By Larry Bell
Dr. Christian Schlüchter’s discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.
This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today, with “a wild landscape and wide flowing river.”
Dr. Schlüchter’s report might have been more conveniently dismissed by the entrenched global warming establishment were it not for his distinguished reputation as a giant in the field of geology and paleoclimatology who has authored/coauthored more than 250 papers and is a professor emeritus at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
Then he made himself even more unpopular thanks to a recent interview titled “Our Society is Fundamentally Dishonest” which appeared in the Swiss publication Der Bund where he criticized the U.N.-dominated institutional climate science hierarchy for extreme tunnel vision and political contamination.
Following the ancient forest evidence discovery Schlüchter became a target of scorn. As he observes in the interview, “I wasn’t supposed to find that chunk of wood because I didn’t belong to the close-knit circle of Holocene and climate researchers. My findings thus caught many experts off guard: Now an ‘amateur’ had found something that the [more recent time-focused] Holocene and climate experts should have found.”
Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlüchter points out that “the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned.”
Schlüchter criticizes his critics for focusing on a time period which is “indeed too short.” His studies and analyses of a Rhone glacier area reveal that “the rock surface had [previously] been ice-free 5,800 of the last 10,000 years.”
More here: http://www.newsmax.com/LarryBell/warming-global-climate/2014/06/17/id/577481/#ixzz355f6L5y2
==============================================================
On Pierre Gosselin’s “No Tricks Zone” we have this:
Distinct solar imprint on climate
What’s more worrisome, Schlüchter’s findings show that cold periods can strike very rapidly. Near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier his team found huge tree trunks and discovered that they all had died in just a single year. The scientists were stunned.
The year of death could be determined to be exactly 8195 years before present. The oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice show there was a marked cooling around 8200.”
That finding, Schlüchter states, confirmed that the sun is the main driver in climate change.
Today’s “rapid” changes are nothing new
In the interview he casts doubt on the UN projection that the Alps will be almost glacier-free by 2100, reminding us that “the system is extremely dynamic and doesn’t function linearly” and that “extreme, sudden changes have clearly been seen in the past“. History’s record is unequivocal on this.
Schlüchter also doesn’t view today’s climate warming as anything unusual, and poses a number of unanswered questions:
Why did the glaciers retreat in the middle of the 19th century, although the large CO2 increase in the atmosphere came later? Why did the earth ‘tip’ in such a short time into a warming phase? Why did glaciers again advance in 1880s, 1920s and 1980s? […] Sooner or later climate science will have to answer the question why the retreat of the glacier at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 was so rapid.”
On science: “Our society is fundamentally dishonest”
CO2 fails to answer many open questions. Already we get the sense that hockey stick climate claims are turning out to be rather sorrowful and unimaginative wives’ tales. He summarizes on the refusal to acknowledge the reality of our past: “Our society in fundamentally dishonest“.
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/09/giant-of-geologyglaciology-christian-schluechter-refutes-co2-feature-interview-throws-climate-science-into-disarray/#sthash.z6pKzqtQ.dpuf
Having just finished an extensive discussion with him and reading of his review of the literature, I cannot help but correct this. Lief has never said that solar activity cannot influence climate. He has stated that the evidence that variable solar activity has a strong (dominant) influence on climate is extraordinarily weak and mostly based on incorrect assertions about just how relatively large/extraordinary the levels of solar activity were in the late 20th century. Having just finished reading through the evidence he provides, I have to agree. Even if you “want” to believe that it is the explanation, before you can or should go around asserting that it is, at the very least you have to address the very serious issues with consistency raised by the substantial evidence that while the late 20th century had comparatively high solar activity relative to the overall level of the last 180 years that we have good records of solar magnetism and hence inferrable state, it wasn’t that extraordinary, certainly was nothing like a “grand maximum” over that or any other plausible interval, and in any event isn’t well-correlated with temperature changes over any particular stretch of temperatures 100 years in length or more. You cannot just cherrypick an interval, accept one particular scientist’s claim for solar state when it is evaluated by just one proxy and inconsistent with results consistently obtained by four or five alternative means, some of them effectively direct measurement and not proxies at all, and claim success.
