From Oregon State University and the department of “we fully understand Earth’s climate, we just need more funds” department comes this bit of a surprise. (h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard)
Researchers find 200-year lag between climate events in Greenland, Antarctica
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study using evidence from a highly detailed ice core from West Antarctica shows a consistent link between abrupt temperature changes on Greenland and Antarctica during the last ice age, giving scientists a clearer picture of the link between climate in the northern and southern hemispheres.
Greenland climate during the last ice age was very unstable, the researchers say, characterized by a number of large, abrupt changes in mean annual temperature that each occurred within several decades. These so-called “Dansgaard-Oeschger events” took place every few thousand years during the last ice age. Temperature changes in Antarctica showed an opposite pattern, with Antarctica cooling when Greenland was warm, and vice versa.
In this study funded by the National Science Foundation and published this week in the journal Nature, the researchers discovered that the abrupt climates changes show up first in Greenland, with the response to the Antarctic climate delayed by about 200 years. The researchers documented 18 abrupt climate events during the past 68,000 years.
“The fact that temperature changes are opposite at the two poles suggests that there is a redistribution of heat going on between the hemispheres,” said Christo Buizert, a post-doctoral research at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. “We still don’t know what caused these past shifts, but understanding their timing gives us important clues about the underlying mechanisms.
“The 200-year lag that we observe certainly hints at an oceanic mechanism,” Buizert added. “If the climatic changes were propagated by the atmosphere, the Antarctic response would have occurred in a matter of years or decades, not two centuries. The ocean is large and sluggish, thus the 200-year time lag is a pretty clear fingerprint of the ocean’s involvement.”
These past episodes of climate change differ in a major way from what is happening today, the researchers note. The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The key to the discovery was the analysis of a new ice core from West Antarctica, drilled to a depth of 3,405 meters in 2011 and spanning the last 68,000 years, according to Oregon State paleoclimatologist Edward Brook, a co-author on the Nature study and an internationally recognized ice core expert.
Because the area where the ice core was drilled gets high annual snowfall, Brook said, the new ice core provides one of the most detailed records of Antarctic temperatures at a very high resolution. Greenland temperatures were already well-established, the researchers say, because of high annual snowfall and more available ice core data.
“Past ice core studies did not reveal the temperature changes as clearly as this remarkable core,” said Eric Steig, a professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, who co-wrote the paper. Steig’s laboratory made one of the key measurements that provides past Antarctic temperatures.
“Previous work was not precise enough to determine the relative timing of abrupt climate change in Antarctica and Greenland, and so it was unclear which happened first,” Steig noted. “Our new results show unambiguously that the Antarctic changes happen after the rapid temperature changes in Greenland. It is a major advance to know that the Earth behaves in this particular way.”
Kendrick Taylor, chief scientist on the project, said the core enabled the research team to get the relative timing of Greenland and Antarctic temperatures down to several decades.
“We needed a climate record from the Southern Hemisphere that extended at least 60,000 years into the past and was able to resolve fast changes in climate,” said Taylor, from the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “We considered sites all over Antarctica before selecting the site with the best combination of thick ice, simple ice flow and the right amount of annual snowfall.”
Taylor and colleagues formed a science and engineering team consisting of 28 laboratories from around the United States. “The resulting information provides unprecedented detail about many aspects of the Earth’s past climate,” Taylor said. “This will provide a generation of climate researchers a way to test and improve our understanding of how and why global climate changes.”
OSU’s Buizert said it is “very likely” that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is involved in these abrupt climate reversals.
“This ocean circulation brings warm surface waters from the tropics to the North Atlantic,” said Buizert, who is in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “As these water masses cool, they sink to the bottom off the ocean. This happens right off the coast of Greenland, and therefore Greenland is located in a sweet spot where the climate is very sensitive to changes in the AMOC.”
Brook said the AMOC seems to be critical, but was probably part of a combination of factors that ultimately controlled these past abrupt changes.
“Although ocean circulation may be the key, there are probably other feedbacks involved, such as the rise and fall of sea ice and changes in ice and snow cover on land,” Brook said. “There is probably some kind of threshold in the system – say, in the salinity of the surface ocean – that triggers temperature reversals.
“It’s not a problem to find potential mechanisms; it’s just a question of figuring out which one is right. And the precise timing of these events, like we describe in this study, is an important part of the puzzle.”
