Paper: 'Summer temperatures were about 10°C warmer than today, even though the concentration of atmospheric CO2 was similar'

summer temperatures were ~8°C warmer than today, when the partial pressure of CO2 was ~400 parts per million. Multiproxy evidence suggests extreme warmth and polar amplification during the middle Pliocene.
This is the future that we are headed for.
Welcome to MIS-31 (X2)
Welcome to the Anthropocene

Forest fires happen from time to time. If you build your house in the middle of a forest or immediately adjacent to a forest, the chances of your house burning down increases. This is not difficult to fathom.

Reason why I say axis of earth was different now then now.
One impact from a large meteorite, commit or asteroid in the right placement can change our seasons as we know them on earth in a split second.
Even earth quakes can change the rotation speed of the earth.

Stephen Richards. . .
for your viewing pleasure. . .enjoy 🙂
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsIU4Lzdew8 ]

Chris @NJSnowFan says:
June 21, 2013 at 1:17 pm
“Axis of the planet was different. Earth has not always had the same axis.”
Exactly!, the earths axis can and does change, most likely this is what causes a lot of the long term changes that have occurred on earth, glaciation and interglacial periods can be caused by changes in the earths axis. It’s actually one of the major players in climate change my opinion.
“One impact from a large meteorite, comet or asteroid in the right placement can change our seasons”
I wouldn’t think asteroid strikes would change the axis of the planet by very much in relation to the potential devastation they could cause anyway, but we share our solar system with other large bodies that are constantly interacting with the earth and frequently perturbing its orbit and there is a natural precession of the solar system as a whole at play, these factors can change earths orbit and axis even at an incredibly small rate that are only noticeable over long periods of time.
The good news is; we can build very accurate models by observing the planets and other large bodies to understand where and when these interactions will occur.

Temperatures were also considerably higher (although not 10 degrees higher) in the Arctic in the much more recent mid-Holocene.
See…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/dont-panic-the-arctic-has-survived-warmer-temperatures-in-the-past/

jai mitchell says:
June 21, 2013 at 12:33 pm
This is the future that we are headed for.
Welcome to MIS-31 (X2)
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Thanks for the good laugh jai.
Don’t worry, even if we made the Panama channel, it does not cancel the effect of the Panama isthmus, build up around 3 million years ago and which caused the change of the climate.
It is not the magic gas that did it.

Mark Hladik says:
June 21, 2013 at 12:24 pm
If this portion of the Russian platform did not develop into a full-blown glacial episode until 2.2 ma, it would be strong evidence that the Pleistocene had some significant variation WITHIN the hemispheres.
###
I think you are a bit confused. Full blown glaciation of the Norther Hemisphere did not develop until the mid Gelasian. Redefining the base of the Pleistocene to coincide with the base of the Gelasian moved off of the start of full blown glaciation. This is where the base of the Pleistocene used to be defined, which makes little sense. The old definition was like defining the start of a race as the point at which some cares reach maximum speed, as apposed to when the cars start to accelerate.

jai mitchell says:
June 21, 2013 at 12:33 pm
…and polar amplification during the middle Pliocene.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well jai, do you even know what the term “polar amplification” means? Can you explain in your own words the physics by which it is expected to exist? Let’s see if you’re just a troll throwing terms around or if you actually have reason, thought, and logic behind your remarks. Should only take you a paragraph or two. Let’s see what you got.

JAI,
I have a bridge for sale. It crosses the Thames, and has two big towers. £50,000,000 and it’s yours. email me at scammer@nigeria.com

poor Jai, electricians, and OBVIOUSLY zero education about climate etc..
https://www.facebook.com/jai.j.mitchell
REPLY: Well I guess that answers my question about him using a fake name – Anthony
[Reply #2: the page is now “unavailable”. — mod.]

Did “Newclear” something at Berkeley..
but no award that he showed.
I should have taken a screen grab.
oh. isn’t that Muller’s roost ? which thread did Jai first appear on ?

Let’s keep the arguments with Jai on site and not go poking around into anyone’s personal life.

@Ashby..
gees, people just want to know if his ignorance is wilful, natural, or paid for.

skunky says:
I have a bridge for sale. It crosses the Thames, and has two big towers. £50,000,000 and it’s yours. email me at scammer@nigeria.com
um, sorry, but if you want to make the sale, you have to put the words “I am a government paid climate scientist”, somewhere in the brochure.
Sale to the bletheren… guaranteed !!!

There still are lots of hippos in Norfolk. Go into any downtown shopping mall in Norwich at the weekend and you can see them waddling around grazing and looking for mud baths to wallow in.

I wasn’t able to get past the paywall for the paper. When I look at this http://s8.postimg.org/s62bnbmyd/Lake_E_and_CO2_4_to_1_5_Mya.png it’s hard to see any direct correlation between temperature and CO2, let alone figure out the likely direction of any causal relationship. It appears temperature may be leading swings in CO2, but sometimes they de-correlate, so…? Question for someone with access- the yellow line is expressing “CO2 at 3.0C per doubling -280 ppm equals 0.0C”, are they back calculating CO2 based on temperatures assuming a sensitivity of 3.0C per doubling of CO2? Do they ever display raw CO2 calculations for the sedimentary data? What would happen to this chart if you assumed a sensitivity of 1.6? Would their CO2 numbers skyrocket? Or was the CO2 independently calculated?

