Add to the debate
1. Nagara falls formed around this time as well
2. The Bahamas were buried under a pile of iron ore dust blown by huge storms from Africa. This caused the extinction of many unique species there.
****
crosspatch says:
June 16, 2012 at 4:24 pm
Well, that was something of a disappointment. Read through the whole thing and it turns out to be basically “we have no idea what caused it”.
****
Patience. Science is done in baby steps. There’s alot of interesting info here. And kudos to Rodney Chilton for getting this out now. Refreshing to have observational-based research instead of the usual model-based crap.
You Write:
“North Atlantic Ocean circulation has been likened to a great ribbon-like conveyor belt (2). Driven by temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline) differences, the thermohaline (THC) circulation is associated with the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). The sinking of the NADW is alleged to result in the drawing north of warmer waters from southerly climes. This provides north-west Europe with its generally mild climate. However all of this is thought to change when the North Atlantic Ocean circulation slowed or stopped.
1) The North Atlantic Ocean circulation (known as the THC) slowing or shutdown was not triggered by meltwater suddenly shunted down the St. Lawrence, nor was it likely to have flowed north through Arctic Canada. Nor was the continent of Antarctica involved in Younger Dryas forcing.”
===============
What I do not find plausible here is the “allegation” in this sentence:
“The sinking of the NADW is alleged to result in the drawing north of warmer waters from southerly climes.”
After all water is a “liquid”, and behaves —-, well not quite like air does, but I see no reason why it should not be the other way round, i.e. the water that rises from the bottom to the surface in the tropics (Equatorial areas) to replace the enormous amount of water that evaporates there are replaced along the ocean’s bottom – just, a bit like the Hadley, Ferrel and Polar cells do in the Atmosphere. – If it was not for the fact that it is pointless to do so, I would be willing to bet a pound to a pinch of poo that if the Atlantic ocean-water was fresh-water only, the currents would still be behaving exactly as they do now. –The sooner these so called scientists accept that it is the Sun that drives all aspects of natural happenings in the Solar System, the sooner they will begin to get things right. – Well, that’s IMHO.
The earthquake in Japan moved the axis of rotation by around 16 cm.The Japanese landmass was moved around by as much as 4m. This redistribution of mass on the surface changed our moment of inertia. Couldn’t a really big earthquake (10 +) and its aftershocks do the job ? Wouldn’t it change circulation patterns. Sea level was 100 m lower than today http://64.40.115.138/file/lu/6/52235/NTIyMzV9K3szNTc2Njk=.jpg?download=1
http://www.abocadabro.net/woomanchoo/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Map_of_Sunda_and_Sahul.png
So a small change in the circulation patterns could have had a huge long lasting effect.
Here you are George:-
Dryas (plant)
Eightpetal Mountain-Avens
****
William says:
June 16, 2012 at 7:55 pm
The Younger Dryas type abrupt cooling event is a cyclic event. A extraterrestrial impact cannot cool the planet for a 1000 years. An extraterrestrial impact is not cyclic.
****
Wow, you’ve really got the extremely complicated properties of earth’s climate-changes nailed down. /sarc
Positive feedback, my friend. An abrupt cooling could likely cause snow to cover areas at much lower latitudes than previously. That reflects sunlight from areas where it previously didn’t, cooling them & preserving the snow over the summer. Which in turn causes more snow. Instant ice-age-like temperatures. How long that would last would be hard to tell. It might last decades, hundreds of yrs, or thousands & thousands. Many times during glacial periods the Milankovitch cycles caused solar input in the N hemisphere polar regions to exceed levels of today — yet the glacial cycle continued unabated for tens of thousands of succeeding yrs. It wasn’t enough to melt the reflecting snow/glaciers.
And I cringe when I read comments about “magnetic effects”. Magnetic properties have zero effect on a water-vapor/albedo driven heat-engine like the earth’s climate. ZERO.
Addendum to previous post:
Oh, oh no wait a minute.- If “Climate Scientists” change their tack and start getting things right, i.e. no more energy creating gases – all energy (of the type that changes to motion, friction and therefore increased heat-content) in our world comes, as it always has done, from the Sun. (I.E. fossil fuels are really stored solar energy.) – Then what do I do to replace my present very educational, and interesting hobby?
Indeedy. That original temp rise is almost vertical, and huge. The YD was a brief return to the pre-spike normal.
Talk about your “interesting times”! The humans banging around about then would have developed a truly paranoid respect for the fickleness of the gods!
richard verney says:
June 17, 2012 at 3:35 am
I was wondering the exact same thing but you said it much better than I could.
“William Abbott says:
June 16, 2012 at 7:05 pm
If a comet entered the atmosphere it might account for a large influx of “melt”water. Perhaps causality is cosmic. Maybe the comet’s “melt”water was massive and caused a thousand year suppression of the N Atlantic circulation.”
Given the wide distribution of impacts in the cosmic theory, maybe there was a direct impact in the north Atlantic that disrupted the current for some time.
O.h. DAHLSVEEN Omits entirely the largest and most powerful ocean current driver, Coriolis force/effect.
http://suite101.com/article/ocean-currents-and-the-coriolis-effect-a132224
Dear Mr Watts – appreciate your site which I have stumbled upon (and, I think, will continue to stumble upon!). However, why are so many people continuing to believe in this? I live in Australia and if you say, as I do, that I am a “climate agnostic” you are treated with absolute disdain! What is the circuit breaker here? Climategate wasn’t!!!! Of all things, it should’ve been! If Climategate couldn’t topple the theory (as Watergate did Nixon) then what can we do? I have worked with satellite sensing technology and I know we only get govt grants if we eat this crap.
REPLY: The circuit breaker will be nature herself – Anthony
Some more input, this happened within human memory.
Hayes Photos of the Younger Dryas Black Mat from all over North America can be found here.
Interestingly enough the mat was interpreted as representing a time when the locality was under water.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/18/6520.full
And Pigati et al. reporting that black mats with iridium and magnetic spherules were found in 10 Marsh sediment black mats dating from 6 to 40 thousand years ago, and are probably formed due to terrestrial processes.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/16/1200296109
But Alcantara et-al note that magnetic black glass if found throughout their core from Lake Cuitzeo, However the layer dated from the of the Younger Dryas also contained the highest level of carbon in the core > 14% much of which was inorganic and radio dead, and globules of melted material which required temperatures in excess of 3000F to form. The hottest lava is only 2200F so volcanism does not seem a likely source for this melted material.
……………………………………………
From PNAS 4/16
We have compared and contrasted the geochemistry of MSp, framboidal spherules, glassy grains, and magnetic grains from the Cuitzeo YDB layer using SEM-EDS. A ternary diagram in Fig. 6A compares FeO, SiO2, and TiO2 and demonstrates that the MSp are geochemically dissimilar to volcanogenic material. Next, the geochemistry of the YDB MSp was plotted on ternary diagrams and compared to that of other types of spherules and melted material. In Fig 6B, no similarity was observed when compared with particles representative of cosmic influx and meteoritic ablation, including > 700 meteorites and cosmic spherules (SI Appendix, Table 6). Instead, geochemical values for Cuitzeo MSp are similar to those for > 1,000 tektites (glassy, melted impact material) and MSp from 11 craters/strewnfields formed by ET impact into terrestrial rocks (Fig 6C; SI Appendix, Table 6), suggesting that Cuitzeo MSp also formed by cosmic impact.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Has anyone ever done a model of how rapidly a low earth orbit dust cloud would clear once its orbit decayed enough to encounter significant atmosphere. Could it stay in orbit for a thousand years and then clear within 50?
O and BTW
The models of some climate scientists may not be exactly predictive, but we are essentially talking about pollution and its side effects. That rising CO2 levels cause ocean acidification is simple chemistry. That this acidification further stresses corals which form the nursery for a large percentage of fish is not in doubt. That the oceans a under enormous and unsustainable pressure is clear from the precipitous drop in catches over the last 10 years. (And there is always the Texas-size mess of floating Dixie cups in the middle of the Pacific.) And if you don’t believe in antrophogenic climate change, I invite you to observe the National Forest west of Bakersfeild California. When I was there in the 1990s, standing forests were cool and the ground biome was moist. Adjacent boundaries that had been clear cut 20 years before were dry and ankle deep in loose dust with stunted 3 foot high trees. Removal of the canopy in a simi-arid climate can tip the balance from a self-sustaining cool micro-climate which precipitates rain out of the off ocean winds, to desert. If you live in LA and like to shower, you might not want those boundaries cut. We are also talking about maintaining forests standing, and in the hands of the peoples who have always lived in them, or weather we want to see multi-national timber interests force the people off the land and clear cut it for plantations.
Talking about Global Warming is a proxy for weather we want to live in industrial pollution and countenance the theft of lands, or develop better technology and a way to preserve standing forests and their people as global lungs. So if buying into Global Warming means supporting the land rights of natives and the rescue of the oceans and the preservation of forests, then I support the aims of those who believe in Global Warming, even if I am skeptical of the predictions of their models, I can see that intensive fossil-fuel burning results in an environment like that of Mexico City or Beijing where it is difficult to breath without a mask. We need to engineer better than this, and we considering that the Younger Dryas was a likely impact event, we need to engineer a meteor defense too.
A very interesting article. I note that:
“There are two completely different theories that have split the scientific community. One group strongly endorses an overall slowing or complete stoppage of the Northern Atlantic Ocean circulation 13,000 years ago. The other camp maintains that a catastrophic event originating from the cosmos was the cause.
“It is very intriguing that a reduction in incoming solar radiation may have occurred at a time when during the summer a maximum of solar energy should have been occurring.
“Scientists such as geologist Dr. Allen West contends that approximately 13,000 years ago “ a low density object” entered the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrated explosively, and the remnants of the catastrophe rained down upon the planet.
“It may be concluded that an alternative hypothesis, that of a very large cosmic event took place not that far from Earth, 13,000 years ago.”
At the 2012 Astrobiology Conference in Atlanta, Oyang Teng (LPAC Basement Research Team) interviewed Dr. Claudio Maccone (Technical Director of the International Academy of Astronautics) on humanity’s current vulnerability to extraterrestrial threats such as asteroids, comets, and supernovas, and the needed international collaboration to overcome such dangers:
I have three comments about the Younger Dryas:
– the temperature decline was much smaller than is typically quoted (globally only 2.0C);
– the temperature decline really started at the Older Dryas event 14,300 years ago, 1,500 years earlier;
– there are 26 similar events in the ice cores, it happens on its own every 3,000 to 10,000 years in a glacial cycle.