The challenge he establishes is straightforward. A) Reconcile the solar activity data you wish to use with that which you don’t wish to use (because it doesn’t support your assertion). One or the other has to be incorrect, and the first order of business is to determine which one is more likely to be in error. Lief’s presentation and discussion convinced me — and I’d like to think that as a physicist I’m not an idiot when it comes to the underlying reasoning even if it isn’t my field — that it would be very very difficult to assert that the methods that show no grand maximum are in error, as there are several of them, they independently lead to results that can be cross checked, and they are manifestly consistent with sunspot observations and the modern instrumental record where they overlap. Alternative presentations — e.g. Ushokin’s — are not in and of themselves implausible, but they do not resolve the inconsistency, and by failing to do so are at the very least not a good basis for making egregious statements about climate causality. B) Explain why and how the tiny changes in solar irradiation can explain large changes in the climate.
Note well that he doesn’t assert that such explanations cannot exist, only that they haven’t been proven and often are asserted on the basis of carefully selected data inconsistent with what should be considered a reliable, multiply verified record of solar activity back to at least the early to middle part of the 19th century. Such an explanation is not likely to be simple — a linear response model, for example. And so far, we have had damn-all luck in building multivariate nonlinear models for the climate that can explain why solar state is important in explaining this burst of warming or cooling, but not that one when almost exactly the same solar conditions held. But that sort of linear response is exactly what is constantly being asserted, based on sketchy data that contradicts some really, really solid data, without explanation or resolution of the conflict.
This is actually good science. In fact, it is great science. Skeptics are just as easily infected or equipped with confirmation bias and data blinders and cherrypicking combines and data dredges as warmists. It doesn’t help the science (which is probably leading to some really, really complex explanations, not plural, all tightly coupled and nonlinear and chaotic and non-Markovian) to constantly try to assert an ill-supported, inconsistent, linearlized explanation — which includes both one-knob CO_2 and one-knob solar state — for the climate.
rgb
“extreme, sudden changes
Sorry I can’t remember where I read it but here is what it said.
Frozen Mammoths were to have whole strawberries in there
stomach. Now that is fast!
From earthsciencescanada.com…
Quote: “Will the Athabasca Glacier melt away altogether? It’s possible. Some 5000 years ago, during a period not much warmer than the present, the middle of the Columbia Icefield was forest, not ice.”
http://www.earthsciencescanada.com/geovista/PDFs_en/vistas8_agci.pdf
Also, a recent documentary on the Rocky Mountains, narrated by none other than Suzuki, noted that 5000 years ago the Columbia Ice Fields didn’t exist. This is fact, and had nothing to do with SUVs or a lack of wind farms!
Another recent documentary explained that circa 5000 BC the Sahara Desert wasn’t a desert, but instead something resembling the Serengeti along with extensive herds of every kind of African plains species found there.
Climate change is a fact of life, always has been, always will be. There is nothing whatsoever unusual about our current global climate changes.
Nick Stokes says:
August 8, 2014 at 8:29 am
Hardly.
===
Nick…we don’t know anything…it’s all a bunch of hooey
Nick Stokes
In an article here in 2013 I reconstructed (highly variable) temperatures and compared them to the virtually static (until modern times) hockey stick.
I took the opportunity of assessing thousands of glacier records and compiled a first version of a chart showing glacier advances and retreats over the last 3000 years. I overlaid the Hockey stick on top of it.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/clip_image010.jpg
(note) A closed blue horizontal line at the top of the graph equates to a period of glacial retreat (warmth) and a closed blue line at foot of graph demonstrates glacier advance (cold)
As can be seen, there are many glacial advances and retreats which seem to give the lie to the static nature of the climate recorded by the Hockey stick.
Here is the full article;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/
Nothing today seems to be unprecedented or even unusual.
tonyb
Interesting concepts put forward by Nick Stokes.
LIA cooling caused a reduction in CO2 levels, but warming must be caused by a rise in CO2 levels.