The paper:
- Nature 520,661–665(30 April 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14401
The last glacial period exhibited abrupt Dansgaard–Oeschger climatic oscillations, evidence of which is preserved in a variety of Northern Hemisphere palaeoclimate archives1. Ice cores show that Antarctica cooled during the warm phases of the Greenland Dansgaard–Oeschger cycle and vice versa2, 3, suggesting an interhemispheric redistribution of heat through a mechanism called the bipolar seesaw4, 5, 6. Variations in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) strength are thought to have been important, but much uncertainty remains regarding the dynamics and trigger of these abrupt events7, 8, 9. Key information is contained in the relative phasing of hemispheric climate variations, yet the large, poorly constrained difference between gas age and ice age and the relatively low resolution of methane records from Antarctic ice cores have so far precluded methane-based synchronization at the required sub-centennial precision2, 3, 10. Here we use a recently drilled high-accumulation Antarctic ice core to show that, on average, abrupt Greenland warming leads the corresponding Antarctic cooling onset by 218 ± 92 years (2σ) for Dansgaard–Oeschger events, including the Bølling event; Greenland cooling leads the corresponding onset of Antarctic warming by 208 ± 96 years. Our results demonstrate a north-to-south directionality of the abrupt climatic signal, which is propagated to the Southern Hemisphere high latitudes by oceanic rather than atmospheric processes. The similar interpolar phasing of warming and cooling transitions suggests that the transfer time of the climatic signal is independent of the AMOC background state. Our findings confirm a central role for ocean circulation in the bipolar seesaw and provide clear criteria for assessing hypotheses and model simulations of Dansgaard–Oeschger dynamics.
This just further accentuates the absurdity of the approach used in climate science. My take on it is that they take everything they know about the earth’s climate, add it all up, find a difference between their formulas and real-world measurements, and call the anomaly “man-made”.
They could use the exact same strategy to say “God-did-it”, or blame the anomaly on unicorn farts. This isn’t science, it’s a rudimentary religion at best.
What I don’t understand is that they are blaming a 200 year lag between Antarctica and Greenland, and they are blaming this two century gap all on Ocean circulation ?
What baffles me,… how were they able to get absolute data spanning over 60,000 years that helped them make such a precise statement?
“We needed a climate record from the Southern Hemisphere that extended at least 60,000 years into the past and was able to resolve fast changes in climate”!
can this be done?
http://www.ayeshajamal.com
[Note: There is no need to attach a link to WordPress with every comment. ~mod.]
*blaming a 200 year lag between Antarctica and Greenland all on Ocean circulation
http://www.ayeshajamal.com
As they specified in the article, they got the necessary data from ice cores.
Which they chose verrrrry carefully.
Presumably they found ice core records from Antarctica, and Arctica, that showed similar (or opposite ?) behaviors (wow how often would that happen) that occurred 200 years apart; and some Maxwell’s demon, (like my Mother Gaia for example) whispered to them that these matching (or disparate) results are linked. How likely izzat to simply happen by chance.
Now imagine this “pi core” matching prospect.
Suppose I take a printout of the number pi to some number of digits; not just 68,000 digits; maybe 68 million.
So I throw a dart at the printout somewhere in the first 200 digits (not counting the first (3) and I write down the next ten digits of pi after the one that has the dart hole in it.
Now how many digits must I scan through, from that point, until I come to the exact same sequence of ten digits. Maybe I find them much sooner than I get to 68,000 digits of pi.
So is somebody going to tell me, that these two regions of pi, are related to each other, and there is some cause and effect relationship between them.
What is the longest string of sequential digits of pi, that has been found to occur in at least two places in pi ??
So splain me again how these chaps or chapesses determined that these 200 year apart sequences are physically related, so that the occurrence of one ensured the occurrence of the other ???
G
PS The fine structure constant (alpha) or more importantly 1/alpha is known to better than five parts in 10^8.
It has the value: (2.h.c.epsilonnought)/e^2 = 137.0359895 (+/- 0.045 ppm)
And of course epsilonnought has the value: 1 / (c^2.munought)
So this fundamental constant of physics, was approximated by a person in the late 1960s, or early 1970s who was simply playing with numbers; but he presented it as a serious paper which got everybody’s attention for a couple of months.