The Younger Dryas temperature decline is often quoted based on Richard Alley’s GISP2 ice core calibration. The isotope data in this ice core has been calibrated to a “faulty borehole temperature reconstruction formula”. Antarctica only declined by -4.0C. Other isotope data around the world says -1.0C to -3.0C. The proper formula for Greenland dO18 isotope data would be about -4.0C (whereas the borehole/Alley method has Greenland rising to +10C in the last Eemian interglacial which would have melted out all of Greenland’s glaciers – it is faulty).
The event really started at 14,300 years ago, the Older Dryas. There was as much decline from this time to start of the Younger Dryas as during the Younger.
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/4267/transliagrnld.png
The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores show these periodic upswings/downswings every 3,000 to 10,000 years – the Heinrich events. It is really, really difficult for an ice sheet to get all the way down to Chicago or New York. The summer sunshine, even in the downturns of the Milankovitch Cycles, is not much different than today so during the summer, the glacial fronts at Chicago, New York or even at 60N are melting furiously. There are just periods when the glaciers advance rapidly and, if there is not enough accumulation at the centre load points to continue the push south, the glaciers melt back just as rapidly – global Albedo swings back and forth from 0.33 to 0.31 during these advance/retreat cycles – thus rapid global cooling/warming cycles – Heinrich events.
The Older and Younger Dryas were just the last of these advance cycles.
http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/7671/liagrnld.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_event
“Well we don’t know what caused it, but do we know what caused the rapid temp increase that ended the younger dryas?”
“Others have questioned how a cosmic event could have such a long tail – 1,300 (?) years – or did something cosmic last that long?”
The Younger Dryas is characterized by both a sudden ingress and sudden egress. A cosmic impact could explain the sudden cooling, but after the earth will slowly move back to an equilibrium state. It doesn’t really explain the extended stability at the new state nor the sudden warming 1300 years later. We might argue that an impact resulted in the earth entering some new metastable state for a long period, but something needs to cause the equally dramatic shift to a new warmer state.
At any rate, thanks for the post Rodney. It’s a good mystery.
Until we find geological evidence of visitations by frost aliens it makes sense to look to the one truly independent variable that we are most familiar with being the cause of warming and cooling — nominally, it’s the sun, stupid.
Maybe it’s all cosmic rays. Suppose we’re (the solar system) is cruising along through the galaxy receiving a lot of cosmic radiation because of our position in the galaxy, radiation sufficient to keep earth cold and glaciating (via the Svensmark effect). We start to move into a patch of lower radiation and the earth begins to warm when all of a sudden we enter the cone of radiation from a super nova which drives the temperatures back down. A thousand years later we abruptly leave the cone and temperatures quickly return to where they would have been which is considerably higher than they were when we entered the cone because we continued moving into the area of lower background cosmic radiation during the whole thousand years. The temperature curve would look something like the one shown. I have no idea whether this is a ridiculous speculation, I’m not a cosmologist, astronomer or physicist but it seemed plausible to me. Just thought I’d throw it out.
good science!!! they are…skeptical….
The Younger Dryas cause is similar but more dramatic than a larger volcanic eruption where we see an immediate lowering of temperature associated with high altitude ash reflection solar radiance. Further more, the volcanic event is short lived in global climate influence. However, a super volcanic eruption or atmospheric explosion that can intensely darken the atmosphere for a longer period of time will be more effective in cooling global climate. In both cases the climate rebounds, demonstrating a resilient global climate. Ice age interglacial periods are thus driven by something stronger than the cause of the Younger Dryas event. My humble thoughts on the subject.
The Younger Dryas cause is similar but more dramatic than a larger volcanic eruption where we see an immediate lowering of temperature associated with high altitude ash reflection solar radiance. Further more, the volcanic event is short lived in global climate influence. However, a super volcanic eruption or atmospheric explosion that can intensely darken the atmosphere for a longer period of time will be more effective in cooling global climate. In both cases the climate rebounds, demonstrating a resilient global climate. Ice age interglacial periods are thus driven by something stronger than the cause of the Younger Dryas event. Humble observation.
This [Gulf Stream] provides north-west Europe with its generally mild climate.
I read it is not true. It depends on prevailing atmospheric circulation. Gulf Stream did not stop a bit during the extreme winter 2010 in western Europe.
Caveats: Gratitude to Anthony for publishing this “discussion” of the Y-D events. Appreciation to Rodney Chilton’s for the desire to summarize Younger-Dryas research. I believe that the Y-D is one of the most significant “mysteries” for us to solve for our future on Earth. Solving the “mysteries” and thinking through the necessary adjustments to these kinds of climate changes, whether of impact origin or “cyclic” (meaning “regular”) climate events, is where our gazillions of “climate” doillars should focus.
Problems: I have an ever expanding file of Y-D research, much of which is not included in the footnotes of Chilton’s research summary. Most of his 71 citations of evidence comes from Nature or Science, or from Paleoceranography from the 1990s. Example: Out of 71 footnotes, 23 refer to Nature “research”; 10 from Science “research”; 9 from 1990s research in Paleoceanography; 12 from a variety of 1990s or earlier research. Only 13 citations are from 2000 or later research, with three of them coming from conferences.
I turned to Chilton’s footnotes early on because I was very interested in expanding my files. I have to say I was shocked that this information was presented as the most forward variety of scientific research and interpretations of the events of the Younger-Dryas “mystery”. The discussion among scientists has been repleat with hostile and denigrating comments and “counter-research” for many years, especially to those who propose anything but a uniformitarian approach. Moreover, I had to unsubscribe to Nature and Science because of: lack of actual peer review, no requirment that data and methods for research are available to those who want to check results, and the evident take-over of the editorial board/staff by “AGWers”.
I look forward to Anthony’s continuing presentations of essays that discuss most recent research, data, and interpretations, including which data is used as the baseline for “temperature” changes and how many checks have been made by other researchers as to the validity of that data. Scientists “could” approach these issues with both assertiveness and cooperation.
The paper does a good job of pointing out weaknesses in the various arguments for ocean circulation as a main driver of changes to Earth’s climate. Beyond that, we know that ocean currents could not create the nano-diamonds associated with the onset of the YD, nor can impacts account for the frequent sudden spikes upward in temperature that are as prominent in the ice core records as relatively sudden drops.
It is possible that the Sun is a variable star, that Earth is visited at perhaps regular intervals by cosmic interlopers of one kind or another, and also that EM forces may be responsible for still further disruptions to life on Earth.
It has been proposed that a sudden immense amount of fresh water disrupted the THC approximately 13,000 years ago,
Henry says
which, as the story (from Noah) goes, (NOT ONLY FROM THE BIBLE)
indeed, came from the atmosphere….
as I said,
\we (people) were living under much higher pressure before.
Charles Hapgood’s theory of sudden crustal displacement is still out there but not given much credence with the scientific community. Albert Einstein did support his idea and wrote in the foreword of Hapgood’s book:
In a polar region there is continual deposition of ice, which is not symmetrically distributed about the pole. The earth’s rotation acts on these unsymmetrically deposited masses, and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced in this way will, when it has reached a certain point, produce a movement of the earth’s crust over the rest of the earth’s body… (Hapgood, 1958, p. 1)
——————————
Hapgood, Charles H. (1958). Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. New York: Pantheon Books.
——————————
A sudden shift of the polar ice cap from Hudson Bay, as an example, to the current icecap position would be capable of producing catastrophic tsunamis, global flooding, depopulation, climate change and sudden freezing of mastodons relocated to the Arctic zone due to the shift.
“””””……….Philip Mulholland says:
June 17, 2012 at 4:43 am
Here you are George:-
Dryas (plant)
Eightpetal Mountain-Avens……….”””””
Well thanks Philip; I really appreciate that info. I never would have guessed that some weedus commonus, would be responsible for the climate going to hell. Perhaps it says more about publishing scientists; who seem to enjoy coming up with some totally obscure label for some event; obviously to make themselves self aggrandized because they alone understand what the hell amalgamese tobunganate is !
I typically start at the bottom of these threads, to see what the most recent posts are, and work up to see what if anything they are responding to, so on the way up to your information, I did come across a Bill Illis (thanks Bill) post, in which he mentions the “Older Dryas” ,
which seems to occur right around the time of my ” who dat ?”
So I never know from one day to the next, what interesting stuff I am going to learn each day at the Hacienda A. Watts. I know zippo about Botany, other than I can kill any plant that ever evolved, by just planting it in my garden; which is why I prefer green concrete; and I know almost as much about zoology. The one thing I do know, is that Makaira Indica is NOT the blue marlin (indigo), and Makaira Nigricans, is NOT the black marlin.
Well hell, they screwed up when they decided that electrons are negatively charged, so forever we have to put up with the mass of the electron travelling in the opposite direction to the electric current., so they got the marlins switched too. Actually, neither one of them is black.
Thanks again Philip, and Bill Illis too.
In 1961, as a geologist for the Geological Survey of Manitoba, I was mapping Precambrian geology in the Rat River area in central Manitoba and, in the middle of a jackpine forest, came upon a classic barchan
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=Barkan&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
sand dune largely overgrown except for the ridge. This represents wind-blown sand from one of the strand lines of Lake Agassiz as it drained north in a series of steps. Strand lines are clearly visible from along the eastern margin of the Riding Mountains in Manitoba down into the basin and also in North and South Dakota where the famous Campbell beach occurs, and mark the drops in lake level in a number of steps. The establishment of new strandlines at lower lake levels does not occur in a short period of time but rather takes centuries to develop and mature the beaches. At Carberry Hills, Manitoba, a wide zone of dunes marks a delta of the Assinaboine River where it entered Lake Agassiz about 10,000 years ago. A prominent strandline is that of Campbell-McCauley beach in North Dakota.
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=Campbell-McAuley%20beach&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
“The Campbell beach represents the elevation of glacial Lake Agassiz from approximately 12,200 to 11,000 years before present, around 10,700 years before present, and again from approximately 9900 to 9000 years before present (Arndt, 1977). Prior to 12,200 years before present, the lake stage was above the Campbell beach and glacial Lake Agassiz drained through a southern outlet into the Minnesota River valley.”