Joe Born says:
August 8, 2014 at 6:54 am
Strabo writes about Cisalpine Gaul (the Alps) in his Geography [my emphasis]:
And beyond Comum, which is situated near the base of the Alps, lie, on the one side, with its slope towards the east, the land of the Rhaeti and the Vennones, and, on the other, the land of the Lepontii, Tridentini, Stoni, and several other small tribes, brigandish and resourceless, which in former times held the upper hand in Italy; but as it is, some of the tribes have been wholly destroyed, while the others have been so completely subdued that the passes which lead through their territory over the mountain, though formerly few and hard to get through, are now numerous, and safe from harm on the part of the people, and easily passable — so far as human device can make them so. For in addition to his putting down the brigands Augustus Caesar built up the roads as much as he possibly could; for it was not everywhere possible to overcome nature by forcing a way through masses of rock and enormous beetling cliffs, which sometimes lay above the road and sometimes fell away beneath it, and consequently, if one made even a slight misstep out of the road, the peril was one from which there was no escape, since the fall reached to chasms abysmal. And at some places the road there is so narrow that it brings dizziness to all who travel it afoot — not only to men, but also to all beasts of burden that are unfamiliar with it; the native beasts, however, carry the burdens with sureness of foot. Accordingly, these places are beyond remedy; and so are the layers of ice that slide down from above — enormous layers, capable of intercepting a whole caravan or of thrusting them all together into the chasms that yawn below; for there are numerous layers resting upon another, because there are congelations upon congelations of snow that have become ice-like, and the congelations that are on the surface are from time to time easily released from those beneath before they are completely dissolved in the rays of the sun.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/4F*.html
climatology is the poorly marked and dimly lit intersection of art and science
Adam Gallon says:
August 8, 2014 at 12:33 am
The retreating Swiss glacier you cite showed that an intermittently open pass exists in the Alps which had been forgotten in recent centuries.
The finds exposed by its retreat came from specific time periods, during the Medieval, Roman & Minoan Warm Periods & the Holocene Climatic Optimum (like Ötzi, the Italian-Austrian Iceman).
Nick Stokes said:
Nick,
So we all agree that the current retreat of glaciers is not unprecedented.
Then do you agree that this natural variation explains any recent warming (or cooling)?
I suspect not because I think you still want to believe that recent warming is “unprecedented”.
That is implied by your response to Weinstein:
“Yes, that is based on the rapid rise consistent with AGW, and with no alternative explanation from present data.”
That sounds like the “theory” proposed by CAGW believers, which compel us to believe that 1) all these climate ‘catastrophes’ have happened recently and 2) there were 600 jillion tons of manmade CO2 released in the same period. So, somehow [waving hands] 2) is the cause of 1)
But you were clever not to claim that argument as scientific proof:
“But it is not the proof of AGW, which is based on radiative physics.”
But you did not present any compelling proof based on radiative physics either. Yes, we know CO2 absorbs long-wave radiation, but so does H2O and the other GHG’s. And it is well-known that climate models can be twiddled to produce any desired result, and have little or no skill in predicting real world climate events.
So where is the compelling proof, based on radiative physics, that manmade CO2 released into the atmosphere will have these dire, catastrophic consequences?
There is no compelling proof, except for a lot hand waving and loudly acclaimed 97% “support” for CAGW.
But it does not make any difference how many people believe in a theory, it is not a valid theory if it can be falsified by experimental observations.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
-Albert Einstein
The MSM obviously do not agree with Einstein because they think they can prove CAGW, through implication, by merely increasing the number of news reports on “extreme weather” catastrophes. => “Twin hurricanes hit Hawaii! Must be that manmade CO2. What else could it be!?”
But the notion that the modern retreat of glaciers is unprecedented and therefore can only be caused by excessive CO2 is certainly shot down by these many apparently well-known historically ancient retreats.
And, finally you complain that no one can counter your claim that AGW is consistent with ancient receding glaciers. Perhaps that is because AGW has been transformed into a kind of religion, which can’t be falsified because it continuouslly redefines itself to counter criticism. It used to be about “global warming” when that fizzled it switched to “extreme climate”. Very adaptive, like a human.
