Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The Earth is presently in an interglacial period—a period between ice ages. Since the end of the last ice age, Earth’s surface temperatures have been above the temperature needed to maintain ice sheets and glaciers, which covered much of the land masses at mid-to-high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, those ice sheets and glaciers have been melting for tens of thousands of years and sea levels have risen…and will continue to rise until the start of the next ice age.
Many of us are old enough to remember the scare stories from the 1970s, a time when climate scientists were warning that Earth was returning to an ice age.
For fun, imagine the multidecadal uptick in global surface temperatures didn’t happen from the 1970s to present—that global surfaces actually cooled a comparable amount, that sea levels were dropping, that glaciers and ice sheets were gaining mass.
Would mankind still be blamed? What would be different?
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Here is the classic 1970’s ice age scare booklet, complete with “two CIA reports”. Politicians were urged to take action to save the planet from freezing. http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/01/31/the-coming-of-the-new-ice-age-end-of-the-global-warming-era/?singlepage=true
Forget an ice age for a moment but what does cooling look like? What are the changes in the jet stream or ocean currents? Does more heat come out of the ocean to counter the cooling air? Does weather become more erratic? Does it start at the poles and move equatorwards or the reverse or is it roughly the sme in all aread? Are there rapid falls followed by pauses or is it a stead amble downwards?
Has anyone had the idea that the Politicians [ I know , but not all of them are stupid ], realised all along that there was a coming Ice Age & the only way to get huge amounts of tax off the public was to convince them that heating etc was a problem .
If they could tell the world that it was getting hotter , & that energy use was the cause, then they might just get away with the huge tax increases that have been put in place over the last few years .
Would mankind still be blamed? What would be different?
A more interesting question is “would CO2 be blamed?”
As many known, CO2 is an emitter of Infra-red. So, one can imagine a Noddy-science explanation going like this: “if you paint radiators black they emit more”, so by putting more IR interactive gases like CO2 intot the atmosphere, we effectively are painting the earth blacker and that is why it is cooling.
They would then match the slope downward to the supposed CO2 effect and scale up by “positive feedbacks”. Then they would assume a massive exponentially increasing CO2 effect to scale it up even further.
This would then be considered as “the settled science” and any who questioned it would be “deniers”.
The only difference is that the IPCC would be pushing a theory named AGC and telling us that the only solution for global cooling is to build more wind farms.
Chris
Covered in exquisite detail here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/16/the-end-holocene-or-how-to-make-out-like-a-madoff-climate-change-insurer/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/29/glacial-inception/
William,
I had a quick re-read of your earlier posts.
Concerning MIS-11 it seems possible that low Arctic ice actually entails a glacial inception risk, if progressive loss during an interglacial causes a tipping point to be reached eventually. Especially considering lower current summer insolation than during most of the last glacial (Muller and Pross 2007).
Note that Ruddiman’s idea that single-digit or even fraction-of digit CO2 ppm increases by early humans fended of glacial inception is utterly implausible. It could only be accepted if CO2’s effect were believed to be Homeopathic. Such notions have no place here – folks should go to new age religious websites for this.
Looking at fig 1 in Pol et al 2010 it is clear that even after the MPR the system is TRYING to retain 41 kYr obliquity pacing with most interglacials being followed by an abortive twin ~40kYrs later and several – at the eccentricity modulation maxima, being fully double-headed and 41 kYr spaced. This makes it clear that the system is undergoing complex weak nonlinear forcing at several Milankovitch wavelengths.
There is a suggestion that the MIS-11 and MIS-19 (400 and 800 kYr ago) interglacialy had “nipples” – that is, a smaller peak on a broader peak. In view of the variable forms of the interglacials there is no clear delineation between glacial and interglacial – just fractal like multiscale variation.
Generally the question – will the current MIS-1 extend or not extend – seems quite finely balanced. Considering the arguments of Ruddiman, Tzedakis, Muller & Priss etc. it seems that whether or not the current interglacial is extended or not will conclusively answer the question of whether CO2 drives global temperatures in a significant way or not. This answer will not be quick in coming – even if termination has already started it will be decades to centuries before this is clear. However CO2 has not prevented the overall temperature decline in the last 4000 years that the likes of Mann are trying furiously and fraudulently to conceal. Maybe deep down they even know the answer to the above question, but this knowledge drives their superficial consciousness into manic denial? Its not looking good for this interglacial.
Even if Hell freezes over, Mike Mann’s snug little tenure will be safe.
His tenure won’t be safe if the proposed changes to the grant process require both “transparency” and “reproducible/verifiable results” by the “researcher/recipient” and the “institutional sponsor.”
