From AAAS: From Russia with Lovely Data
Pliocene Warmth, Polar Amplification, and Stepped Pleistocene Cooling Recorded in NE Arctic Russia
Brigham-Grette et al.
Understanding the evolution of Arctic polar climate from the protracted warmth of the middle Pliocene into the earliest glacial cycles in the Northern Hemisphere has been hindered by the lack of continuous, highly resolved Arctic time series. Evidence from Lake El’gygytgyn, in northeast (NE) Arctic Russia, shows that 3.6 to 3.4 million years ago, 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, sudden stepped cooling events during the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition, and warmer than present Arctic summers until ~2.2 million years ago, after the onset of Northern Hemispheric glaciation. Our data are consistent with sea-level records and other proxies indicating that Arctic cooling was insufficient to support large-scale ice sheets until the early Pleistocene.
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ralfellis says:
June 22, 2013 at 12:16 am
Re: Norfolk hippos from 500-780,000 years ago.
They swam in the Thames at the site of London as recently as the Eemian, ~125,000 years ago or more recently. Just more evidence that this interglacial is cooler than the previous one, without coal-mining & burning or cement-making by Neanderthals.
And if our cousins across the pond think that you have fine examples of hippos in Norfolk malls, you haven’t been to any Wal-Mart in the USA.
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.
@Phlogiston, 2.13pm
I have always liked the geological term ‘Recent’, although rather a lot has actually happened in that brief period of time.
But my one-time structural geology professor, who came for South Wales and had little respect for any rock that couldn’t stand up on its own, dismissed the whole lot, saying: “Anything after the Cretaceous is gardening!”
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.
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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.
CO2 is a “trace gas” in air, insignificant by definition. It absorbs 1/7th as much IR, heat energy, from sunlight as water vapor which has 80 times as many molecules capturing 560 times as much heat making 99.8% of all “global warming.” CO2 does only 0.2% of it. For this we should destroy our economy?
Carbon combustion generates 80% of our energy. Control and taxing of carbon would give the elected ruling class more power and money than anything since the Magna Carta of 1215 AD.
See The Two Minute Conservative via Google or: http://adrianvance.blogspot.com and when you speak ladies will swoon and liberal gentlemen will weep.
Ashby says:
June 22, 2013 at 7:37 am
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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.