Again, show me your _compelling_ proof that manmade CO2 causes glaciers to recede.
Tony
“I took the opportunity of assessing thousands of glacier records and compiled a first version of a chart showing glacier advances and retreats over the last 3000 years.”
Even at present, some glaciers are advancing while others (even close by) are retreating. They respond to precipitation as well as temperature. So that is yet another reason why finding evidence of some diminished glaciers in Mid-Holocene wouldn’t contradict anything.
But the fact is, no-one is saying that is was a lot colder then.
jones on August 8, 2014 at
12:45 am
“Following the ancient forest
evidence discovery Schlüchter
became a target of scorn. As
he observes in the interview,
“I wasn’t supposed to find
that chunk of wood because I
didn’t belong to the close-knit
circle of Holocene and climate
researchers. My findings thus
caught many experts off
guard: Now an ‘amateur’ had
found something that the
[more recent time-focused]
Holocene and climate experts
should have found.”
.
Who does he think he
is…..Alfred Wegener?
Right, ‘jones’, but then…
is it you, Mr. Wegener?
Only asking – Hans
RGB at Duke says it for me in characterizing the problem as predicting the behavior of a complex, nonlinear, multivariate system. Complex system theory is not exactly a secret so one would think climate scientists would be aware of the unpredictability of the particular tiger they have by the tail. Then it occurs to me that while they cannot prove the system is controlled by CO2 it also cannot be proven that turning up the knob on CO2 can’t result in global warming. If the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China can lead to that tornado in Kansas why can’t CO2 lead to warming? It becomes a contest between who can provide the most likely explanation and since the people to whom the explanation is being presented are the ‘man in the street,’ green houses and warming are more familiar and easier to understand than complex systems theory. Of course this makes climate scientists pushing the CO2 explanation total frauds which I hate to think is true. Maybe complex system theory is not that well known.
Big oil planted the wood there for others to find, right Al?
Same thing in Alaska. Forest from Medieval Warm Period exposed by retreating Mendenhall Glacier:
http://www.livescience.com/39819-ancient-forest-thaws.html
Mick says:
climatology is the poorly marked and dimly lit intersection of art and science
Good quote. But I’d make it ‘art and pseudoscience’.
===========================
markx says:
LIA cooling caused a reduction in CO2 levels, but warming must be caused by a rise in CO2 levels.
Nick Stokes is nothing if not illogical.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Nick Stokes says:
…AGW theory…
Nick, AGW is not a ‘theory’. To be a theory, AGW would have to be able to make repeated, accurate predictions. It can do neither. AGW is merely an unproven conjecture.
……………………………………………………….
johann wundersamer says:
…is it you, Mr. Wegener? Only asking – Hans
Mr. A. Jones has commented here for years. I very much doubt that he uses sockpuppet identities.
It seems time has stood still for Nick Stokes who is discounting this story today with the same dull arguments it was originally discounted with so many years ago. One has to be profoundly driven by something more important than truth to discredit the importance of a mature forest where glaciers existed before the mature forest and which exist again today. He appears to be indistinguishable from being fundamentally dishonest and therefor an unreliable source of science. Sad if true.
Nick Stokes says:
But the fact is, no-one is saying that is was a lot colder then.
That is very surprising to me, because “unprecedented” nature of current warming is THE driving factor in all of the publicity around CAWG.
I think the problem is that the only reason people are worried about CAGW is because they are being told that high temperatures are really, really bad, they create horrible problems, catastrophic problems to be exact – mass extinction, death of polar bears, death of corrals, complete destruction of cities, etc.
Well, it appears that we have hard proof that higher temperatures do not have that effect. So, whether caused by humans or not, and explained by models or not, higher temperatures are not going to kill polar bears.
If that is so, the whole argument becomes pretty academic and of little interest of anybody outside of very narrow circle of climate researches.
But that is not what you want, is it? Because if it’s contained to obscure field of science, the funds will dry up, the fame will disappear, together with all of the perks of “planet saviors” that you got so used to.
