From the University of New Hampshire and the department of “CO2 controls everything with a single big red knob” (as stated in the article) comes this modeling inanity. Never mind that after the continental breakup the continent of Antarctica is now on the bottom of the world and gets dark for months and super cold, nooooo, it’s CO2 wot dun it. Climate models can’t even get the present right, so I have serious doubts they’ll get 34 million years ago, where we have far less data, right either.
Antarctic ice sheet is result of CO2 decrease, not continental breakup
DURHAM, N.H. – Climate modelers from the University of New Hampshire have shown that the most likely explanation for the initiation of Antarctic glaciation during a major climate shift 34 million years ago was decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The finding counters a 40-year-old theory suggesting massive rearrangements of Earth’s continents caused global cooling and the abrupt formation of the Antarctic ice sheet. It will provide scientists insight into the climate change implications of current rising global CO2 levels.
In a paper published today in Nature, Matthew Huber of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and department of Earth sciences provides evidence that the long-held, prevailing theory known as “Southern Ocean gateway opening” is not the best explanation for the climate shift that occurred during the Eocene-Oligocene transition when Earth’s polar regions were ice-free.
“The Eocene-Oligocene transition was a major event in the history of the planet and our results really flip the whole story on its head,” says Huber. “The textbook version has been that gateway opening, in which Australia pulled away from Antarctica, isolated the polar continent from warm tropical currents, and changed temperature gradients and circulation patterns in the ocean around Antarctica, which in turn began to generate the ice sheet. We’ve shown that, instead, CO2-driven cooling initiated the ice sheet and that this altered ocean circulation.”
Huber adds that the gateway theory has been supported by a specific, unique piece of evidence—a “fingerprint” gleaned from oxygen isotope records derived from deep-sea sediments. These sedimentary records have been used to map out gradient changes associated with ocean circulation shifts that were thought to bear the imprint of changes in ocean gateways.
Although declining atmospheric levels of CO2 has been the other main hypothesis used to explain the Eocene-Oligocene transition, previous modeling efforts were unsuccessful at bearing this out because the CO2 drawdown does not by itself match the isotopic fingerprint. It occurred to Huber’s team that the fingerprint might not be so unique and that it might also have been caused indirectly from CO2 drawdown through feedbacks between the growing Antarctic ice sheet and the ocean.
Says Huber, “One of the things we were always missing with our CO2 studies, and it had been missing in everybody’s work, is if conditions are such to make an ice sheet form, perhaps the ice sheet itself is affecting ocean currents and the climate system—that once you start getting an ice sheet to form, maybe it becomes a really active part of the climate system and not just a passive player.”
For their study, Huber and colleagues used brute force to generate results: they simply modeled the Eocene-Oligocene world as if it contained an Antarctic ice sheet of near-modern size and shape and explored the results within the same kind of coupled ocean-atmosphere model used to project future climate change and across a range of CO2 values that are likely to occur in the next 100 years (560 to 1200 parts per million).
“It should be clear that resolving these two very different conceptual models for what caused this huge transformation of the Earth’s surface is really important because today as a global society we are, as I refer to it, dialing up the big red knob of carbon dioxide but we’re not moving continents around.”
Just what caused the sharp drawdown of CO2 is unknown, but Huber points out that having now resolved whether gateway opening or CO2 decline initiated glaciation, more pointed scientific inquiry can be focused on answering that question.
Huber notes that despite his team’s finding, the gateway opening theory won’t now be shelved, for that massive continental reorganization may have contributed to the CO2 drawdown by changing ocean circulation patterns that created huge upwellings of nutrient-rich waters containing plankton that, upon dying and sinking, took vast loads of carbon with them to the bottom of the sea.
The article is available to download here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v511/n7511/full/nature13597.html.
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Gotta love the “brute force” quote in bold. Translation: we pushed the model in the direction we believed it should go.
It should be noted that this is version 2.0 of this meme. Huber also had a paper in 2011 saying basically the same thing:
Pagani, M., Huber, M., Liu, Z., Bohaty, S.M., Henderiks, J., Sijp, W., Krishnan, S. & DeConto, R.M. (2011): The Role of Carbon Dioxide During the Onset of Antarctic Glaciation. Science, 334, 1261-1264
NikFromNYC says:
July 30, 2014 at 10:11 pm
“Science is beautiful and terrible. Just check in on Lubos Motl’s blog to see that. It’s a fine balance forevermore between dumb logic and empiricism. As if art itself isn’t good enough, or music, some buffoons must push for an alternative to old religious books in physics. But the only alternative is in CHEMISTRY, baby!”