Go to the source, you researchers and you will see the argument isn’t about whether a sudden rush of freshwater went out the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi (the later emptying went out into Hudson’s Bay) or Arctic Canada, but whether there was a sudden rush at all.
Not too surprising. These CAGW-enthusiasts are worried about a fraction of a degree temperature rise and thousands of years ago, the earth dropped almost 20 degrees from a cosmic impact. Also note we’re currently in one of the colder periods historically of the last 10,000 years or so. Not surprising to anyone who has researched paleoclimate, except for the hockey stick tribe. The Roman Warm Period temperatures were 2 degrees warmer than today!
Whoohoo! Real science, not another stream of dodgy data from dodgy advoscientists. A fascinating tale, and thanks to Mr. Chilton and Anthony.
Two comments and a plea:
(1) Comets are messy – ice, rocks, dumped tyres (well, they turn up everywhere else). If one hit the Earth or exploded in the atmosphere there should be more than nanodiamonds as a result. But I guess that’s what Mr Chilton means when he talks of widening the search net.
(2) GuarionexSandoval (June 16, 2012 at 5:12 pm) refers to possible extreme plasma events. I wonder whether the end of an ice age, with rock rebounding from the ice mass, could cause some major events of this nature. Rocks under extreme pressure have been linked to ball lightning (and, therefore, UFOs!).
And the plea: Nooo to Atlantis, Noah, and (heaven forfend) Velikovski.
“””””…..Elizabeth Elmore says:
June 17, 2012 at 6:42 am …..”””””…..
“””””……Removal of the canopy in a simi-arid climate can tip the balance from a self-sustaining cool micro-climate which precipitates rain out of the off ocean winds, to desert. If you live in LA and like to shower, you might not want those boundaries cut. We are also talking about maintaining forests standing, and in the hands of the peoples who have always lived in them, or weather we want to see multi-national timber interests force the people off the land and clear cut it for plantations……..”””””
“””””…..Talking about Global Warming is a proxy for weather……..”””””
Well Elizabeth, just what were you smoking, when you were in those National Forests WEST of Bakersfield; the only forests I know of in that region are forests of those grasshopper oil well pumps.
LA is a natural desert basin, that doesn’t really have any water in it to shower with, so they have to steal it from somebody else, so you can take a shower and water your golf course.
Personally, I have always preferred “Navy” showers, which only require a basin of water; perhaps one gallon, and a decent face cloth. On my recent trip back to Auckland NZ, I had a great revelation, discovered at the home of a retired UofA prof, who was my tour guide for a week.
I discovered the benefits of taking a Navy shower with a dish sponge, instead of a basin of water. So now my daily ritual, is down to less than a cup full of water, and the soap lasts much longer, too, and doesn’t pollute the drainage as much. You should try it if you really are concerned about water conservation.
I’m not for clear cutting of forests and turning the forest nymphs out in the cold and dust; seems to me there really aren’t any Native American tribes living in their old homes in the LA basin any more either.
Clear cutting, and prompt replanting, is a standard method of forest husbandry, for wood products; but I’m not for leaving cut national forests unplanted. The reason these forests ARE National Forests; rather than State or privately owned lands, simply recognizes, that people in every State, have an interest in access to forest products; whether they have local forests for the nymphs to run around in or not.
Some States, don’t have the ability to grow square miles of food grains either, and many States don’t have either oil or natural gas. I guess when we all co-operate, we all benefit from the combined efforts and resources of a diverse populace.
By the way, sometimes clear cutting is the only way to access some forest products, because environmental regulations don’t allow selective access to available timber, including no roads for fire suppression either.
My house is also now 100% LED illumination; no hot incandescents, and no mercury filled fluorescents either, and about one fifth of the electricity usage; and ALL off the shelf available products.
Thank-you once again Anthony for providing such an open and enlightening forum, and also posting my guest blog. I just wish to address a few points now. (as there are so many points raised in the comments section). 1) I have become increasingly convinced that the sun, not our fossil fuel emissions have caused the most recent golbal climate changes. I will admit to a small influence from C02 and other so called greenjouse gases, but when you consider C02 as only making up approximately 0.04% of the atmosphere, then I think the role of C02 is placed in prespective. I am also now writing a new and updated submission on my website that is a follow-up to what I called “Trouble in the Greenhouse”, where I attempt to more fully address this important isssue (website http//www.bcclimate.com. 2) I used all the (what I considered valuable references I could glean, from yes the very conservative Science journals( as well as some others) The very conservative ones that I have had not had any encouragement from whatsoever include Science and Nature. I however took not what so much was concluded in the articles, but what I perceived as holes in the research, or simply in some cases what they reported. Many of references do date from the early to late 1990’s and early 2000’s, it is true,. but really with some exceptions, that is when most of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation work was done. Yes there is an exception in regard to the black mat and nanodiamond work which is ogoing, but I felt in guest blog I did not need to rehash this again. Finally, I did include the Taylor Dome ice core reference in my book “Sudden Cold: An Investigation into the Younger Dryas”, and yes it was I think a very valuable reference as the cooling is contemporous with most of the rest of the world (a fact that also favours a cosmic origin for the Younger Dryas.
the argument isn’t about whether a sudden rush of freshwater went out the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi (the later emptying went out into Hudson’s Bay) or Arctic Canada, but whether there was a sudden rush at all.
That is simply not true. The Campbell strandline is a high water stand which occurred after the Younger Dryas and in particular after the Marquette readvances blocked outflow. The Herman Tintah Norcross strandlines are now understood to be a high stand and slow and methodical drainages before the Younger Dryas, when thereafter the lake drained suddenly to the Moorehead phase low stand well before the Campbell beach was deposited. There isn’t much evidence of any intermediate strandlines between the well demarked Campbell beach strandline and the Moorehead low stand. The Moorehead low stand is fairly unambiguous in its effects.
Claiming the Moorehead drainage didn’t occur is not supported by any evidence I am aware of. There are other sources of LIS water during this period, the Great Lakes themselves and Glacial Lake Vermont (which intermittently became the Champlain Sea during this period as well). all of which contributed to the fresh water discharge into your favorite or preferred discharge location. The forcing didn’t necessarily have to be catastrophic, but there were unambiguous catastrophic discharges all throughout the LIS decay period. Timing, magnitude and duration are everything.
Was the Younger Dryas an unexpected return to cold after the start of the interglacial, or was it an unexpected warming that just happened to occur only a few thousand years before the real interglacial started.
If you extrapolate the temperature decrease that was occuring before the Younger Dryas to the coldest part at 13000 years ago then the actual temperature is the same as the extrapolated temperature would be at that time. This would tend to suggest that it was the extreme warming before the Younger Dryas which was unusal. Perhaps we should be looking at what might have caused that warming rather than looking at what caused the YD cooling.
Has anyone looked at that possibiity ?
Captain Ahab said it best:
GK
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Mr. Chilton and Mr Watts, thank you.
George E. Smith; says:
June 17, 2012 at 10:43 a
I discovered the benefits of taking a Navy shower with a dish sponge, instead of a basin of water. So now my daily ritual, is down to less than a cup full of water, and the soap lasts much longer, too, and doesn’t pollute the drainage as much. You should try it if you really are concerned about water conservation.
I’m not for clear cutting of forests and turning the forest nymphs out in the cold and dust; seems to me there really aren’t any Native American tribes living in their old homes in the LA basin any more either.
Clear cutting, and prompt replanting, is a standard method of forest husbandry, for wood products; but I’m not for leaving cut national forests unplanted. The reason these forests ARE National Forests; rather than State or privately owned lands, simply recognizes, that people in every State, have an interest in access to forest products; whether they have local forests for the nymphs to run around in or not.
George:
Could it be that you do not know that
National forest boundaries are sold off by the US Forest Service of the Dept of Agriculture to the highest bidder. The government builds the roads to allow the timber to be harvested. The revenue from the sale of the timber often does not pay for the cost of the tax-payer funded roads, and the timber (at least in the west) is often sold to Japan, not locally milled.
You are right that the forest in question in EAST of Bakersfeild, North-East in fact.
And the forest boundary had been promptly replanted, the trees just had not grown because of lack of water. Where the Western Devide Hwy turns into 190, take a left and tell me how the trees are doing. The ones that made it are 10 feet high and 40 years old now. Replants from clear cuts in the 70s.
Clear cutting, applied willy-nilly regardless of climate or terrain is the most destructive and lazy “innovation’ to beset forestry since slash and burn as it exposes the soil to drying and erosion,
These same trees would be 100 feet high in areas with more rainfall. Take a drive to Lake Isabella. If I remember correctly there is a section of an 8 foot tree truck in Wofford Heights and pictures in the restaurant in Kernville show huge trees that were removed from the ridges around town that are now barren. Man has definitely impacted the area and not for the better, the pictures on the walls tell the story.
What man does man can sometimes undo, but not if we continue in denial. If we stop timber sales in simi-arid areas, whitened all the dark pavement and put solar out roofs through such companies as Solar City, (something something some of the wealthy in India are doing, then we will be going more in the right direction.
Judy W says:
June 17, 2012 at 9:12 am
“Charles Hapgood’s theory of sudden crustal displacement is still out there but not given much credence with the scientific community”
I agree that it would account for a few discrepancies, if the American continent moves north suddenly, the glaciers of South America retreat, the Amazon forest becomes much drier and Central America becomes much colder. It could also explain why during the catastrophe that ends the younger Dryas, mammoths are frozen in Siberia and part of Alaska, but a huge flood destroys them in North America.
Elisabeth Elmore,
Replace “Man” with “Government” in your post and you will see the central problem. Most of the land held by the federal government should be sold off. Private owners take good care of their property; the government does not. Government is the problem, as it usually is.
I’ve never been a fan of the notion that changes in the THC *causing* much anyway. It has been my opinion that changes in the THC were more an effect than a cause. But overall I find the reasoning behind dismissal of large cold freshwater outflows to be thin. I see no reason to discount the impact of such flows into the Arctic, North Atlantic and Pacific. And there would have been substantial other changes happening as the glaciers retreated and mass rebalanced across the globe. The rotational North Pole would have been gradually migrating from its point at the LGM somewhere near Ellesmere Island toward its current location.