His formula was something like: 1/alpha = (pi^a,b^c.d^e.f^g.h^i)^0.25
where (a) through (i) are all small integers, and are not necessarily all different from each other.
He got closer than a third of the standard deviation of the very best experimental measurements (0.045 ppm) or 1.5 parts in 10^8 just by ******g around with numbers.
His theory contained absolutely no information obtained or observable in the physical universe, yet it came that close to getting the right answer.
So if you want to believe these 200 year apart ice cores are related; I’ll hold your coats for you while y’alls argue about it.
They choose the areas to drill their cores very carefully. Not the cores themselves.
“and call the anomaly “man-made”. They could use the exact same strategy to say “God-did-it”, or blame the anomaly on unicorn farts.”
There is difference. Based on the evidence, we are fairly sure that men do exist. We have no reason to believe God exists. And everyone knows that unicorns do not fart.
Actually Scientific modeling has shown that male unicorns do fart, though the females merely emit a glow.
Excuse me for shouting: THEY SAY THAT TODAY IT IS GLOBAL BECAUSE THEY HAVE AN ALGORITHM THAT GIVES THEM A GLOBAL NUMBER. THEY DON’T HAVE THAT FOR THE PAST. IN REALITY, TODAY’S IS CLEARLY REGIONAL AS WELL IF YOU USED THE SAME METRICS THEY HAVE FOR THE PAST. SOME AREAS WARM A LOT MORE THAN OTHERS. THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT AREA OF MISUNDERSTANDING. NOT SURE IF IT IS ALWAYS DELIBERATE OR IF THEY ARE JUST USING THAT ARGUMENT SO THEY REMAIN IN WITH THE CONSENSUS CROWD.
“The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
The money shot.
One look at iceagenow’s website which has documented extreme cold in Canada, Great Lakes, Northeast, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Middle East, China, and the authors could easily write the converse:
“The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. COOLING today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
That’s perfect, did you get your grant yet?
Well I have a theory that there is a six month bi[polar disorder lag, between the weather / climate in the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere.
The trouble is at the present resolution of my data, I can’t tell whether the southern hemisphere is six month delayed from the northern hemisphere, or whether it is the verse vicea of that.
So I really need some more grant funds to improve the resolutions so I can decide which is which.
G
PS I’m sure there is curious information in their studies; just not sure if it’s worth anything to know.
… all natural processes having stopped.
So, the ocean has stopped changing?
Soon, soon, they’ll get rid of that nasty Medieval Warming Period once and for all.
Then, they’ll need only deal with the Holocene optimum (and the Roman Warm period and the Minoan warm period and…)
Yes, the question that comes to mind is how do they know that what is going on now is global in scope, yet the interaction between Greenland and Antarctica is unchanged? Seems to me that if the current event was different, the interaction would also be definably different. But if you deny the climate activity that is going on, you can overlook anything that would make a normal person question events.
Darn, beat me to it They could have added a disclaimer. “If we don’t blame it o CO2 we will not get any more funding.” . .
I am very suspicious of Anything coming out of Steig’s mouth. Re: spreading of Antarctic temperatures from one station to the whole continent. No thanks LOL
“The key to the discovery was the analysis of a new ice core from West Antarctica…”
And we all know how representative of the Antarctic West Antarctica is.
“We considered sites all over Antarctica before selecting the site with the best combination of thick ice, simple ice flow and the right amount of annual snowfall.”
…and most likely to give us the results we wanted.
Do you have any evidence that West Antarctica isn’t representative of that region?
Do you have any evidence that the criteria that they used to select the site were invalid?
Mark W: Until Mr. Kafkazar returns…
Re: West Antarctica Not Representative
I used “Antarctic” as the search term in the WUWT Search box (upper left margin) and found this which you may find of interest:
Sample quote: “… one of the largest glaciers in West Antarctica, the Thwaites Glacier, is primarily melting from below due to geothermal heat flux from volcanoes located along the West Antarctic Volcanic Rift System, … In contrast, East Antarctica, which holds > 80% of Antarctic ice mass and does not have any known underlying volcanoes, is significantly increasing in ice mass.”
{Source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/12/new-paper-finds-west-antarctic-glacier-likely-melting-from-geothermal-heat-below/ }
Hope this is helpful,
Janice
P.S. Even without attacking their regional (West) and specific site selection criteria, this paper is so full of baloney it gets a big fat “FAIL” no matter HOW good their criteria were and, further, the West region is, when speaking of JUST this particular document, not dispositive. That is, the thing is a PIECE OF JUNK. Period.