____________________
Do you mean CHEMISTRY that one studies on the way to realizing that the true alternative is physics, or do you mean CHEMISTRY that could prompt one to go past physics to metaphysics?
Until the table of sources and sinks is correct, and the carbon cycle is understood, it is not possible for the models to have any value.
The US EPA Methane and Nitrous Oxide Emissions From Natural Sources, US EPA 430-R-10-001, April 2010, Page ES5, lists upland soils as a 30Tg sink. This is physicaly impossible.
Once methane is in the atmosphere, it rises.
This 30Tg error is included in the IPCC’s latest balance of sinks and sources as a 30Tg topsoil sink.
This IPCC inclusion of only the 30Tg US sink number must be a political calculation because the logical deduction is that none of the topsoil anywhere else in the world is a sink, making the balance sheet even more of a farce.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V3/N7/C1.php
“Hence, in this best explanation yet for the impressive correlation of CO2 and air temperature over glacial-interglacial cycles, atmospheric CO2 variations are the result of temperature variations …
“Once again, therefore, we have another demonstration of the fact that it is changes in air temperature that drive changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration and not the reverse phenomenon, which figures so highly in GCM predictions of continued global warming as a result of the rising CO2 content of earth’s atmosphere.”
“One of the things we were always missing with our CO2 studies, and it had been missing in everybody’s work, is if conditions are such to make an ice sheet form, perhaps the ice sheet itself is affecting ocean currents and the climate system—that once you start getting an ice sheet to form, maybe it becomes a really active part of the climate system and not just a passive player.”
Errrrrr…….Really ? Never would have thought of that.
“We’ve shown that, instead, CO2-driven cooling initiated the ice sheet and that this altered ocean circulation.”
Yeah, you know what else is good at altering the ocean’s circulation? A combination of the Correolis Effect coupled with the Conservation of Angular Momentum.
So CO2 is driving the ocean currents now? Newton and Kepler are most certainly flabbergasted at this “science.”
Bill Illis:
Another vote for the motion that you ask if Anthony (or somebody) would host your data, say, on a permalink. To protect the integrity, make it so only you or established reputable editors could edit, change, delete data (new data are coming all the time, as you well know).
The graphs you posted are MOST invaluable! They once again show the correlation between CO2 and temperature is non-existent (outside of natural variation, of course).
Thanks in advance,
Mark H.
Réchauffement climatique : l’innocence du … – YouTube
Vidéo pour “Francois Gervais – l’innocence du CO2″► 5:34► 5:34
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNAoG_E7eyk
23 sept. 2013 – Ajouté par LibertarienTV
Le CO2 a certes augmenté depuis le XIXe siècle, passant de 300 ppm à … François Gervais est physicien ..
co2 is innocent – that”s what he says …………..
It would be impossible to know even if they did get it right. We don’t even know with certainty what temps were 1000 years ago. All we have are proxies and guesses. Running such a model is pointless, except as a fanciful exercise.
Evidence that we must not allow CO2 levels to fall below 400ppm minimum. It’s been modelled so it must be correct. UNH needs to alert the IPCC stat. We must burn more fossil fuels now!
And here I was thinking ‘Barack Obama’, ‘Elizabeth Warren’, ‘Michael Moore’, ‘Sean Penn’ etc. every time I heard the term ‘red knob’.
Mark Stoval…
In answer to your question..
‘“How do these dingbats get away with this nonsense?”
The MSM is the absolute key IMO.
One thing this whole sorry business is teaching the world is the extreme danger in having, and accepting as a given—a partisan left wing MSM.
A really questioning media with investigative journalists on the case would have surely put this whole thing to rest years ago, when the global ‘consensus’ was announced and then enforced—- before most of the science was even done.
A non-partisan media would have questioned the expunging from history of the MWP and LIA in order to accommodate the hockey stick—and they wouldn’t have given up on it.
A non-partisan media would surely have followed the ‘science’ down every rabbit hole, listened to and would have given at least some credit to hitherto highly-respected scientists who are now pariahs because they question the ‘consensus’ and provide alternative research and findings.
They wouldn’t have tolerated the gate-keeping on such a huge issue.
Without a sceptical MSM, dingbats and ratbags run riot.
The only good thing about this latest product is that it’s from New Hampshire and not from Australia—-and for a little while anyway—it takes the spotlight off our own Australian dingbats , who use our hard-earned taxpayers’ money to scramble brains with their ‘scientific’ notions of giving ourselves over to the ‘great global super-organism’—a ‘global intelligence’ that will do our thinking for us apparently—their claims of 97% of scientists agree’—and their ‘conspiracy ideation’ theory etc etc.