We might also be looking things in completely the wrong way. Rather than looking at the period immediately before the Younger Dryas as the beginning of the current interglacial and as the Younger Dryas as some sort of temporary interruption, maybe that isn’t the case. Maybe the warming before they YD was the same sort of interstadial event that happened from time to time during the last glaciation anyway. Temperatures warmed rapidly to near modern temperatures several times during the last glacial period, stayed that way for a couple of thousand years, and headed South again. Maybe it is only the rapid warming after the YD that is the real start of the current interglacial.
Maybe Earth passing through clouds of interstellar dust is the reason for the ice ages and “clear” spaces within those clouds are the reason for those brief interstadial events. Maybe “bubbles” in that dust cloud are reasons for the interglacial periods. No idea but at this point it is just as plausible as anything else.
Grey Lensman says on June 17, 2012 at 5:56 am:
“O.h. DAHLSVEEN Omits entirely the largest and most powerful ocean current driver, Coriolis force/effect.”
========
False arrest Lensman! – The Coriolis effect is not responsible for the creation of Ocean currents and if you would bother to read your own link you will find that your article says about the Coriolis effect that “It is thus responsible for the shape of wind and ocean currents.” So, – therefore it has a “deflective influence” on that particular current but it has no further responsibility for it, or any other current.
Wow; what a lot of work. I sure enjoy this site.
A couple of notes. First, a lot of this reminds me of the joke on the blackboard during my engineering training. Two guys in lab coats are looking at a bunch of equations with ‘now a miracle happens’ in the middle, to get them from start to end. An interglactic event? really?
Now, almost 50 years of experience later, my contribution is that: if a hypothesis doesn’t satisfy ALL the data, it is unlikely to be correct. No matter how much you like the hypothesis. And its opportunities.
Al may have fifty reasons for his activist position but since the CO2 profile seems to follow the temperature profile on HIS graph, it’s easy to ignore those fifty reasons. In God we trust; all others: bring data.
charge on; thanks.
Cal in 65
There has never been an ‘interruption’ of the solar magnetic cycle [which is self-sustaining] and even if there were one, any effects would be extremely minor.
Leif, this article does raise a very interesting issue that falls closer to our realm.
What in your opinion would bring about these highly elevated C-14 and Be-10 numbers?
Here is an interesting paper on the subject.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/2797/2008/acp-8-2797-2008.pdf
Compare the increased Be-10 (32% during the Maunder Minimum compared to today) and the increased C-14 (not quantified in the above paper), and then compare it to the numbers in this paper.
Interestingly, one of the referenced papers in this article has these interesting graphs…
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6812/fig_tab/408567a0_F3.html
Look at the C-14 production during the Y-D , which is referred to in this paper.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6812/fig_tab/408567a0_F3.html
From what I can see, at least in this core, there is very little change in Be-10 during the Y-D
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6812/fig_tab/408567a0_F1.html
I found the paper itself here.
http://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/marchal01epsl_42277.pdf
There is considerable controversy over the Be-10 numbers in the GISP-2 core concerning the source.
So, at the end of the day, what cosmogenic force would account for the large rise in C-14 coincident with the Y-D.
I don’t think an asteroid or comet would account for that UNLESS that comet was rich in carbon-oxides as has been found (CO at least) in some comets.
Could that be a proxy for cometary implanted C-14? That would make sense as comets typically come from much further out in the solar system or beyond, which would account for a dramatically increased C-14 spike, but not the abrupt rise and subsequent slow tail off as shown in figure 3 above…..
I’m afraid all this Younger Dryas stuff is riddled with errors and over speculative suppositions.
For instance if you check deuterium excess in the grenland ice cores
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5731/118.full
You’ll see that the YD acts identical to the Dansgaard Oegscher events. So why then would the YD be something different than another D-O event? Not that we have any idea what those are, but if the YD needs an extraterrestrial impact, then how about all other D-O events?
Then we have the alleged 14C of Hughen et al 2000 based on the varve count in the Caracio basin
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/290/5498/1951.abstract
However, newer studies have shown major problems with this proxy so in the new INTCAL09 radiocarbon calibration table, this part of the chronology is rejected, which also diminishes the 14C spike to noise levels.
But I guess it’s useless to make this post since everthing I write in this sense is moderated away, far far worse than RC. Shame. I thought that we, skeptics could deal with discussing truths.
I will as the author of the paper respond to the last two submissions. As far as the Hughen paper goes it was not the only one that reported very large increases at the beginning of the YD. Two other papers also cited in my paper, one by Goslar et al (1999) and the other by Kitagawa et al (1998) also presented very large C14 increases a the beginning of the YD. Also please note that the sun itself does not have to register chnages in magnetic field or waht have you. A very large flux of dust and an interruption in incoming sunlight can also be responsible for huge increases in C14. Be 10 increasing on its own may not be so .impressive, but when it does so with C14 then I think we have something ……A cosmic encounter! Thank-you all of you for your comments signed Rod Chilton or mystery seeker
A very large flux of dust and an interruption in incoming sunlight can also be responsible for huge increases in C14.
Neither a large influx of dust or an interruption in incoming sunlight will increase the C-14 flux. The C-14 flux is modulated in the normal fashion by a decrease in solar wind velocity/solar magnetic field strength, which allows a higher proportion of galactic high energy particles to enter the inner solar system. The two, C-14 and Be-10 usually rise in tandem under this influence. However, if the Y-D has a large C-14 increase without an increase in Be-10, then this would tend to rule out solar variation (unless the Be-10 data is in error which some authors claim).
If C-14 increases dramatically, as was the measured case, then the possibility exists that a carbon rich asteroid or comet (A large carbonaceous Chondrite asteroid or comet with a lot of carbon), would tend to have a much higher C-14 proportion due to its life mostly outside of the inner solar system where cosmogenic particle production would be higher. The lack of Be-10 can be explained by the fact that much of the Be-10 is from nitrogen transmutations that does not typically exist in any extraterrestrial asteroid/comet body.
I have always found this quite interesting, and kinda on topic. Microscopically too?
Once again, something else that shows how little we really know about this place we call
home 🙂
http://tsun.sscc.ru/hiwg/chevrons.htm
or
http://my.opera.com/nielsol/blog/2006/11/15/asteroid-impacts-tsunamis-and-chevron
Ya think?
Coriolis force, as it does wind, so it does ocean currents, it drives them. In the case of wind topography and thermal effects have a major influence in the pattern. Ocean currents are much more robust and have huge inertia. The Coriolis force drives them and shapes them. Thus they just carry accumulated heat and disperse it, not driven by heat at all.
Ocean current overturning is complete nonsense.
Additional notes
How come every single comet photographed looks just like an asteroid or meteor and not a dirty snowball?
The original temperature chart makes it absolutely clear that current temperatures are not unusual, not record, nor highest ever nor unprecedented nor catastrophic. But things like that have happened in the past with no input from man.
In view of the Svensmark cosmic radiation modulation theory for climate change and the relatively long duration of this period, it might be worthwhile to see if the solar system might have been transiting an unusually thick wisp of galactic dust or the arm of a supernova fragment during this interval. Dr. Svensmark has published a paper that seems to correlate cold climatic intervals on the Earth with the passage of the solar system through galactic clouds with high cosmic radiation levels which facilitate cloud formation and cooling of the Earth’s surface.
edward says:
June 16, 2012 at 6:09 pm
IMO, the discussion about the YD event is talking about the cart before the horse. If one can explain the climatic phenomenon that occurs roughly every 1200 yrs throughout the glacial cycle, then one is ready to discuss the YD event. … the 1200 yr spike is the anomaly, unexplained and not understood, and without the understanding of what is “forcing” this switch like behavior, one cannot possibly understand what happens when this forcing is removed.
I agree with your perspective here. Just before the YD were deep glacial conditions and the YD was just a drop back to current glacial “normality” after an abortive jump to interglacial conditions.
Indeed, if we remind ourselves that these very short abortive interglacial spikes occurred regularly throughout the glacial period, then the YD cool interval disappears as an anomaly, it is just an abortive interglacial spike that just happened to occur shortly before the “successful” interglacial rize which – unlike the abortive spikes – held on stably to the interglacial attractor rather than falling away from it.
Further, if we remind ourselves of the rather self-evident fact of glacial and interglacial being alternate attractors in a nonlinear/nonequilibrium climate system, then these 1200 year interval abortive interglacial spikes and the less frequent interglacial rises which “stick” are an expected and normal behaviour.
Thus the YD is not in any way a “problem” except a problem of imagination and paradigm of the observer. The need for every upward or downward wiggle of earths climate history to have some discreet and unique external forcing comes from ignorance of quasi-chaotic systems and a deficient paradigm. It is even slightly absurd to imagine the climate system to be so passive.
“””””……Elizabeth Elmore says:
June 17, 2012 at 12:15 pm
George E. Smith; says:
June 17, 2012 at 10:43 a
……………………..
George:
Could it be that you do not know that
National forest boundaries are sold off by the US Forest Service of the Dept of Agriculture to the highest bidder. The government builds the roads to allow the timber to be harvested. The revenue from the sale of the timber often does not pay for the cost of the tax-payer funded roads, and the timber (at least in the west) is often sold to Japan, not locally milled. ………..
………….. Clear cutting, applied willy-nilly regardless of climate or terrain is the most destructive and lazy “innovation’ to beset forestry since slash and burn as it exposes the soil to drying and erosion,
……………….
What man does man can sometimes undo, but not if we continue in denial. If we stop timber sales in simi-arid areas, whitened all the dark pavement and put solar out roofs through such companies as Solar City, (something something some of the wealthy in India are doing, then we will be going more in the right direction……….”””””
Elizabeth, let me state here just for the record, that I do not normally post everything I know, in every post I make; that would be tiring, to write, and probably moreso to read.
So never assume, I don’t know something simply because I don’t mention it in every post.