P.P.S. The idea of the oceans being a climate driver is VERY GOOD — there are a few pieces of good meat in that fly soup. That is, the “a piece of junk,” is like a 1976 Subaru wagon (hippies loved them for some reason) . It had a few good parts in it, but it wasn’t going to get you very far… .
Janice,
Being melted from below does not impact the ice closer to the surface.
The claim is that they carefully chose this particular glacier because they believed that the ice in it was formed in such a way that it is not representative of the region.
Mark W,
I’m sorry you did not find that article about West Antarctica and undersea volcanoes helpful. I wish Mr. Kafkazar would return. You would find reading what he would write to you more worthwhile, no doubt. Do note that the ice which is now closer to the surface was once far below it and the volcanic upwelling affected its initial rate of accumulation.
I hope that you will be able to do some research into this subject on your own and find out the answer to your question!
Janice
“We considered sites all over Antarctica before selecting the site with the best combination of thick ice, simple ice flow and the right amount of annual snowfall.”
The press release, above, gives the impression that the site was selected according to their special criteria, the hole drilled, the core analyzed and then used to perform the analysis. But note that they don’t really say that. The hole was drilled well before this paper was received by Nature, 11 September, 2014.
“The key to the discovery was the analysis of a new ice core from West Antarctica, drilled to a depth of 3,405 meters in 2011…”
That’s a gap of at least three years, from 2011 to 2014. It wasn’t really a “new” ice core in the sense that you and I use the word.
The actual paper states: “Here we use a recently drilled high-accumulation Antarctic ice core to show that, on average, abrupt Greenland warming leads the corresponding Antarctic cooling onset by 218 ± 92 years (2σ)…”
Note that doesn’t say they drilled the core after selection of the site. Surely it would say so, if that were true. They say they selected the best site, not the average site. It was selected for optimum observation conditions, like the drunk looking for his car keys under a street lamp, instead of where he dropped them, because it would be easier to see them there.
We can’t rule out that they selected the site with the best core data for their purposes, i.e., picked a cherry Sno-cone.
Janice has pretty well disposed of the notion that a West Antarctica site is representative of Antarctica. The researchers admit they picked one that was “better” than the others. Better means atypical. Note, too, that undermining of West Antarctica glaciers by geothermal flows may have altered local conditions, similar to Heinrich events, which could have affected the deposition of snow well inland from the coast. More direct volcanic effects could also be a factor in making this site atypical.
In finding high time resolution for temperature in ice cores, a major issue is resolving (dating) small time intervals in the core. High snowfall and ice formation rates greatly help. West Antarctica has a high snowfall rate and is good for this. East Antarctica cores do not. This core is the first good west core and was chosen because it is almost unique for this work.
Also consider this. If significant temperature oscillations of 200 years occur between poles because of ocean currents, how much might such currents influence global temperatures over shorter times?
Now there is a claim about a 206 year solar cycle, but naw… it’s gotta be the oceans.
200 years is not the cycle, it’s the delay. They cycle itself was 1000 years.
Some have identified it as a 206 year solar cycle, e.g.: http://northwestpassage2014.blogspot.ca/2014/12/the-global-climate-status-report.html#!/2014/12/the-global-climate-status-report.html
Fish & chips in the UK has run out, CO2 is to blame, the ice-core data proves it, cheque please! Off to the takeaway now! sarc off.
A truly fantastic alternative:
Try battered and deep-fried halloumi. It’s really good!
Thanks for the tip, will try it this weekend 🙂
There’s seems to be a consistent, cavalier usage of the term ‘ice age’. The present warmth that Earth is experiencing is an interglacial period, the current (on-going) ice age having started some 4my ago. The last glacial period ended only about ~10,000 years ago; the end of this present interglacial will be marked by the onset of the next glaciation.
The frequency of this rhythmic glacial/interglacial periodicity greatly exceeds a human lifespan, which may explain why so many folk find the concept impossible to comprehend.
We have spent considerable monies and effort to collect climate data back to the start of this interglacial, yet many people look at the last 20 years and say, “See, no warming.”.
Others would look at the 50 years or go back to the LIA and announce the earth has a fever.