Better yet: Suppose that Gaia was “globally warming” at the precise opposite rate our planet-of-choice has actually been stable or cooling these past 18 – 25+ years.
Imagine peccatogenic AGW Catastrophists’ bleats-and-squeaks to effect that “Earth is melting, we’re all a-gonna die”, when in fact there would be no more long-term, objective, “scientistic” evidence for anti-entropic Warming than there is for cyclical Holocene Epoch cooling (since there are no experiments, historical analogies however plausible reduce to “mere opinion”).
Necessarily confined to spuriously biogenic temperature tabulations, “climate research” is not an empirical discipline but a classificatory exercise akin to botany, immune to rational projection on millennial scales. Self-satisfied exponents of this carcinogenic rodenteria [a cognitive “cancer in rats”], deviant Warmists such as Keith Farnish, Kentti Linkola, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber are nothing but blinkered totalitarian ideologues whose arrogant, self-serving, dialectical-materialist axes remain too soft to grind.
We do not need to speculate what will happen if the planet abruptly cools. We will have a front row seat to watch the cooling. I would expect the start of unequivocal cooling in time for the US presidential election (winter 2015/2016 and certainly by the winter 2016/2017). Based on solar observations and the fact the solar magnetic large scale northern field is now flat lining, the sun will be anomalously spotless by late 2015. Someone should keep a diary that records how the public, media, politicians, and scientific community paradigms change in response to the cooling.
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_4096_4500.jpg
The solar large scale magnetic field is believed to created by the residue magnetic flux from sunspots. As the magnetic flux floats on in the solar plasma and as the solar wind continually removes magnetic flux from the surface of the sun a consequence of the weakening of the magnetic field strength of individual newly formed sunspots is a weakening of the solar large scale magnetic field.
As many are aware the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots has for the last decade being decaying roughly linearly. The magnetic flux tubes that rise up to the surface of the sun to form sunspots on the surface of the sun are believed to be formed at the narrow interface between the solar convection zone and the solar radiative zone which is called the tachocline. The magnetic flux tubes require a calculated minimum field strength of 20,000 to 30,000 gauss to avoid being torn apart as the rise up through the convection zone.
As the magnetic field strength of the flux tubes weaken what forms on the surface of the sun is tiny short lived sunspots rather than large long life sunspots. As the process continues the magnetic flux tubes no longer have sufficient field strength to withstand the convection forces and are torn apart.
What is now forming on the surface of the sun in many cases is patches of higher magnetic field strength (residue of the magnetic flux tubes) and no sunspots. The solar northern hemisphere is roughly 18 months ahead of the solar southern hemisphere. There are now only tiny pores in the solar northern hemisphere and there are many days when the solar northern hemisphere is spotless.
More details of mechanisms as to how solar magnetic cycle changes modulate the earth’s climate and why there was a delay from the unset of the solar magnetic cycle slowdown and the start of cooling when there is a new thread on solar magnetic cycle and unequivocal evidence of cooling. (I am curious when there will be an official acknowledgement that the solar large scale magnetic field is flat lining. If the solar large scale magnetic field strength remains at current, Leif estimate for the solar cycle 25 sunspot number is 3.)
http://www.solen.info/solar/polarfields/polar.html
http://nsidc.org/news/press/day_after/NRCabruptcc.pdf
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
William: There are cosmogenic isotope changes are each and every cyclic cooling event. The cosmogenic isotope changes are caused by a weakening of the solar magnetic cycle due to a Maunder like solar minimum.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/Resources/Holocene.vs.Stage5e.html
http://www.news.wisc.edu/9557
William : see my comment at 12/7/8:04 pm and reply at12/8/6:37 AM above for discussion 0f the millennial cycle length and timing and cooling forecast links.
William Astley says on December 8, 2014 at 7:30 am
“We do not need to speculate what will happen if the planet abruptly cools. We will have a front row seat to watch the cooling. I would expect the start of unequivocal cooling in time for the US presidential election (winter 2015/2016 and certainly by the winter 2016/2017).”
Twelve years ago I wrote in an article published on September 1, 2002 in the Calgary Herald:
“If solar activity is the main driver of surface temperature rather than CO2 [as I believe], we should begin the next cooling period by 2020 to 2030.”
Now William you are saying with certainty it’s cooling by 2017 at the latest? You mean I missed it by three years, 15 years earlier? That’s a 20% margin of error. Quelle horreur! I must be losing my touch.