I’m quite familiar with the forestry practices of the United States Federal Government. If the American people (voters) are all for and quite happy with the Federal Government (not money grubbing private compqanies) selling lumber in the Tongass National Forest to a Japanese company for the handsome price of $1 per tree, so they can transport it to a factory ship outsie US Territorial waters, to process, into wood products to then bring ashore for sale in the United Staes markets; well why should I protest what the American people want, and let their government do on their behalf. But it isn’t private companies selling their lumber to those foreigners, it is the US taxpayer. If $1 per tree is fine with you, so be it.
I’m not in the forestry business, so I wouldn’t know why somebody would cut down trees in some place where they hardly grow at all, anfd expect to replace them in any reasonable time. In New Zealand, they have virtually NO harvesting, of native forests, or at least tiny amounts, for specialty situations. Almost 100% of their foresty industry is farmed, the largest man made forests in the world. A Douglas fir (Oregon pine down under) grows to around 135 feet in about 30-35 years; they do have rain where they do their forest farming. They generally clear cut in quite small plots, largely protected by surrounding forest, and replan immediately. Some of their native trees are over 2,000 years old, and they don’t cut those; they don’t have to; they simply dig them up from long buried swamps. I have apicture of a large specimen of one of those trees, and it is framed in a frame made from one of those resurrected buried trees. It was radio-carbon dated to 45,000 years old.
When I came to America, I had to wait in line for a visa, behind hundreds of agricultural scientists, being imported into America. Perhaps the US forest service should consider hiring some of them to tell them how to grow trees.
So just what material would you recommend we dig up from underground, to whiten all of the asphalst areas of the USA; didn’t Obama suggest painting our roofs white.
Do you know how much Solar City pays in rent, to rent the roofs of people for their taxpayer funded solar panels. Why would anybody rent out their valuable solar energy collection area for somebody like Solar City to put up junk solar panels made from extremely toxic chemicals (Cadmium and Selenium), with very low solar conversion efficiency. In solar energy collection; absolutely NOTHING matters except solar to electric conversion efficiency; it is criminal to put up junk like Solar City and Solyndra had, in valuable solar collection sites.
Solar energy may be free, but collection of it is extremely expensive; and we get no more than 100 Watts per square foot of it from the sun. If 87% of the energy is wasted as heat; it’s not worth doing.
Oh I forgot; the taxpayers are footing the bill. And that TV dope Ed Asner is pushing it so it must be good.
Some good research is going on in solar cell development; and it will be available one day. (NO I do not work in the field or have an iron in the fire) People who fall for the Solar City gig, will wake up one day, and find obsolete non functioning solar panels on their roof, and Solar City will be long gone, and won’t come back to retireve their junk off your roof.
If you put Dish TV on your roof, and finally tire of it, they simply abandon the hardware, and leave the problem of getting rid of it to you to pay for.
When a solar PV installation can pay for itself without the taxpayer getting ripped off for it, I would encourage anybody with a roof to consider it; but don’t by some fly by night system that is both cheap and inefficient, and make sure your solar system is OFF the grid, so you can then also take your LED lighting off the grid as well, and don’t waste energy making the double round trip conversion from solar DC to grid ac, and back to LED lighting DC. Now I do plead guilty of knowing something about that technology, and lately the business as well. But I have only been working in LED technology since 1966, so if you go back before that, then you probably know more about LEDs than I do.
Thank you for the article outlining the controversy over the cause of the Younger Dryas. It has a really interesting and broad summary of the studies involving ice and marine cores and the limitations involved in reading them and syncronizing them.
In reply to Rod Chilton about the alleged 14C spike at the onset of the Younger Dryas, quoting Kitagawa 1998 and Goslar et al 1999.
http://cio.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/1998/RadiocarbonKitagawa/1998RadiocarbonKitagawa.pdf
I’m afraid that this Kitagawa et al 1998 does not report a carbon spike while Kilian et al 2002 report problems matching varve dates with carbon dates from the same lake Gosciaz that Thomas Goslar used for his spike.
http://cio.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/root/2002/QuatIntKilian/?pFullItemRecord=ON
Really it would be a good idea to scrutinize Reimer et al 2009
http://digitalcommons.library.arizona.edu/objectviewer?o=http%3A%2F%2Fradiocarbon.library.arizona.edu%2FVolume51%2FNumber4%2F49691745-6a68-4e2c-a26f-08f0a16c1a53
and plot their delta 14C from INTCAL09 values at the YD transition in comparison with INTCAL04 to see how the spike vanished, due to the removal of the Cariaco data.
http://i54.tinypic.com/20zocch.jpg
As a consequence the carbon dates are now also calibrated differently and the widespread carbon date of 10,9 ka BP, associated with the onset of the Younger Dryas, which used to calibrate to 12.9 cal BP is now 12.7 cal BP instead, which is perfectly in agreement with several European counted proxies.
A more detailed discussion can be found here:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=192583
Would this one really pass the moderation?
Neville says:
June 16, 2012 at 5:48 pm
Well we don’t know what caused it, but do we know what caused the rapid temp increase that ended the younger dryas?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
This abrupt temp increase of 10c in a decade occuring in Venezuela and Greenland at the same time must also be very unusual?
I just wish that someone here could give a suggestion for this huge temp increase over such a short time span.
*******************************************************************************
Burning biomass from 1) the bolide entering the atmosphere and 2) the impact itself would throw up an awful lot of carbon. At first it would be very cold due to the decreased sunlight reaching the Earth, but it would get warmer as CO2 built up in the atmosphere.
Kay,
Maybe that 10 degrees wasn’t there. The only indicator for that are isotope which have a lot of problems, but I can’t talk about it because that is moderated away here..
Anyway, the lake cores of greenland tell a different story
http://www.geol.lu.se/personal/seb/Geology.pdf.pdf
The first late-glacial lake sediments found in Greenland were analyzed with respect to
a variety of environmental variables. The analyzed sequence covers the time span between
14 400 and 10 500 calendar yr B.P., and the data imply that the conditions in southernmost
Greenland during the Younger Dryas stadial, 12 800–11 550 calendar yr B.P., were characterized
by an arid climate with cold winters and mild summers, preceded by humid
conditions with cooler summers. Climate models imply that such an anomaly may be
explained by local climatic phenomenon caused by high insolation and Fo¨hn effects. It
shows that regional and local variations of Younger Dryas summer conditions in the North
Atlantic region may have been larger than previously found from proxy data and modeling
experiments.
Note that climate model excuse is just an excuse. It’s not holding up to real scientific ethics, testing that hypothesis.
I’m sure this one won’t pass moderation. Too much rebellion
George E. Smith; says:
June 17, 2012 at 11:51 pm
George:
In what reasonable world would I mention the lac wit way that boundaries are sold off in sensitive areas if I approved of same.
it is a little hard to ascertain what your point is, other than perhaps you, yourself live carefully and do not contribute to man-made climate change?
In that I applaud you.
As far as Solar City is concerned, I think you need to shelve the attitude and do a little more research. Solar City rents solar panels that will provide most of the electricity for a home at a lower cost than the electric utility charges. They will provide the maintenance and the upkeep.
As for solar panels containing selenium or cadmium, it is somewhat like being concerned that your leaded crystal chandelier is going to poison you. If you restrain the impulse to eat or burn the solar cells you will be fine.
There are certainly industrial by-products involved in solar cell manufacture as there are in oil and gas extraction, and the cadmium telluride panels will need certainly to be recycled at the end of their life to prevent cadmium contamination of the ground water, just as we recycle led batteries, but really, cadmium yellow and orange are common pigments and contribute much more to cadmium to the enviro than solar panels ever will. If you have concerns about that solar panel technology choose silicon cells or the copper ir cells, or the organic dye cells that are under development. If you have done work in LEDs then you know that the same quantum mechanical effect used in LEDs can be reversed to produce electricity. I believe that a UC Berkley team presented something of the kind at the Conference on ElectroOptics last May, a cell that is like 28% efficient.
A couple of points in regard to C14 and Be 10, as has been discussed by leftturnaandre and others. First, quite right re: the increase in C14 not being caused by shielding by cosmic dust (sorry a brain f–t). Of course though, an expected increase, likely large, occurred at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, because I and others contend that Earth had an encounter witha comet or an asteroid. Not all the other possible factors that include: geomagentic variation, expanded sea ice extend, nor a colder ocean, in combination with what I now see as a non responsive North Atlantic, can account for the large 70% to 80% increases as reported by Goslar, Hughen, Lee, and yes Kitagawa (perhaps not seen as a peak, but a large increase nonetheless). Now onto Be 10, yes granted there is controversy re: its increase at the start of the Younger Dryas too. Some scientists content that it was the result of a drastic reduction in snowfall (hence a more concentrated deposit of Be 10 in the ice). However, just as many scientists that I have read believe that the increase was simply because there was more Be 10 in the atmosphere at the time, 13,000 BP. The fact that I still see the two radionuclides increasing in tandem, and considering the many other important signs of a cosmic event reinforces greatly the comet encounter idea. Thank-you again Rod Chilton the mysteryseeker.
A couple of points in regard to C14 and Be 10, as has been discussed by leftturnaandre and others. First, quite right re: the increase in C14 not being caused by shielding by cosmic dust (sorry a brain f–t). Of course though, an expected increase, likely large, occurred at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, because I and others contend that Earth had an encounter witha comet or an asteroid. Not all the other possible factors that include: geomagnetic variation, expanded sea ice extend, nor a colder ocean, in combination with what I now see as a non responsive North Atlantic, can account for the large 70% to 80% increases as reported by Goslar, Hughen, Lee, and yes Kitagawa (perhaps not seen as a peak, but a large increase nonetheless). Now onto Be 10, yes granted there is controversy re: its increase at the start of the Younger Dryas too. Some scientists content that it was the result of a drastic reduction in snowfall (hence a more concentrated deposit of Be 10 in the ice). However, just as many scientists that I have read believe that the increase simply was because of more Be10 in the atmosphere at the time 13,000 BP. The fact that I still see the two radionuclides increasing in tandem and considering the many other important signs of a cosmic event reinforces greatly the comet encounter idea. Thank-you again for this valuable forum signed Rod Chilton, the mystery seeker
Smokey says:
June 17, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Are you SERIOUS?
You recon without PREDATOR Capitalism.
It was the clear cutting of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s old growth boundaries after a hostile takeover at the hands of Michael Milken &Co that sucked so many people into unsustainable logging.