But, they know how to save the planet.
We should be looking at all the data and base today’s climate arguments on this interglacial.
Show all you know and include defensible data, statistics and error bars.
You’ve got nothing to hide, “Do you, Mister Jones”?
B Dylan
This maybe
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/crutem3vsh/mean:24/plot/crutem3vnh/mean:24
The standard deviation of the differences of the derivatives of CRUTEM3NH and SH from 1900 to 1980 is 0.46°C/year. That works out to be 0.04°C/month.
So over that whole time period, the changes in average temperatures from month to month differed in the land measurements of the two hemispheres by less than one tenth of a degree for 95% of those measurements. Obviously, no effects of changing ocean currents was observed.
Any half decent scientist would think that the homogenisation was a flop.
“Antarctica showed an opposite pattern, with Antarctica cooling when Greenland was warm, and vice versa.”
So what we see today, with the Antarctica ice extent high and the Arctic ice extent low, is no different than what has happened many times in the past. It could very well be just another natural cycle that has nothing to do with CO2. Isn’t the burden of proof on those who want to claim that this time is different?
Yes, I was thinking the exact same thing.
Didn’t Joe Bastardi say this a couple of years ago?
Ouch! I hope they were wearing a cup.
Exactly. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
No,No- today’s cause is Global Warming via CO2. Get with the program.
I find this paper to be refreshingly unambiguous and level-headed; a far cry from the usual “We’re all doomed Mr Mainwaring” * so typical of grant grabbing alarmists.
I am not a climate scientist, but I am a real microbiology scientist – so naturally, as well as having been educated to be, I am almost always sceptical. However this paper just makes sense to me. Thanks for the heads up!
*Non UK readers should search “Dad’s Army” and watch on YouTube.
P.S. “Mainwaring” is pronounced mannering.
So how do you pronounce Cholmondeley ?? I think it is some kind of a flower.
g
Pronounced Chumley , and it is the family name of an old landed family in Cheshire (Cholmondeley Castle). Cheshire until recently was dominated by the estates of just a few grand families of Norman origin: the DeMasseys, the Egertons , Breretons, Bulkeleys (pronounced Buuckley) as well as the forementioned .
That is why there are relatively few large market towns , but a lot of villages originally established around the country estates and halls – now largely lost.
Chumly
You’re thinking of cha-momily.
Well I just knew that you guys would know how to pronounce it. And yes I did encounter a packet of seeds for some kind of exotic flower that was named that (plus something else of course) I don’t think it was a gm rose , might have been some kind of Orchid.
Damn near bought some just to feel a bit “chumly.”
You CAN learn almost anything at WUWT.
g
Mr. Bugs,
To prevent a “real … scientist” from misleading readers who are overly impressed by credentials and who did not read the above synopsis carefully:
Note:
This (along with several unsupported conclusions, e.g., that oceans are no longer the controlling mechanism, here) is hardly “level-headed,” bona fide, science. It is a blatant promotion of pure speculation to get money (as others have also pointed out). The funders: any power generation investor (e.g., Big Wind) who can use l1es about human CO2 emissions to create artificial market share through regulation and or to rationalize taxpayers/power co. customers (via surcharges) subsidizing their cost of doing business.
A non-scientist who is unimpressed with this OSU “science,”
Janice
I suppose they performed Granger Causality tests as part of their analysis (?)
“These past episodes of climate change differ in a major way from what is happening today, the researchers note. The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
So you can have your cake and eat it too!
The abrupt events of the ice age [glacial period] were indeed regional in scope — because there weren’t any thermometers [proxies] anywhere else. It is a fundamental feature of climate science that places without thermometers have convenient temperatures. MWP? Regional. Missing heat? Deep ocean. Greenland? Regional.
At least Greenland has been promoted from “local”.
Spinning planet with orbiting moon, in rotating solar system orbiting star. Star exhibits cyclical patterns in the fluid dynamics of its plasma, oceans on earth full of liquid tiadally affected by moon on 24 hour period. Rossby waves in oceans and atmosphere with multi decadal periods and possibility of seiching ( period doubling).
200 year period phenomena?
To be expected frankly.
Someone tell the modellers to get some better periodicity going. Get a few evidence based periodic mechanisms incorporated, please.
“These past episodes of climate change differ in a major way from what is happening today, the researchers note. The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
——————————
Oh, now I see…
They are different, aren’t they?