The Climate Science Three-Step Dance:
1. Design, build, and run climate model-based computer simulations of reality.
2. Note how well the simulation results match what you anticipated they would be thus confirming what you expect was, is, and/or will be reality.
3. Write it up and publish while you finalize the next round of funding.
Repeat until retirement or perhaps until you find honest work as a paid activist and/or lobbyist.
Ok. This one takes the cake in terms of climate gravy train chasing. It is on par with insurance fraud wrapped around faked injuries. Science is fast becoming a tabloid industry. Heads up to real scientists from every discipline: If you fail to police your own, you may be at risk of being swept up in the aftermath of public disdain.
Anyone believing co2 destroys the earth, STOP EXHALING NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“initiation of Antarctic glaciation”
there are two theories.
neither can be tested by future observation.
A) we cannot re arrange the continents
B) we cannot drop C02 content.
That means the only way to understand the past is to.
A) collect what TRACES we have of past events —
B) model the past and see which theory provides the “best explanation”
“In a paper published today in Nature, Matthew Huber of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and department of Earth sciences provides evidence that the long-held, prevailing theory known as “Southern Ocean gateway opening” is not the best explanation for the climate shift that occurred during the Eocene-Oligocene transition when Earth’s polar regions were ice-free.”
Now in observational science, in sciences that focus on the past, in sciences where the “thing’
studied is bigger than a lab, you have nothing to do except model. And, you cant do controlled experiments. It’s hard to make predictions, so the focus is “understanding” or “explanation”
Now, note
“Huber notes that despite his team’s finding, the gateway opening theory won’t now be shelved, for that massive continental reorganization may have contributed to the CO2 drawdown by changing ocean circulation patterns that created huge upwellings of nutrient-rich waters containing plankton that, upon dying and sinking, took vast loads of carbon with them to the bottom of the sea.”
Note that the previous theory doesnt get “falsified” the move will be to incorporate the parts of it that are required for a more complete understanding.
On brute forcing the model. That is a perfectly sensible modelling approach.
In past modelling the ice sheet was represented as a “passive thing”
continent change –> circulation change–> ice sheet
brute forcing an ice sheet change up front shows you how the last two items might be reversed or re inforce each other
“Says Huber, “One of the things we were always missing with our CO2 studies, and it had been missing in everybody’s work, is if conditions are such to make an ice sheet form, perhaps the ice sheet itself is affecting ocean currents and the climate system—that once you start getting an ice sheet to form, maybe it becomes a really active part of the climate system and not just a passive player.”
as with all historical science the level of understanding is never complete.
FrankK says:
July 30, 2014 at 9:24 pm
. . .
Now hang on a tick chaps. We know that temp changes preceded CO2 variation. . . .
Not really:
http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~wxcheng/envs23/lecture3/weathering.html
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been declining for over half-a-billion years, at least so you would say given the overall trend. Really, CO2 crashed in the Permian/Triassic ca. 300 to 250-million years ago. It then covered to about a quarter the starting level and has been crashing since. The present levels are comparable to the Permian. The estimated peak value prior to the Permian is around 6,000 ppm. The maximum recovery, during the Mesozoic, was about 1,500 ppm and levels have been declining since. The errors of the geocarb estimate make the figures pretty soft, but geocarb remains the standard for estimating atmospheric CO2 over the Phanerozoic.
Next they’ll tell us that the ice ages and interglacials were also driven by their magic CO2 knob.
So basically this study says higher CO2 is GOOD because it’ll open up a whole new continent for habitation. But, of course, all the other continents were a barren, lifeless wasteland of searing heat before Antarctica froze, right? Oh wait, they weren’t.
Where do these amateurs get their training at the proper development and use of models & sims? Sheesh.
At 400ppm Antarctica’s ice is still there and doing strong.
This is not the first study to blame co2.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7267/full/nature08447.html
Mosher, you forgot the third theory: the anticipation of a drop in CO2 caused rearrangement of the continents and opening of the Drake Passage. That should be obvious from the current great scientific consensus that rising CO2 will close the Drake Passage and melt Antarctica’s ice.
This “research” strikes me as “drug-related.”
