Guest post by David Archibald
Baby boomers like me have enjoyed the most benign period in human history. The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of relative peace, we had cheap energy from inherent over-supply of oil, grain supply increased faster than population growth and the climate warmed due to the highest solar activity for 8,000 years. All those trends are now reversing. But it will get much worse than that. The next glaciation will wipe out many countries and nothing will stop that from happening. For example, the UK will end up looking like Lapland. As an indication of just how vicious it is going to get, consider that there are rocks on the beaches of Scotland that got blown over on ice from Norway across a frozen North Sea. As scientists, our task is to predict the onset of the next glaciation.
Onset of interglacials is driven by insolation at 65°N. That is where the landmass is that is either snow-covered all year round or not. It seems that insolation above 510 watts/sq metre will end a glacial period. For an interglacial period to end, the oceans have to lose heat content so that snows will linger through the summer and increase the Earth’s albedo. Thanks to the disposition of the continents, our current ice age might last tens of millions of years yet. From the Milankovitch data, this graph shows insolation at 65°N from 50,000 BC to 50,000 AD:
The green box has the Holocene ending at 3,000 AD – an arbitary choice. Insolation is already low enough to trigger glacial onset. For the last 8,000 years, the Earth has been cooling at 0.25°C per thousand years, so the oceans are losing heat. We just have to get to that trigger point at which snows linger through the northern summer. Solar Cycle 25 might be enough to set it off. By the end of this decade, we will be paying more attention to the Rutgers Global Snow Lab data.
From the source at: http://most-likely.blogspot.com/2012/03/milankovitch-cycles-and-glaciations.html
Model input is obliquity and precession and model output is the inverted δ¹⁸O record, with zero mean during the Pleistocene, from Lisiecki and Raymo 2004 and Huybers 2007. Lisiecki and Raymo use orbital tuning to constrain the age of the benthic records, while Huybers explicitly avoids this, consequently the two datasets are occasionally completely out of phase, but generally in good agreement, especially in the late Pleistocene.
As fitness function we take the product of the sum of squared errors (SSE) between the model and the two reference records from 2580 thousand years before present, with 1000 year timesteps.
For the longer term perspective, this is a combined crop (to make a continuous timeline) of the two fulls panel from the model prediction of the Milankovitch data.
The time period represented is from approximately 450,000 BC to 330,000 AD. The scale on the vertical axis is change in O18 content. There is a very good hind-cast match between the model and past temperature change as shown by the work of Lisiecki et al 2005 and Huybers 2007. The next glaciation is fully developed between 55,000 and 60,000 AD, with the next interglacial 20,000 years after that.
References
Huybers, P., 2007, Glacial variability over the last 2Ma: an extended depth-derived age model, continuous obliquity pacing, and the Pleistocene progression, Quaternary Science Reviews 26, 37-55.
Lisiecki, L. E., and M. E. Raymo, 2005, A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic d18O records Paleoceanography, 20, PA1003, doi:10.1029/2004PA001071.
Source Data: Download the consolidated data, including orbital parameters, insolation calculations, reference data and model output: Milankovitch.xlsx
Another point, both LR04 and Huybers07 are based on benthic stacks and both gaze at the bad correlation with the 65North insolation, for instance around 420 thousand years when we had the highest benthic isotope swing combined with the least variation in the insolation.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Milankovitch_cycles
That should raise red flags.
In this thread, one can read how the Greenland isotopes are NOT a proxy for temperature, but for absolute humidity
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=4074335
Some comparisons there with fossil and paleobotanical records trash the temperature misunderstanding of the Younger Dryas.
Who could dispute we’re on the down slope, certainly not me, it is a thought and often in my mind – above my head – there was, in the not too distant past – a couple of thousand feet of ice – awe inspiring thought.
What is not in dispute, is that the world is still in the grip of an ice age, there may be a blip – another little ice age coming but the big one is still some time away.