We just need the right starting point…
Let’s assume it’s CO2 from humans then say it’s warming all over the globe.
Then let’s say it was caused by all of those evil Americans living too well.
Natural climate variability driven by the oceanic cycles. My my who’d of guessed?
http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/easterbrook-et-al_ch2evidence-for-synchronous-global-climatic-events.pdf
Which I subscribe to.
“Warming today is global …” This is not true! The satellite record (UAH) shows far more warming in the Norther Extra-tropical region and at the North Pole. There is much less warming in the Souther Hemisphere and no warming at the South Pole; it may even be cooling. Global warming is neither global nor warming (not for 18 years anyway).
It is not global warming. Today, it is climate change.
Well… they’ve also tried “Climate Disruption” and “Climate Weirding”, so take your pick.
Right on Thomas. It is not warming globally at all. It is not year round either. It is mostly in winter in the NH and on average it is not warmer at all at 3000 ft altitude. That means it is colder somewhere else. The claim that the globe is warming is unsupportable from any standard point of view: not evenly, not year round, not trending up, not anything like GHG warming caused by an increase in CO2 well distributed around the world.
If they get a point this basic wrong what else have they got wrong? Is it possible they don’t believe a word of that sentence and just wrote it in to get published? Maybe we should look for coded words that mean ‘They made me say that; please read between the lines to see what I have found that vitiates the CAGW catechism.’
It looks promising. No CO2 in the story or evil humans and does include the AMO and oceanic signals in place of atmospheric. One detailed ice core record is okay for the starting framework and with more cross checks later.
read paragraph # 6, it slid in there nicely, as somebody else (mark) said, “the money shot”.
This article provides a glorious example of the circular reasoning under which mainstream climate scientists labor. Read the following quotations from the article and note the circular reasoning:
‘“The 200-year lag that we observe certainly hints at an oceanic mechanism,” Buizert added. “If the climatic changes were propagated by the atmosphere, the Antarctic response would have occurred in a matter of years or decades, not two centuries. The ocean is large and sluggish, thus the 200-year time lag is a pretty clear fingerprint of the ocean’s involvement.”’
“These past episodes of climate change differ in a major way from what is happening today, the researchers note. The abrupt events of the ice age were regional in scope – and likely tied to large-scale changes in ocean circulation. Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
As we all know, the real question is what part of recent warming is the result of manmade CO2. To say that today’s warming is global rather than regional because it is caused by manmade CO2 is to assume that no combination of regional natural regularities causing warming could account for some part of today’s warming. Isn’t the circle obvious? On this line of reasoning, any natural regularity is ruled out as a contributor to global warming because natural regularities are highly likely to be regional. And natural regularities are highly likely to involve time lags across regions. In other words, on this reasoning Judith Curry’s Stadium Wave framework is ruled out because it recognizes time lags across regions.
The subject matter of climate science is natural variability in the climate. The goal is to identify and describe all of the myriad natural regularities that make up natural climate change. Once climate science becomes mature, through identification of natural regularities, then the contribution of manmade CO2 to warming can be determined with a reasonable degree of certainty. In its present immature state, all that climate science can hope to accomplish regarding the manmade contribution is a quasi-probabilistic guess with huge error bars.
The Warmers only acknowledge that natural climate variability can slow warming. They use this to explain the “pause”. They are politically incapable of acknowledging the corollary that until proven otherwise, the Null Hypothesis that “climate change is natural and human contribution is insignificant” stands.
The other asymmetry in their cant is that only the negative consequences of climate change may be discussed. The wonderfulness of longer growing seasons, more moisture in the air, and CO2 as important plant food cannot be mentioned, again, for political reasons that subvert their claim to be scientists.
It’s worse than that.
While they admit that natural forces can at time mitigate the warming caused by man. Any time there is any warming, it all the fault of man, there are no natural forces that can cause temporary warming.
I agree this is a huge problem with that circular assumption in most published articles. The gate-keeper effect demands that they acknowledge and assert CO2 has caused recent warming as if there is no other possibilities. Those few researchers who acknowledge and demonstrate natural warming effects, typically only state that those effects happen in addition to CO2. Very few will ever state natural warming dynamics were the main driver. Johnstone 2015 that attributes 20th century NW North America warming to the PDO, without evoking CO2 stands out as an example of the few brave minority scientists.