Consider Sole, Turiel and Llebot writing in Physics Letters A (366 [2007] 184–189) identified three classes of D-O oscillations in the Greenland GISP2 ice cores A (brief), B (medium) and C (long), reflecting the speed at which the warming relaxes back to the cold glacial state:
“In this work ice-core CO2 time evolution in the period going from 20 to 60 kyr BP [15] has been qualitatively compared to our temperature cycles, according to the class they belong to. It can be observed in Fig. 6 that class A cycles are completely unrelated to changes in CO2 concentration. We have observed some correlation between B and C cycles and CO2 concentration, but of the opposite sign to the one expected: maxima in atmospheric CO2 concentration tend to correspond to the middle part or the end the cooling period. The role of CO2 in the oscillation phenomena seems to be more related to extend the duration of the cooling phase than to trigger warming. This could explain why cycles not coincident in time with maxima of CO2 (A cycles) rapidly decay back to the cold state. ”
“Nor CO2 concentration either the astronomical cycle change the way in which the warming phase takes place. The coincidence in this phase is strong among all the characterized cycles; also, we have been able to recognize the presence of a similar warming phase in the early stages of the transition from glacial to interglacial age. Our analysis of the warming phase seems to indicate a universal triggering mechanism, what has been related with the possible existence of stochastic resonance [1,13, 21]. It has also been argued that a possible cause for the repetitive sequence of D/O events could be found in the change in the thermohaline Atlantic circulation [2,8,22,25]. However, a cause for this regular arrangement of cycles, together with a justification on the abruptness of the warming phase, is still absent in the scientific literature.”
In their work, at least 13 of the 24 D-O oscillations (indeed other workers suggest the same for them all), CO2 was not the agent provocateur of the warmings but served to ameliorate the relaxation back to the cold glacial state, something which might have import whenever we finally do reach the end Holocene. Instead of triggering the abrupt warmings it appears to function as somewhat of a climate “security blanket”, if you will.
So if this can actually be had both ways, we will need a big red knob for matter CO2 infecting the northern hemisphere and another big red knob for the antimatter CO2 that may be infecting the southern hemisphere.
“Climate modelers from the University of New Hampshire have shown that the most likely explanation for the initiation of Antarctic glaciation during a major climate shift 34 million years ago was decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.”
Once I read “Climate Modelers” my brain turns off and I get angry as to how our tax dollars are totally wasted.
This is not science, it is like astrology.
Anyone who has worked with any computer models knows that they are GIGO unless one has a grasp of all the physical equations in the model which is impossible for 35 million years ago.
It is interesting to me that this is not something new, the theory was expounded using climate models back in 2003.
DeConto, R.D. and D. Pollard, 2003. Rapid Cenozoic glaciation of Antarctica triggered by declining atmospheric CO2. Nature, 421, 245-249.
Abstract: The sudden, wide-spread glaciation of Antarctica and the associated shift toward colder temperatures at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary (~34 Ma)1-4 is one of the most fundamental reorganizations of the global climate system recognized in the geologic record. The established paradigm for the glaciation of Antarctica centers on the tectonic opening of Southern Ocean gateways, allowing the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), subsequent thermal isolation of the Antarctic continent, and glacial inception5. This inception and early growth of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is simulated using a coupled GCM-dynamical ice sheet-sediment model, accounting for paleogeography, greenhouse gas concentrations, changing orbital parameters, and varying ocean heat transport. In our model, declining Cenozoic CO2 first allows small, highly dynamic ice caps to form on high Antarctic plateaus. Later, a CO2 threshold is crossed, initiating ice-sheet height-mass balance feedbacks that allow the ice caps to expand rapidly with large orbital variations, eventually coalescing into a continental-scale EAIS. The opening of Southern Ocean gateways is shown to play a secondary role to CO2 in the Paleogene “greenhouse” to “icehouse” transition.
The fact that the most recent paper indicates they can’t shelve the SO gateway theory with their modeling work suggest to me there is nothing new here….what they are proposing is exactly what was proposed back in 2003. Whether it is correct or not the only thing new about it is they presumably used more sophisticated ocean/atmosphere circulation models.
[” (~34 Ma)1-4″ means “34 million years ago”, right? The 1-4 are references then, defiend later in that paper? .mod]
“Just what caused the sharp drawdown of CO2 is unknown”
Might it have been a sharp reduction in temperature that preceded it? That would be consistent with every notable temperature change as per proxy ice core data from Antarctica.
It isn’t possible for a climate model to find that anything other than CO2 is the cause of anything, because nothing there is nothing else allowed for in the climate models. They don’t have Earth orbit variation coded, they don’t have any solar cycle or its effect coded (they don’t know how to), they don’t have any ocean oscillation or its effect coded (ditto), they don’t have any atmospheric oscillation or its effect coded (ditto). Whatever they try to model, there is only one possible cause. In the model, that is, not in the real world.