Jai Mitchell spending a lot of time at skeptical science can be dangerous to your intellectual development. Having the kind of conversation over there that we are having here is impossible because it is first and foremost an echo chamber for global warming promotion that deletes and edits almost all contrary opinions.

I’m fed up with reading replies from people responding to activist nonsense.
I know it’s very hard to do faced with an onslaught of trash but please the ignore the troll and pay attention to the topic of the post. The troll gets off on your responses; if you ignore her she will go away.
If you don’t, the troll wins and the blog suffers.

Summer temperatures were about 10 degrees higher than now in northeastern Siberia during the previous interglacial 125 000 years ago when CO2 was at 300 ppm. And hippos were not only swimming in the Thames,they were living at 1300 feet altitude on the Yorkshire moors (google “Victoria Cave”). And there were water buffaloes on the Rhine and monkeys in Bavaria.

Steven Mosher says:
June 22, 2013 at 3:51 pm
phlogiston says:
June 21, 2013 at 2:20 pm
We can return to the warmunists their own question – with interest. Concerning the last half of the 20th century with rising temps and CO2 they ask smugly “what else but CO2″ can be causing the warming?
Well, how about 3 million yrs ago? 8 deg C warmer than now with identical CO2.
What else can be causing the warming?
It clearly is not CO2.
########################
Many things cause fire. Arson, lightening, you can expand the list.
Your house burns down. The fire marshall comes. He notes that arson was not the cause.
Your child asks “does that mean arson cannot cause fires?”
My child would probably say “yes it was me Daddy”. But that’s beside the point.
This all seems to boil down to the induction / deduction issue of epistemology and the philosophy of the scientific method, especially Karl Popper’s laws, which we have argued here before and no doubt will again. Your position appears to be the precise opposite of that of Karl Popper. Popper says it is harder to prove something right (induction) and easier to prove it wrong (deduction). You say that induction (A=B thus B=C thus C=D ….) and a series of linear logical steps is the only way to obtain scientific knowledge (assumes the system is simple, linear and rigid so each step is robust), while any attempt to disprove anything can be avoided by bringing in arguments of causality and complexity and houses burning down etc. (the system is now complex so refutation can be escaped).
Poppers stark statement was that “there are no inductive inferences” and it may be possible to argue that this is too extreme a position. There are some inductive inferences. In 1862, Darwin, commenting on the discovery of an orchid flower with a particularly long neck, predicted that a moth with an equally long tongue would pollinate this orchid. Such an moth was discovered in 1903 (and was observed pollinating the orchid in 1997). Thus an inductive inference by Darwin was successful, Darwin 1 Popper 0. More recently Peter Higgs reflected on the fact that fields tend to go with particles, so thinking about gravity – a field – predicted the eponymous boson as the particle associated with gravitational fields. Now the Higgs boson has been found. And in maths of course all is inductive and everything works since theory and reality are one.
Its all about complexity. In the two examples there is a simple and direct linear connection between two things, moth’s tongue and orchid flower length, field and particle. But Popper’s arguments have most authority in the scientific study of complex systems, such as biology and climate (in this sense Popper was ahead of his time). Here the hubris of human intellect is on dangerous ground if it uses linear catholic logic to chart a path of logical inferences through unknown and chaotic territory.
Arrhenius’ greenhouse theory is a good example. It all looked so simple at first – CO2 absorbs IR so the earth is warming in a CO2 blanket. But then reality steps in and it all got more and more complex. There was logarithmic decline in effect and saturation, issues of absorbance bands, interaction with water vapour, clouds and trying to endlessly prove every feedback has to be positive contrary to all engineering and systems understanding, emission heights etc. etc. And now it turns out that Arrhenius might have stepped on a thermodynamic landmine. Ilya Prigogine’s nonlinear thermodynamics of dissipative structures throws another log across the road. The correct scientific conclusion to take would be – so its much more complex than the simple Arrhenius cartoon so lets look at real world data, including historic CO2 and temperature data – and see what we can deduce from that. But no – too much political capital and intellectual hubris was invested in CAGW for that to be acceptable, so we have this furious rearguard action defending this complex inductive AGW hypothesis.
If you make a canoe out of spaghetti and sugar icing and try to ride it over Niagara falls, the chance of it emerging intact at the bottom are about the same as the chance of the revised Arrhenius AGW hypothesis emerging intact from the real complexities and nonlinear chaotic dynamics of atmosphere, ocean and climate. (But the same canoe in the vacuum of space might sail splendidly.)
In complex systems Popper reigns supreme – you have to start with observation, with theory following, not the other way around. Things can be proved wrong more easily than being proved right.

Ashby says:
June 22, 2013 at 7:37 am
——————–
The CO2 numbers are all from other independent studies. In climate science, they really, really like to cherrypick just one of these estimates at, let’s say 2.85 Mya, when it was 400 ppm and try to say that was CO2 at the time. But the temperature numbers are from 3.6 Mya to 2.2 Mya. And there are 100s of other CO2 estimates in this same timeframe (and coming from the same dataset as the 400 ppm) that are ignored and not talked about.
I put all the (reliable method) CO2 estimates in all the charts I make because over this period, it fluctuates between 220 ppm to 416 ppm within the short timeframe and there is no reason to say it it was 400 ppm. Obvious enough.
Now to put CO2 (in ppm) on the same chart as temperature (in anomaly C), they should be done on the same basis so they are comparable. The CO2 ppm is just converted into temperature AnomalyC by the 3.0C per doubling formula. If you changed it to 1.6C per doubling, the CO2 line would just be flatter.