Best, Allan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/10/polar-sea-ice-changes-are-having-a-net-cooling-effect-on-the-climate/#comment-74024
Leif Svalgaard (19:57:40) :
Allan M R MacRae (19:49:11) :
Climate change is natural and cyclical
I would not disagree with that, except for downplaying the ‘cyclic’ bit. I don’t think there is strict cyclicity, just that it ‘goes up and down’.
___________________
Agree the up-and-down cycles are less than perfect – although there is something of interest in the PDO and/or Gleissberg – and possibly also in longer cycles but I haven’t looked at them.
I published Tim Patterson’s global cooling prediction for 2020-2030 in 2002 – but perhaps we were a bit late…
Here is a note received this morning from a friend in Spain:
“The whole of Europe went through a big chill. Last week it’s been 20º below zero in Cantabría, Spain, and traffic collapsed in snowed-in Madrid. Same chaos in Marseille, with 30 cm of snow in the streets…
… Will we heat our frigid homes with wind powered electricity costing as much as the rent ? Or solar-powered juice going for twice that amount ?”
It is particularly distressing for me to see this cold winter misery unfolding, as Europeans’ inadequate alternative energy systems fail to keep them warm.
This disastrous scenario was not only predictable, it was predicted – by Sallie Baliunas (Harvard U Astrophysicist), Tim Patterson (Carleton U Paleoclimatologist) and me in September 2002, at:
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
“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.”
This egregious error in energy policy is costing lives, and was entirely avoidable. The enviro-scare movement and foolish politicians are primarily responsible.
Another point we made in the same article, that Europeans may wish to consider as they huddle and freeze.
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist. ”
Best regards, Allan
William, anything going on with respect to the solar differential rotation, which might be affecting zonal and meridional flow speeds? Like one hemisphere picking up speed or one hemisphere slowing down or anything in between?
A sunspot number of 3??? huh what???
Low polar fields strengths and aren’t we currently relying on the source surface field around the middle brought about by the sunspots or am I off here? Hmm GCR could be a problem. Where is Houston?
Stock market increases and decreases would no longer be referred to as ‘bull’ and ‘bear’ markets – they would be ‘musk ox’ and ‘polar bear’ markets. 😉
Bob; in order for continental ice sheets to be maintained in the northern and mid latitudes, does the earth actually have to grow significantly colder at those latitudes, or do temperature extremes between summer and winter and the poles and tropics simply have to even out?
At some point, all that water has to move from the oceans to the land masses and become frozen. Won’t you need more water vapor in the air? How does that happen? During the period in which all that water moves from the oceans to the land, the earth would have to be a much cloudier place, and more evaporation would have to be occurring over the oceans. Heat for that process has to come from somewhere. Submarine volcanic activity?
Technically or geologically speaking we are currently in an iceage. Being in an interglacial just means a period of lesser glaciation.
Looking at past glacial periods, what generally happens is that toward the end of the interglacial, the climate signal becomes very “noisy”. Things appear to “chatter” a bit back and forth between cold and warm on decadal/century scales flipping between warm and cool before finally settling in the cool phase. Also, the sea level drop is quite slow. The last glacial maximum occurred only after 100,000 years into the ice age. We have likely already started cooling in the past 4,000 years into the next glacial state. We have also begun to see some of that “chatter” (Medieval warm period, Little Ice Age, Modern Warm Period) with each successive warm and cool period a little cooler than the previous one.
But we have some things working for us this time that might extend the interglacial. Earth’s orbit is currently about as circular as it gets. This keeps the energy flow to Earth fairly constant year round. Secondly, maximum energy happens during Southern Hemisphere summer where the surface is mostly ocean and that heat can be absorbed and distributed by ocean currents. If the orbit were more elliptical and if Earth was closest to the sun during Northern Hemisphere summer, we would likely see a rapid cooling by now. The colder winters would result in more ice and the greater albedo would mean reflecting more solar energy into space from land surfaces and less heat absorbed into the oceans.
So we have pretty much “perfect” conditions right now for a very long interglacial period.
So we have pretty much “perfect” conditions right now for a very long interglacial period.
Don’t count on it. The current transitional glacial-intgerglacial switching regime (before earth descends into permanent possible snowball earth glaciation) is driven by nonlinear oscillation. This is weakly forced by multiple Milankovich cycles. The thing about nonlinear dynamics is that absolute magnitudes diminish greatly in importance. The record of the current glacial epoch so far is that modulation of the amplitude of eccentricity, to which you are referring, does little to affect the form of interglacials. Oddly the interglacials occurring when eccentricity oscillation has its highest amplitude, i.e. 200 and 600 kYrs ago, are unstable and double-headed where one would expect the reverse.