“””””……Elizabeth Elmore says:
June 18, 2012 at 9:22 am
George E. Smith; says:
June 17, 2012 at 11:51 pm
George:
In what reasonable world would I mention the lac wit way that boundaries are sold off in sensitive areas if I approved of same.
it is a little hard to ascertain what your point is, other than perhaps you, yourself live carefully and do not contribute to man-made climate change?
In that I applaud you……”””””
Elizabeth, actions taken by the US government, and/or agencies of that government are done on behalf of the US citizens who vote for, and put those people in control. To the extent, that American citizens disapprove of what the Government does on their behalf, there is a simple remedy. You vote those people out of office and you replace them with people who will do things more to your liking .
We have ethanol or MTBE in gasolines because Americans voted for people who dictated that stuff should be in there.
As for Solar City, I’m fully aware of their business model. It’s very clever. Like Solyndra before them, Solar City has a solar panel (II-VI based) that nobody in their right mind would buy using their own money, because it is too inefficient. If I want to put up a solar system on my roof, I want to use that space for the most conversion efficient solar devices available.
So Solar City can’t sell their product, so they rent it instead, so they install it on people’s roofs, and sell them back their own solar energy, by just undercutting the local utility electric rate.. They pay no rent at all for use of the homeowner’s roof to install their solar collectors. I presume that SC is responsible for whatever property taxes are involved in the arrangement, and I wonder who is liable for any insurance consequences. But it sounds like you are an insider, so I guess you probably have those answers.
I’m quite familiar; very familiar actually, with the Solar cell research being done by Eli Yablonavitch at Berkeley, and also the research elsewhere. Currently 43.5% is the best reported conversion efficieny; but I don’t know if that is an air mass zero efficiency or whether it is ground level AM 1.5 perhaps; nor do I know how many suns, that performance was reached at.
Personally, I would opt for the two axis steering high concentration technology, being researched by Prof Roland Winston et al at UC Merced in Atwater CA.. That requires much smaller quantities of whatever expensive and potentially toxic cell materials, are used.
Material toxicity can’t be just shucked off as you seem to think, because solar proponents, are talking prodigious areas of solar collection farms. For example, a proposed solar farm to be situated in the waste desert areas of the American South West (see Sci-Am for Jan 2008) would occupy 30,000 square miles for solar panels. That much area would have to be totally cleared of human habitation; remember your mention of long time inhabitants turned out of their homes. It would then have to be fenced and provided with armed guard security, because of the vulnerability of solar farms to vandalism, or worse.
30,000 square miles, is an interesting number; it converts to 19.2 million acres, which just happens to be the area of the entire Arctic National Wildlife Reserve; in which energy companies, would like to drill on 2,400 acres to recover the already known energy resources.
I remember Ca Senators Barbara Boxer, and Diane Feinstein working hard to protect those “waste” desert lands of California, and the American South West
; pretty much the only good thing Boxer has ever achieved in her stint n Washington DC.
You see Elizabeth, the reason I may have “an attitude”, is because I see what is being done, and who it is being done by, and I see Americans complaining about it, and then I watch them go to the polls, and re-elect the scoundrels who are doing those things on their behalf; and usually because they want the Government to “do something” for them; usually with other people’s money and hard enterprise. The E. in my name has always stood for EFFICIENCY, and I have put in more than half a century working toward that end, in the interest of a better America, and a better life available for all.
I’m already 22 years past the age, at which my “public servant” daughter can retire, on a full pension at a large fraction of her last pay rate; for which I and many other private economy workers will be entirely responsible for paying (and therefore continuing to work) . So yes I have an attitude; I’d like the lazy bums to get off my back.
As to an Electro-Optics seminar in May, Elizabeth, I didn’t attend one; they seem to have so many lately; but I did attend the Las Vegas LightFair International; which turned into an almost exclusively Solid State Lighting affair. Back in March/April time frame, I did attend a solar energy symposium at UC Merced, at the Merced campus, and the Eli Yablonavitch presented his Berekeley group’s flexible GaAs based solar cell; and that might have been 28 some % efficient. The big thing was the tiny amount of material and the substrate reusability of their very clever peeling process. Shoji Nakamura’s group at UC Santa Barbara, are working on a GaN/InGaN high band gap cap for a multijuction multibandgap solar cell, and those crazy people think they can get as much as 60% solar conversion efficiency that way. I’m also crazy enough to believe they can, and I think they will do it (at least labwise) in less than five years; and eventually make it volume manufacturable. I’m sure it will be expensive enough to only be usable in Prof Winston type high concentration multi-sun designs (more than 100 suns concentration).
George E. Smith; says:
June 18, 2012 at 10:24 am
It sounds so smooth and sweet. Is this a great country, or what?
But I hope you weren’t thinking of the recall of Gov. Grey Davis – primarily because of a criminally manipulated energy crisis – that brought Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to power in California, where he presided over California’s nosedive.
Back on topic, if you look at the graphs awhile, the most recent 12 millennia or so sure have been relatively benign. Perhaps the Taurids have shot their wad, but big rocks are still whizzing by without much advance notice, in some cases.
Elizabeth Elmore,
You responded to my comment:
…with your coomment:
Again, government is the problem. Selecting one example shows the laxity of regulation, not that government is the solution. And I very much doubt that you have ever visited the site you referenced, but rather, you accept the opinion of another writer who also has not done any on-site research. Of course, I could be wrong. But I well recall the demonization of Michael Milken, who turned out to have more character than any of his detractors.
I also remember the open land rush the federal government held in Colorado in the 1950’s. The land was federally owned, and a lot of it was covered with trash and open mines. Anyone could stake a claim to 5 acres on the day of the land rush, which was held with great fanfare. The result? Within one year the local residents were commenting on how well cared for the land was.
The federal government owns huge swathes of land, which pay not a dime in taxes. It costs a lot of money to administer, and is a drain on the treasury. Litter abounds, marijuana plantations are cultivated, and feral hogs ruin the land. That land should be sold to the highest bidders. Private owners will take good care of it, unlike the lackadaisical government.
Smokey says:
June 18, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Actually I have seen KKR’s work up close and personally.
I worked for one of the high tech companies that KKR put in play because we had no debt and a lot of assets. We paid taxes and they could borrow money against us to buy us out and then reduce the taxes to nothing by deducting the interest. KKR made the first tender offer but we were not ultimately bought out by them. We were subjected to a hostile takeover/ leveraged buyout by a ” white knight.” who wound up making a tender offer for stock that gave them control for 200M. Then they took a 200 Million dollar tax write off, took our fully funded 200 mil pension fund, our 50 million dollar R&D budget, sold the IP to a competitor for 200Mil and cut up and sold the other assets of the company for I don’t know what. We had 2370 employees and they laid off 2300 of us, because during the Reagan Administration the rules were changed so that the stock we sold suddenly became the instrument of our undoing.
The system was/is gamed by Wall Street to destroy good, well run manufacturing companies.
“Plus il fait chaud, plus ça gèle”
The next morning I started early from Arzier, having an afternoon
journey in prospect to the neighbourhood of another glacière, and was
accompanied by Captain Douglas Smith, of the 4th Regiment. On our way to
La Genollière, we came across the man who had served as guide the day
before, and a short conversation respecting the glacière ensued. He had
only seen it once, many years before, and he held stoutly to the usual
belief of the peasantry, that the ice is formed in summer, and melts in
winter; a belief which everything I had then seen contradicted. His last
words as we parted were, ‘_Plus il fait chaud, plus ça gèle_;’ and,
paradoxical as it may appear, I believe that some truth was concealed in
what he said, though not as he meant it. Considering that his ideas were
confined to his cattle and their requirements, and that water is often
very difficult to find in that part of the Jura, a _hot_ summer would
probably mean with him a _dry_ summer, that is, a summer which does not
send down much water to thaw the columns in the cave. Extra heat in the
air outside, at any season, does not, as experience of these caves
proves abundantly, produce very considerable disturbance of their low
temperature, and so summer water is a much worse enemy than extra summer
heat; and if the caves could be protected from water in the hot season,
the columns in them would know how to resist the possible–but very
small–increase of temperature due to the excess of heat of one summer
above another. And since the eye is most struck by the appearance of the
stalagmites and ice-cascades, it may well be that the peasants have seen
these standing at the end of an unusually hot and dry summer, and have
thence concluded that hot summers are the best time for the formation of
ice. Of course, at the beginning of the winter after a hot summer, there
will be on these terms a larger nucleus of ice; and so it will become
true that the hotter the year, the more ice there will be, both during
the summer itself and after the following winter.
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1493951&pageno=11
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14012
Might seem off topic but that’s where this discussion lead me. Blame Google.
led me, not lead me
From the article:
Several locations, notably Israel, have experimented with solar ponds. With the right salinity gradient, you can prevent convective transfer. In the thermal storage layer, the water can get up to 90 centigrade.
George E. Smith; says:
June 17, 2012 at 11:51
You sound pretty frustrated and invested in being pissed off.
And also navel centric, smug dead wrong.
America has always been a public/private enterprise.Go back to any of the great fortunes, and other than the ones in cosmetics most of them start with a public purpose and government contract. Tiffany’s, DuPont, Boeing, EDS, McDonnell Douglas, and the rail roads come to mind, as well as the drug companies who commercialize NIH developed drugs, then there is the oil and gas industries with their tremendous process development subsidies by the military and their oil depletion allowance to assure they never pay taxes. Private capitol has always been loathe to invest in new physics. They let the government develop the backbone and then flesh it out into a marketable product. Not that the government could not, when the Navy was mandated to do their overhauls in private yards to keep those yards in business, we now get 1/2 the overhaul at twice the price and without the Navy to protect the sea lanes there would be no bulk world trade. But please continue bitching. And then there is the Post Office, which is now in trouble, not because it is efficent, or because of it’s union workforce, but because the Corp-li-con Congress of a few years ago mandated payments into the pension fund that pre-fund USPS pensions for the next 30 years to handicap the post office against Fed EX and UPS.
And I am FAR from being an insider in solar energy. I have never even SEEN a Solar City commercial, much less have a financial interest in them. I looked them up because UT at Austin put solar cells on the roof of one of the structures there and got better than expected results, not only cooling the building, but turning it into a net energy producer for the last several years.