I’ve searched the York’s coast boulder clays, in it one can find all sorts of goodies; Shap granite [from the lakes], is fairly common and schists, gabbro, dolerites, basalt too and fossils aplenty some from the limestone of the Pennines – all left there by the ice and all from far flung parts.
Another thing not in dispute, mankind’s puny surface scrapings and input of a minor but nevertheless vital trace gas are neither here nor there.
I say that we contact “Jimmy-boy” Hansen, and tell him he was right all along about the coming “ice-age” . [from his ’70s claim], and get him back onto the “global cooling” bandwagon.
That way we get rid of a warmist, and show the public that the warmists don’t know what to believe.
You have to go back to the start of the glacial cycles to see how low 65N solar insolation values have to get in order to trigger the start of the ice ages. You have to go back to 115,000 years ago to see the last one.
After the large initial drop, it takes two or three good upswings to break the back/decrease the volume of the ice-sheets enough to eventually melt out the ice in the next upswing. Once the volume builds up to a km or so high, one upswing is not enough to completely melt out the ice before another (smaller this time) downswing occurs. It takes two or three or four upswings.
The next downturn of sufficient size to put us into an ice age is 50,000 years out (and perhaps 130,000 years out). The numbers are almost at their low point right now and it only declines very marginally for a few thoudand years in the future, not low enough to stop summer melt on Ellesmere Island for example.
Technically, the solar insolation values can be accurately forecast out and back for up to 5 million years at a time before uncertainties become too great.
CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere will lessen the impact of the glacial period on that part of the planet not covered in ice. The biosphere will benefit overall and human survival will be enhanced due to greater plant/crop productivity.
Note that humans were bottle-necked down to approx 3000 individuals in the last glaciation and almost died out.
What would be more constructive than this scaremongering would be to work on where in the world, currently not devoted to producing the majority of the world’s food, would climate be suitable in an ice age, to produce the food which would no longer be producable in Canada, Northern Mid-West, Russia, Ukraine etc?
Is it Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia? Is it the Northern Sahara? Is it the Middle East (the Arabian Deserts, Iraq, Iran etc)? Is it part of the Australian desert??
Perhaps the answer to this is: ‘we can’t predict it exactly, but the most likely places are these’.
What is clear is that the world will have the choice of starving people in the North to death or enabling a mass migration to more subtropical latitudes.
The effect of an ice age on human beings will be almost entirely determined by their values as a species.
Humm…
There is a very good chance Earth would contiune to follow cyclical glaciation, but descent into the next colder period will depend on net energy balance. While the very long term (10,000+ years) may bring glaciation, the current influence of GHG forcing makes a substantial delay jn that process likely. This is not speculation: the best estimate of ocean heat content is that there has been an increase (not decrease) over the past 50 years. Argo will contiune to collect heat data; your postulated loss of heat from the ocean would look more credible if the Argo data actually showed heat loss; it clearly does not.
No matter what spin you want to put on it, the “normal” state for the past several hundred thousand years is COLD. We are in a nice comfortable warm period with a nice growing season in which we can feed the billions of people on the planet.
Meanwhile, in the MSM…
Thanks, David, for perfectly destroying my peaceful and quiet sunday afternoon 🙂
Seriously, thanks for reminding us of some real-world climatology.
Warmth is not to be feared. It’s the cold that will destroy us in the end.
A full Ice Age is not required to hurt the developed world. More moderate global cooling could suffice.
Modern Western society is complex, so moderate global cooling, together with a crippling of our food and energy systems through green-energy nonsense, could have devastating effects. (Add a collapse of major global currencies due to excessive money-printing by central banks in the UK, Europe, the USA and Japan.)
We predicted global cooling by 2020-2030 in an article written in 2002. I think there is a reasonable probability that this cooling will be severe enough to affect the grain harvest. Urgent study of this question is appropriate, but the climate science community is so contaminated by warmist hysteria that it is apparently incapable of objective analysis.
Is this just more alarmist nonsense? Perhaps, but we have a strong predictive track record, unlike the warmists who have none.