According to Maslin and Ridgewell the current 100 year spacing is not from direct forcing by eccentricity but a complex variant of precession forcing, maybe “paced” only by eccentricity:
http://www.seao2.info/pubs/manuscript_maslin_and_ridgwell.pdf
Since MIS-19 (800 kYrs ago) may be a better analog of the current interglacial than MIS-11 (400 kYrs ago) then the often repeated assumption that the current interglacial will “go long”, may well be complacent and wrong.
The Earth is presently in an interglacial period—a period between major glaciations.
fixed
we’re in an Ice Age
H.H Lamb “Climatic History and the Future”, 1st Ed. 1977, second Ed. 1984.
The threat of an impending ice age in the 70s was more journalistic hype than scientific, note what
Lamb says in the preface to the 2nd edition:
“It is to be noted here that there is no contradiction between forecast
expectations of (a) some renewed (or continuation of) slight cooling of world
climate for some years to come, e.g. from volcanic or solar activity variations
;(b) an abrupt warming due to the effect of increasing carbon dioxide, lasting
some centuries until fossil fuels are exhausted and a while thereafter; and
this followed in turn by (c) a glaciation lasting….for many thousands of
years.”
Phil.:
RSS shows a flat trend for over 18 years.
None of the data sets show significant warming this century. So, relax.
Phil says:
The threat of an impending ice age in the 70s was more journalistic hype than scientific
And the threat of runaway global warming now is more journalistic hype than science.
Much more: about 49% hype, 51% hoax.
We are entering a Mini Ice Age. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612000417
Many of us are old enough to remember the scare stories from the 1970s, a time when climate scientists were warning that Earth was returning to an ice age.
Journalists, not scientists, scientists were more concerned about warming even then, see my quote from H H Lamb. Also Revelle et al. (1965); Manabe and Weatherald (1967); Broecker (1975); Manabe and Wetherald (1975); Ramanathan (1975); Reck (1975); Schneider and Mass (1975); Schneider (1975); etc.
Odd…. those journalists quoted a LOT of scientists.
In regard to ice age inception this article could be important:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/growing-antarctic-ice-sheets-may-sparked-ice-age-133750917.html
which was posted on an upstream thread by The Ghost of Big Jim Cooley:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/08/climate-alarmism-secures-a-set-of-warning-signals/#comment-1809274
This article looked at the glaciation at the start of the Pleistocene glacial epoch. They found that it coincided with warming of deep Pacific water (yes – warming not cooling). This is because warmer Atlantic water that normally would go south and melt Antarctic ice, instead was diverted into the deep Pacific. This allowed Antarctic ice to grow, and this was the fore-runner to global glaciation.
Note that there is an element of “zero sum game” to this. For glaciation to begin it is not necessary for there to be any change to the global heat budget. Just some deep ocean rearrangement of heat is all that is needed.
What might make this nice piece of palaeo-oceanography quite relevant to the current interglacial are the following two recent observed trends:
1. Antarctic sea ice is growing
2. Deep ocean OHC is apparently growing fastest in the southern ocean.
Interesting times…
The environmentalist mantra that humans (especially the males of the species, especially those from high tech Western society) are the source of all evil had already been chanted for at least 100 years by cooling of the 1970s. Humans would have been blamed even if we had not had the third brief warming since the late 1800s. The proof is that the very same people writing back then about the coming doom from manmade chemical cancer, manmade acid rain, man-caused loss of Antartic ozone, nuclear winter, were the ones who glommed onto the CO2 warming idea and then, when global temperatures wouldn’t cooperate, invoked “climate change” as a less-easily falsifiable substitute. Wherever there are opportunists eager to make a buck or seize control, variations in the circumstances to which they appeal to promote their fraud will change only their story, not its outcome.
Readers might care to read my post on the current interglacial, which has an excellent graph, too!
http://donaitkin.com/on-ice-ages/
I wish the terms ice/glacial age and glacial period would be used consistently. From my research (I’m not an expert or scientist), we are still currently living in an Ice/glacial age, albeit we are currently living in an interglacial period within that ice/glacial age. So when the article speaks of the last ice age, to me that means the one before the one we are living in now, which would have been a couple million years ago or more, not the last glacial period which ended about 12,000 years ago or so.
As I recall it was all our fault it was cooling back in the 70’s .. remember acid rain and particulate pollution. The 70’s introduced ozone holes with regulation and gas shortages, lowered speed limits, limited oil supply theory and unleaded gas. I’d say they were just repeating what worked for them before huh?