About government being on your back, go to one of the countries that has the tax rate you want to pay. Take a look around. If it is not an oil sheikdom what you see is a few rich enclaves, pot holes, and poverty. What your taxes are supposed to buy in this country is infrastructure, investment in knowledge, and a reasonable and consistent set of rules for us all to play by. It is also my frustration with the corporate capture of regulators that consistent enforcement of reasonable rules is not happening.
Well Elizabeth, so you looked up Solar City on Goggle or whatever, and became an instant expert on solar energy. You see there are some good competent people working diligently, to try and make some form of capturable solar energy, practical and affordable. That does Not include me; and I have never worked in any energy field, including PV solar; but PV technology has always been perpheral to the semiconductor business; which includes the LED busines, with which I am very familiar, so I have studied and learned about the solar energy option for as long as I have been active in the other end.
In your list of Government (taxpayer) originated businesses, and industries, you forgot to mention Microsoft, and Apple; oh I see I am reading the wrong list; that is the ones started in people’s garages or kitchens; pretty much the way we once started what at one time the largest LED business in the world. Seems like Hewlett Packard, and Tektronix, also started by individuals, with not a lick of taxpayer funding.
Odd that you should mention the NIH, as the inventor of our beneficial drugs. A lifelong friend, now retired from the U of Miami, worked in concert with NIH all his impressive career, and was considered for director of NIH, until he let on he was ready to retire, not go into administration. He now lives around Atlanta near NIH and keeps contact with the folks there as does his equally impressiver and also retired wife; so I actualy have some idea what NIH does, and doesn’t do.
You mention what our taxes are supposed to buy; I think you called it infrastructure. That presumably includes 200 MPH trains that go from nowhere to nowhere else, with no customers at either end.
I’m sure American taxpayers would rejoice if governments at all levels simply taxed them, and paid for what they are mandated to pay for in US and State Constitutions. In the case of the US Constitution and the Congress, that authorizes them to tax us to pay the National debt, and to provide for the common Defense (the military) and welfare of the United States (AKA Washington DC)… Nowhere are they authorized to tax us to pay for the “welfare” of tom, dick, and harry, nor any of the other things they take it upon themselves to waste resources on.
And back more on subject; even NASA which was one of the best joint taxpayer/industry/scientific collaborations in all of history. seems to have been side tracked into promoting the mythology of catastrophic man made climate change; the green agenda, which is an adjunct of the old world communist agenda of people control. Who after all, is against clean air and clean water.
So I’ll give you Elizabeth, total control of the earth mean surface Temperature; (what the donnybrook is all about). So it currently is circa 59 deg F, say 288 Kelvins.
So what Temperature will you set it to and why. The current total surface Temperature range on the planet goes from about -90 deg C to about +60 deg C, possibly on some upcoming late summer day (northern) or 183K to 333K, and it seems the average may have drifted perhaps 0.6 deg C or 1 deg F from ancient pre big oil comfort zones. So where will you move it to Elizabeth; and why that value ?
You could try “looking up” for some help; maybe the U of Austen has an idea; but I’d rather you used your own ideas.
As to Steve P.’s comment/query, those wonderful muscle bound hero worshippers who currently shower in their water rich LA basin’s tinseltown , gave us their choice to run the world’s sixth largest economy, now rapidly moving up the list to maybe 9th or 10th place, and all the twooty texting teeners gave us their hope and change dictatorship, that simply sidesteps the control system, that our founders bequeathed to us in their wisdom.
You can goggle and wiki for answers Elizbeth; there was a time when people actually learned something themselves, so they could work from a secure base of knowledge, rather than blindly accept the unproven ideas of others.
As to Steve’s comment re the Taurids, I’m interested if he could elaborate the linkage between specific meteor systems, and historic climate events such as OD and YD; didn’t occur to me there might be such specific linkage to well known repeating showers.
Elizabeth Elmore,
Sorry to hear about your unpleasant experience. But on balance, the government causes more problems, and more serious problems, than it solves. It is far too big and expensive, and government’s #1 priority is government, not the citizens that it is supposed to serve.
The Constitution was written with one goal in mind: to protect the citizens from government. Conniving rascals that they tend to be, people in government have found ways to subvert the Constitution, until it now means exactly the opposite of what was intended.
And as George Smith says: What your taxes are supposed to buy in this country is infrastructure, investment in knowledge, and a reasonable and consistent set of rules for us all to play by. It is also my frustration with the corporate capture of regulators that consistent enforcement of reasonable rules is not happening.
Government officials and bureaucrats love nothing better than to hear folks complaining about one perceived excess in the private sector, because it takes the sppotlight of of the almost universal excesses of government meddling and conniving with big business at the expense of ordinary citizens.
George, I think the Taurids have been considered a likely suspect source for any prehistoric impacts or air bursts simply because they represent the largest field or stream of debris/matter in the inner solar system, which we cross summer and fall. Apparently the most dense field of debris comes and goes in c3000 year cycles, may not be well-mixed – an important point – and we may be out of the cross-hairs for now.
Clube & Napier’s The Cosmic Serpent was my introduction to these ideas, now termed “coherent catastrophism” to get separation from you-know-whom, but C & N, along with others, also see the possibility that some impacts may have had cultural significance in the historical period, so there you are.
It’s my understanding that both Los Angeles and San Francisco voted against the recall of Gov. Gray Davis.
I think Elizabeth is correct in her idea that attempts to dismantle American industry began in earnest under Pres. Reagan. Rather than use its power wisely to prevent this destruction of our own security, our government deregulated to make it easier, and Ron never missed his cue to promise to “get government off our backs!”
Most people are suckers for Hollywood stars.
I’ll wrap this up with one of my favorite quotations:
Thanks Steve P. I figured you didn’t just drop that shoe in a stream of consciousness moment, so I figured it was a learning moment for me. Thanks again; next time I hear the Taurids are back, I’ll be sure to duck.
As for SF and LA voting to dump Davis, it was actually the morning show hosts on KSFO radio, who started the whole recall. It was hoped that it would be the only savvy Republican in the whole CA legislature who landed the job; then Tarzan swung into action. That losing Rep, made it into the Congress instead. Don’t actually recall Reagan going after Industry.
I’m not a fan of either LA or SF, or for that matter both of them together. A little sea level rise could fix both problems.
“””””…..Smokey says:
June 18, 2012 at 6:19 pm
Elizabeth Elmore,…..”””””
Smokey, it was actually Elizabeth, who made that comment, I simply agreed with her on that score.
If you read the Constitution Article I section 8, which tells Congress what they CAN do, it gives them 17 tasks, plus a conditional option to make some laws the States can’t handle by themselves.
BUT ! it only authorizes them to raise taxes for three specific things. Pay the National debt; fund the military for defense, and look after “The UNited States” which is the third arm of the Constitutional contract; Washington DC .
But the Congressional rascals, found a loophole. They simply spend money they don’t have for their social engineering boondoggles, which piles all that onto the National Debt, which then they are able to raise taxes to pay. But of course they never have made a payment on the national debt, and don’t intend to so long as they can simply print it, or steal it.
There are other things besides section 8 they are not only authorized to do, but specifically told it is their duty to do; such as article IV, section 4, which tells the feds they MUST protect every State from invasion.
Instead Obama throws the borders wide open, for invading hordes. Seems like he provides them with contraband armaments too, to help with the invasion.
Elizabeth Elmore says:
June 18, 2012 at 3:58 pm
If government activity in the USA has been so profitable and such good investment for the country as a whole, then how and why has the USA ended up with approaching 20 TRILLION DOLLARS of debt?? It looks more as if US government activity has created not a single dime in the last century, and has been debt-funded solely by generous foreigners like Arabs and Chinese. But just like for Greece, payback time is coming. (But maybe just like in Greece, debt meltdown of an economy is good for extreme socialists, so perhaps that is the master plan…)
BTW interest on USA debt bonds today pays for 80% of China’s growing defense budget. In 4 years time this will be 100%.
The difference between good and bad applies to governments as it does to almost everything else in this world.
Unfortunately, our system has devolved to the point where the mass media have the greatest say in selecting our leaders, along with big money. I wonder whose interests they serve?
Last night ABC news with Diane Sawyer leads off with the headline “Burning Heat” as everyone’s favorite platinum-haired national aunt reminds us once again that it’s just sooooo hot, even as the background graphic changes to a map of the W. United States with the several storyline wildfires seemingly merging into one flaming mass, in a subtle reminder of the media’s power to forge lasting images on impressionable, semi-educated brains.
One of the most recent Wooly Mammoths dredged up in Russia, nicknamed Lyuba, dates from c37,000 years ago, while other mammoth finds recently date from c40,000 and c20,000 years ago. Lyuba is extremely well-preserved, including stomach remains…not for the queasy.
It’s conceivable that the pleistocene megafauna were beat down by a series of disasters reflected in the remains of the relatively well-preserved mammoths. It is thought that modern humans appeared on the scene some 100,000 years ago, so a few of our ancestors may have seen some pretty bad stuff coming down, and the petroglyphs argue that they were paying attention.
leftturnandre says:
June 18, 2012 at 8:56 am
[quote]Kay,
Maybe that 10 degrees wasn’t there. The only indicator for that are isotope which have a lot of problems, but I can’t talk about it because that is moderated away here..[/quote]
Right. I’m just hypothesizing, but it seems to me that as someone posted upthread, the anomaly is really the warming that preceded the YD, not the YD itself. I’m no expert, but if you take the Milkanovitch cycles and the duration of previous ice ages as a rough guide, didn’t we still have a few thousand years to go before the last one should have ended? What happened to make it warm so quickly? How do multiple ice sheets, which had been stable and/or growing for 100,000 years, suddenly go into a massive meltdown?
Another thing that needs to be taken into account is the destruction of the ozone layer that would occur with any impact–aerial burst, land impact, or sea impact. I read somewhere that when the Tunguska bolide (a mere rock!) exploded, it destroyed nearly 1/3 of the ozone layer. Imagine what a larger impactor would do.
So, you’ve got large swathes of the planet on fire and sending all that carbon into the atmosphere. You’d have a lot of dying animals and carcasses laying all over the place and in the water. You’ve got a diminished ozone layer. Possibly a weakened magnetic field? (Wouldn’t the bolide create its own magnetic field as it entered the atmosphere?) If it’s a sea impact, you’d have massive tsunamis and acid rain on top of all your other problems.