__________________
Here are some background notes:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/23/ar5-climate-forecasts-what-to-believe/#comment-1064602
[excerpts]
Prediction Number 9
In a separate article in the Calgary Herald, also published in 2002, I (we) predicted imminent global cooling, starting by 2020 to 2030. This prediction is still looking good, since there has been no net global warming for about a decade, and solar activity has crashed. If this cooling proves to be severe, humanity will be woefully unprepared and starvation could result. This possibility (probability) concerns me.
8 Successful Predictions from 2002 (these all happened in those European countries that fully embraced global warming mania):
See article at
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped.
1. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.
2. Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil.
3. Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.
4. Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy – the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt.
5. Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.
6. Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits.
7. Kyoto will be ineffective – even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
[end of excerpts]
______
“…there are rocks on the beaches of Scotland that got blown over from Norway across a frozen North Sea.”
Another geologist here. It is true that Norwegian rock made it to Scotland in the last glaciation – but they were carried in ice flows, not blown by the wind. The North Sea was indeed frozen over though.
Reference:
“The ‘Pliocene’ gravels of Buchan: a reappraisal”
Scottish Journal of Geology, October 1981, v. 17:185-203
It takes a warm ocean for a glaciation. You need the increased snowfall to last year round. Dry cold will not raise the Albedo.
DaveF says:
September 16, 2012 at 3:12 am
kwik 2:22am:
“Make it 100 miles wide.”
I’m not sure that the Panamanians would be too keen on losing around a sixth of their country
===========================================================================
They won’t lose any ground, it will just be piled higher !!
Michael Schaefer says:
September 16, 2012 at 3:30 am
Well, normally, Tallbloke’s name in a posted comment appears with a direct link to his own Blog “Tallbloke’s Talkshop” – but not here:
tallbloke says:
September 16, 2012 at 12:39 am
Or, the 65N insolation may not drop low enough to cause glacial onset this time round and the Holocene may continue for another 50k years.
Nobody knows.
—————————————————————————————————————–
Also, the content of this comment makes me wonder, if we may perhaps have a Name Troll among us.
Tallbloke – was that really you?
[Not a Name Troll – IP and email is correct for Tallbloke ~mod]
It was me alright. I find David’s posts interesting if a little overconfident.
Ice ages end eventually. We don’t know whether the one we’re in ends with our Holocene interglacial or a different interglacial further into the future.
If you want more detailed thoughts from the talkshop, google milankovitch on a site specific search. I don’t want to develop a reputation as a spammer here.
Makes cheerful Sunday reading
Mr. Archibald is correct. My own layman’s prediction is the slide into the next glacial will take two to 200 decades to be accepted by even the commoners. There is NOTHING we can do about it. If we can figure out how to control plate tectonics and push the continents to favorable positions, then probably. Regardless, I’m not holding my breath. I think Harold Ambler is worth mentioning: http://talkingabouttheweather.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sell-Your-Coat-Surprising/dp/0615569048/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347802425&sr=8-1&keywords=dont+sell+your+coat
Anyway, it will take centuries after it is ovious. Still, it will reduce the human population by double digit percentages. Cold kills. Warmer is better.
I’ve just bought Bahama Bank underwater property futures. I’m going to be RICH. A-HA-HA-HA…. wait, when did you say this was going to happen?
Ho-hum. Except for some geologists intersted in making a name for themselves in stratigraphic nomenclature circles this is a big non-issue. Those aspiring geologists have been trying to establish a new geologic epoch- the Anthropocene – (see my blog post on this one at http://suspectterrane.blogspot.com/2011/10/anthrop-obscene.html)
But they are really just a sub-set of the same breed of geologist who named the Holocene in the first place. Geologically, the Holocene interglacial is NOT an epoch in the same way that the Pleistocene or Paleocene or Oligocene are. The Pleistocene was/is the epoch of the glacial and interglacial stages, characterized by periods of glacial maxima, punctuated by interglacial stages in which alpine gladiers alblated and the continental ice sheets retreated to Antarctica and Greenland. Which, of course, is the situation we have now. As long as we have conditions indicative of the Pleistocene we should never have counted ourselves out of the ice ages.