So you will continue to be telling us that, one one hand, you knew all along that it was much warmer before but current moderate warming is going to be a horrible thing.
Is that correct for the summary of how you going to play this?
Nick Stokes:
“And indeed it has warmed. And we’re on track to burn a lot more C.”
We burned FF, it got warmer, ergo FF caused the warming.
Thank you for providing another example of logical fallacies.
dbstealey says:
August 8, 2014 at 9:37 am
“AGW is merely a conjecture.”
..
..
No, the correct term is “hypothesis”
@H Grouse – no, until the null hypothesis is disproven, DbStealey is correct.
Science 101.
Nick Stokes
“and with no alternative explanation from present data.”
—-
And yet another logical fallacy.
I wonder if Nick will be able to get all of them before the day is over.
Resourceguy, if you’re referring to my post, you lost me…??? My point was that glacial historical evidence…such as provided by my link, and consistent with the topic at hand…proves that somewhat radical shifts in global climate are a natural occurrence.
Or I’m misunderstanding your post?
IMHO, AGW is a load of garbage!
Richard D says:
August 8, 2014 at 8:12 am
//////////////////
And not due to CO2!
The satellite record shows zero first order correlation with rising levels of CO2. The staellite record shows us that temps were essentially flat before the 1998 Super El Nino, and essentially flat as from the 1998 Super El Nino.
The approx one thrird of a degree that you note is a one off step change, occuring in and around the Super El Nino of 1998. Unless that Super El Nino was itself caused by the increase in CO2 over say the preceding 20 years (and as far as I am aware no one seriosly argues that it was, or puts forward an explanation as to how CO2 drove that Super El Nino), then CO2 has nothing to do with the temperature record recorded by the satellite data.
CO2 cannot explain the past temperature record of CO2. Further, and not least because, it appears that CO2 lags temperature and therefore is not the driver of those temperatures, but rather merely a response.
The relevance of all of this is that the only reason why CO2 is said to be the driver of the post 1970 warming is because the IPCC could not think of any other reason to explain that warming. There is no direct evidence that CO2 drove the post 1970 warming, and the IPCC does not cite any direct evidencei.
However, until one can explain all past temperaure events/anomalies there can be no merit in the claim we cannot think of anything other than CO2 as being the driver behind the post 1970 warming, since what drove the past temperatures may be driving the post 1970 warming. The claim of not being able to think of any thing else is worthless, and the fact that we cannot explain the past is proof positive that there is a big whole in our knowledge and understanding of what drives climate/temperature changes. In other words, we know that we do not know!
“Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlüchter points out that “the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned.”
Well then that can’t be true can it Steven Mosher? After all that is recorded history and history doesn’t mean anything whereas upside down dendro proxies than don’t validate against instrumental metrics are far more believable. /sarc
Nick Stokes says:
No, there is no such evidence. There has been nothing to change the amount of carbon in the environment in the last millions of years. Recently we have dug up 400 Gtons and burnt it. Radiative physics says that the extra CO2 will impede outgoing IR and cause warming.
Nick,
You forgot to add “all other things being equal”.
In nature, of course, all other things rarely stay equal. And that is the fundamental issue that the Doom and Gloom crowd doesn’t seem to get. That and the fact there is more that we don’t know we don’t know than there is stuff that we actually know.
It seems that it might be a very good thing to require all climate scientists (actually all scientists) to read Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science speech. Repeatedly.
The most important part of that speech is widely ignored by a large number of climate scientists. That portion is:
“That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.”
Compare that to the ever popular sentiment expressed by Phil Jones:
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it…”
So we know that, all other things being equal, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will lead to warming. That should be relatively easy to model. However, as Freeman Dyson noted:
“The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world we live in…”
So your assertion “Radiative physics says that the extra CO2 will impede outgoing IR and cause warming.” is true. However, it is true in a trivial way. It doesn’t address the complexities of the climate and is an appeal to authority which misses the point. And it completely fails Feynman’s ideal on how science should be done.
Eric