In addition, it’s entirely possible that the dates for either the impact OR the YD–or both–are wrong. IMO that’s why it’s such a confusing mess. We’d be a lot better off if they could refine the dates.
phlogiston says:
June 19, 2012 at 2:22 am
BTW interest on USA debt bonds today pays for 80% of China’s growing defense budget. In 4 years time this will be 100%.
===========
The implications for US security are staggering. That is with US interest rates at record lows. Should US rates rise, the point will quickly come where 100% of US taxes go towards servicing the debt.
It is said the true cause of the fall of the Roman empire was the depletion of the silver mines. They ran out of money first, then were overrun. It is also said that history repeats itself. A lesson likely not lost on the Chinese.
George E. Smith; says:
June 18, 2012 at 10:24 am
… To the extent, that American citizens disapprove of what the Government does on their behalf, there is a simple remedy. You vote those people out of office and you replace them with people who will do things more to your liking .
========
While it sounds good in theory, in practice it doesn’t work. the government is not run by the elected officials. It is run by professional bureaucrats that remain after the government is voted out.
Anyone wanting to see how government actually runs should watch or read “Yes, Minister”. While written as a comedy, it is much closer the fact than most non-fiction accounts of government.
In response to Steve P: Yes I believe the Taurids as both you and Drs Clube and Napier also indicate that the Younger Dryas was brought about by a series of cosmic showers. Further to the scenario, I also think that one of the larges bolides strck the Pacific ocean and a huge tsunami (dwarfing both the 2004 and 2011 earthquake generated tsunamis) and wiping out huge populations of ice age mammals in Alaska, Siberia and even on the west coast of North and South America.
“””””…..ferd berple says:
June 19, 2012 at 8:26 am
George E. Smith; says:
June 18, 2012 at 10:24 am
… To the extent, that American citizens disapprove of what the Government does on their behalf, there is a simple remedy. You vote those people out of office and you replace them with people who will do things more to your liking .
========
While it sounds good in theory, in practice it doesn’t work. the government is not run by the elected officials. It is run by professional bureaucrats that remain after the government is voted out……”””””
So why have a government. ?
Elected governments created these beurocracies, and then subcontracted to those unelecteds, the work they themselves were elected to do.
So elected governments can also eliminate those beurocracies. Nobody said governing would be easy; that’s why it shouldn’t be a full time job. One term and you’re done; so getting re-elected is never an incentive. And it’s time they did budgets on an annual basis for the current calendar year, as businesses are required to do; no making five year budgets for ten years after they are out of office. The current crowd haven’t delivered any budget, since they were elected.
If the current system doesn’t work, then maybe; our forefathers guessed wrong, and we aren’t up to the task, like they were; in which case we thoroughly deserve what is coming to us.
This citation does not include any quote from Mr. Wunsch:
54) R. Muscheler et al., “Changes in Deep-water Formation During the Younger Dryas Event Inferred from 10Be and 14C Records,” (2000): Nature 408, 567-570.
The other citation for Wunsch does not include the periodical title:
52) K.A. Hughen et al., “Deglacial Changes in Ocean Circulation from an Extended Radiocarbon Calibration,” (1998): 65-68.
Sorry Laurence, in the last revison of the paper I neglected to change the references to the way they should be. I will correct this today. Rod Chilton, “the mystery seeker”
Anthony: I am sorry that the list of references provided in the original submission was from an earlier version of my paper. You will now see the correct list of references. I am very sorry for any inconveniece that this may have caused. Rod Chilton
REFERENCES:
1) G Bond et al., “Correlation Between Climate Records from North Atlantic Sediments and Greenland Ice,” (1993): Nature 365, 143-147.
2) Richard B. Alley, “The Two-Mile Time Machine,” Princeton, Princeton University Press, (2002): 144
3) W.S. Broecker et al., “Routing of Meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet During the Younger Dryas Cold Episode,” (1989): Nature 341, 318-321.
4) S. Rahmstorf, “Rapid Climate Transition in a Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Model,” (1994): Nature: 372, 82-85.
5) A. de Vernal et al., “Reduced Meltwater Outflow from the Laurentide Ice Margin,” (1996): Nature 381, 774-777.
6) P. La Salle and W.W. Shilts, “Younger Dryas – Age Readvance of Laurentide Ice into the Champlain Sea,” (1993): Boreas 22, 25-37.
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George E. Smith; says:
June 19, 2012 at 12:08 pm
So elected governments can also eliminate those beurocracies.
=======
Only if governments cannot borrow against our future.
Government should be self supporting. They print the money. They should lend it out and collect interest in lieu of taxes. The biggest borrowers would then become the biggest tax payers. You can’t get a fairer system than that. Which is why it won’t be implemented.
I found this posting very interesting and helpful, but reference #54 is still incorrect.
54) R.B. Alley, “Icing the North Atlantic,” (1998): Nature 342, 335-336.
The year does not match the volume # and I cannot find that title in 1998 p.335 or in volume 342 p.335.
That would be a valuable quote to have.
How is it possible to date the Younger Dryas fluctuation to find a cooling of 5-6 degrees in one year or even two or three decades when radiocarbon dates to 5,000 BP have uncertainties of + or – 500 years? Does the rapidity of the fluctuation get gauged by the ice core? When the lowest ice in a glacier gets more and more compressed so that the lowest are not hardly even distinguishable one from another how can they say the change happened so fast? This seems like a catastrophist fantasy unsupportable by real science. It is these supposedly phenomenal fluctuations that lie at the supposedly scientific basis of climate hysteria.
Here is ref# 54:
Palaeoclimatology: Icing the North Atlantic
Publication Nature, Volume 392, Issue 6674, pp. 335-337 (1998)
“Icing the North Atlantic”
This article does not have the cited quote: “Dr. Wunsch was even more emphatic about the role of the North Atlantic in climate changes when he stated that “you can’t turn the Gulf Stream off as long as wind blows in the North Atlantic” and then goes on to say that “the conveyor is kind of fairy tale for grownups”(54)”
This article has this quote:
“However, the idea that changes at high latitudes can affect widespread regions extending across the Equator is unpopular with many workers who do not believe that the small, energy-starved polar ‘tail’ can wag the large, energy-rich tropical ‘dog’.
I just purchased the pdf and read it.
Great post, Rod. Forgive me for not posting the earlier version on the Tusk. I hope your many commenters will review the astonishing recent PNAS paper from Bunch, et al., Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/14/1204453109.full.pdf+html?with-ds=yes
And, of course, for those seeking continuous coverage of the Younger Dryas Boundary Event: http://www.cosmictusk.com
As Dr. Henrik Svensmark seems to have shown that cold periods in the past correlate with periods of high cosmic radiation intensity, it seems reasonable that we should see whether or not that was also true for the Younger Dryas period. The impact events observed might have come from the same source as the elevated cosmic radiation, such as the expanded debris field of an ancient supernova. The time required to transit such a region might better explain the long abrupt duration of this event.
Increased cosmic radiation may enhance convective cooling by reducing the thresholds required for condensation to begin.
REF: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of-the-younger-dryaswhat-does-it-mean-and-what-caused-it/#comment-1015264
Comments on galactic modulation of cosmic rays begin at about the 30 minute mark of the Svensmark video “The Cloud Mystery” included with the reference above. You can use the progress slider to select that portion to start.
“The clouds take their orders from the stars.” Henrik Svensmark
Impact dynamics/mechanism on Earth is resolved, paper will
appear in 3 months….
Cheers JS
crosspatch says:
June 16, 2012 at 4:24 pm
“Read through the whole thing and it turns out to be basically “we have no idea what caused it”.
Yep. That’s pretty much the point. Still a hot topic in modern science.
otsar says:
June 16, 2012 at 5:06 pm
“The parts I have never liked, and find unsettling, about the Younger Dryas are: that it occurred fairly recently, that the onset was in years, and that we do not have a solid understanding of what produced it.”
BINGO! Very recent and involved large fireballs and continental fires. Heads up.
William says:
June 16, 2012 at 7:55 pm
“The Younger Dryas type abrupt cooling event is a cyclic event. A extraterrestrial impact cannot cool the planet for a 1000 years. An extraterrestrial impact is not cyclic.”
Actually, if the impactors were in a fragmenting comet debris stream, a stream like the Taurid complex for example, you could get a millennium or more of cyclical impacts. Right on time every year. Napier et. al. Debris stream already exists. No solar flare conjecture required. Set down those galactic wind cocktails. Cyclic as your calendar.
John F. Hultquist says:
June 16, 2012 at 10:08 pm
“Others have questioned how a cosmic event could have such a long tail – 1,300 (?) years – or did something cosmic last that long?”
Same as above.
gymnosperm says:
June 16, 2012 at 10:53 pm
“I keep saying, despite the snickers, cosmic rays convert Nitrogen to 14C…”
Good – an astro cause provides simple answers once again….
Grey Lensman says:
June 17, 2012 at 7:47 pm
“Coriolis force, as it does wind, so it does ocean currents, it drives them….. The Coriolis force drives them and shapes them.”
Incorrect. Coriolis will steer but not provide initial momentum, only a delta to existing momentum. I’m telling you that as a dynamicist. Its actually “Coriolis Acceleration”, and the term acts as a cross product for non-zero velocity (i.e. Coriolis term equals zero when velocity equals zero). So you read all the way to here and now you’ve got a fact to show for it!
Joachim Seifert says:
June 22, 2012 at 9:49 am
“Impact dynamics/mechanism on Earth is resolved, paper will
appear in 3 months….”
OK, now I’m REALLY curious….
TH
As Svensmark has claimed evidence proving that the intensity of galactic cosmic radiation to be a primary determinant for climate change on the Earth, for both long and short duration events, I think anyone claiming a special mechanism for the Younger Dryas period should make sure, based on the Earth’s position in the galaxy at that time or on other evidence, that cosmic radiation (proton bombardment) should not have been unusually high during that unique period.
The saddle-shape of the event *might* be explainable as a transit through an old, arrested supernova shock front, entering the back-wash region, then cleaving back out again.
Spector: Very interesting idea! Any idea which supernova may have been the cause? However, I still think that the Earth was subjected to a comet bombardment episode. Signed Rod Chilton