“Baby boomers like me have enjoyed the most benign period in human history. The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of relative peace”
Factually correct, but it didn’t feel that great at the time with the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation.
Philip Bradley says:
September 16, 2012 at 2:25 am
Black carbon will. Well at least for a few hundred to a few thousand years.
You obviously don’t ski in the Alps. Man’s pathetic attempts with particulate carbon are utterly dwarfed by the amount of Saharan dust that lands all over the Alps. On many occasions, there’s enough of it visible on the surface to make the snow look pinkish or yellowish. Woe betide you if you try to ski on the heavier accumulations of dust, your skis will come to an abrupt stop.
In summer in the Alps most of the glacial firn areas will have a pinkish tinge if there has been significant melting going on.
I’ll just add that it’s worth noting that 65N insolation didn’t drop as far as at the end of the last half dozen or so interglacials, we’re already past the low point, and the Holocene is already longer than several past interglacials. Also, 65N insolation is not the only important factor. Eccentricity times well with the periodicity of glacial interglacial cycles.
We might be in luck. I hope so, even if it means we just keep getting warmer and the AGW theorists carry on holding sway with their mumbo jumbo. I’d rather put up with bad science than the onset of a glacial.
Hopefully, the shorter term multidecadal drop in T both David and I (and many others) expect from around 2014 onwards will put paid to the AGW meme forever anyway, once nature has performed the crucial experiment for us.
Stop the Next Glaciation Project – SNGP
North hemisphere where majority of the land mass and the world population is concentrated has plenty of time to do a bit geo-engineering which should prevent the next glaciation.
The idea presented here is simple, easily implemented with available technology and in gradual stages as required.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SNGP.htm
You heard it here first !
Views of civil engineers and geologist may corroborate feasibility of the suggested project.
Philip Bradley had it almost correct. Black carbon is relatively easy to use, but the most effective way is to dust the ground (possibly from large lighter than air airships) with powered coal, or any other dark material (even volcanic ash), rather than depending on natural air born deposition of burn products. Ground or air vehicles could easily cover vast areas well enough to melt accumulations early during local summers. Northern North America and Northern Eurasia would be the main targets.
“More likely those rocks were embedded in icebergs calved from Norwegian glaciers that got blown across the North Sea. BTW, they are called Drop Stones”
When they grow up from little stones to big rocks they are called Eratics.
New York’s Central Park is littered with them.
Canada should either claim them as sovereign territory or demand those greedy Yankees give them back.
Chris in Canada;
How much human-generated CO2 would be required to counteract an ice age? If we have 1000 years to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, is it possible to maintain the interglacial indefinitely?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That’s one of those questions which, if you ask on a warmist blog, goes POOF! and disappears. ‘Cuz they’d rather not admit that CO2 is logarithmic, meaning it is subject to the law of diminishing returns. The accepted meme is that doubling of CO2 = +3.7 w/m2 = +1 degree. Let’s look at that starting with our current CO2 concentration of close to 400 ppm.
PART 1
400 x 2 = 800 = 1 degree
800 x 2 = 1600 = 2 degrees
1600 x 2 = 3200 = 3 degrees.
So, if we quadruple our entire consumption of CO2 starting today, it will take about 800 years to get us an extra 3 degrees.
From 1920 to now, CO2 concentrations have increase from about 280 to about 400. At that rate it will take only 2,800 years or so to get us an extra 3 degrees. Of course the warmists will point out that our CURRENT rate of increase is about double what it was in 1920. So at current rates, it will take 1,400 years to get another 3 degrees. And that’s assuming that feedbacks are not negative, an assumption that the science (in my opinion) is increasingly showing to be incorrect.
I’m not particularly worried however. What is remarkable about human beings is our ability to confront the challenges of nature and defeat them. An ice age won’t happen in an instant, we’ll have centuries to both adapt to it and mitigate it. The only way an impending ice age defeats the collective ingenuity of the human race is if we lay down and die.