Thanks for the comment. I have always enjoyed your excellent work. You understand empiricism and naturalism. Thanks for the reference to Johnstone.
“As we all know, the real question is what part of recent warming is the result of manmade CO2.”
NO, this is distracting question they want us to think is important.. As their climate science fails regarding thermodynamics, with the upper tropical troposphere at -17 deg C warming the surface at 15 deg C, they then ingenuously morph into pretending that CO2 heat the atmosphere directly.
During the day (and the climate models are all daylight 24/7), CO2 and water vapor are saturated and emit and absorb IR radiation equally. They have no effect that could be detectable.
But, at night, these radiative gases, unopposed by solar input, convert heat in the air to IR radiation which is lost to space. This is why the air chills so rapidly after sunset and, on partly cloudy days, small breezes kick up quite quickly as the air in the clouds’ moving shadows cool rapidly.
Any effect CO2 might have during the day is dwarfed by its effects during the night. That’s all their is to it. It’s contribution to any warming is a negative number.
Also, as the models totally ignore the massive heat engine of the water cycle, they are doomed to fail. An estimated 85% of the solar energy input that arrives at the surface is moved to altitude by warm, humid air, where the air adiabatically cools and the latent heat of water vapor released and lost to space.
It is about establishing base lines, which the Warmistas have failed to do, perhaps intentionally.
“Warming today is global and primarily from human carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.”
A proper mea culpa to keep those NSF grants coming.
Neo,
As we know here, that is merely an assertion. It is grant-trolling.
The fact of the matter is that no measurable evidence exists quantifying the supposed fraction of man-made global warming, out of total global warming from all sources, including natural climate variability.
If global warming due to human CO2 emissions can’t be measured, all MMGW amounts to is a baseless assumption. That is not nearly a good enough reason to radically alter Western civilization. But that is always the proposed ‘solution’ to something that is no more than a measurement-free conjecture.
The paper itself may well reveal the actual numbers and how they define “abrupt”. A matter of debatable interpretation in itself. Comparing that past abruptness with the current situation. Providing the numbers are correct, is the current situation abrupt?
It probably is if it means butter on your toast.
If the answer is yes then we have to conclude that the 60’s cooling was also abrupt as it was of similar scale and the LIA must then by definition have been a climate catastrophe. (It certainly was for the poor buggers living in those days)
Of course it had to be from large-scale changes in ocean circulations……………..because humans were not around burning fossil fuels back then.
If however, humans had been around burning fossil fuels during that time frame, they would have found that was the reason for it.
Suddenly, this study comes out of nowhere with this huge revelation in the understanding of past climate!
I have an idea, maybe we should rewrite climate history(again) like the IPCC did when Michael Mann’s hockey stick suddenly showed up.
http://a-sceptical-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Comparison-charts.jpg
On the other hand, let’s just chalk it up to the current environment in many scientific fields but especially so in climate science.
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Izzat deg. C or kelvin on the Temperature scale ??
I am not sure where these so-called scientist are getting the idea that a temperture change, hot or cold is global in nature. Perhaps they mean that globally areas of the Planet have cooling temperatures, while at the same time other areas have warming temperatures.
But doesn’t that happen every year. I think it’s called seasonal changes. Summer in the northern hemisphere and at the same time winter in the Southern hemisphere.
There’s only one rational conclusion – there were no seasons before humans started making CO2!
“The researchers documented 18 abrupt climate events during the past 68,000 years.”
Just how “abrupt” where these events and what was the change in temperature? We are told that the temperature change that happened last century was unprecedented and therefore had to be human caused. I mean if the temperature has swung by 0.6 C over 100 years 18 times then what happened last century was just more of the same, right? or am I missing something?
Yes. Your grant.
Just say it was all caused by CO2 and you should have your check within a week.
When in doubt, those who have little realistic comprehension of climate dynamics bury their ignorance deep in the ocean. Precious little of the mass transported poleward by the Gulf Stream actually winds up sinking to the bottom of the ocean as it cools. The overwhelming bulk continues to circulate near the surface in the North Atlantic gyre roughly centered on the Azores high. Nor can temperature variations on the West Antarctic Peninsula be taken as representative of the whole continent.
No it is not global, climate change is happening regionally.
The proper response to the Dansgaard-Oeschger events in comparison to today should have been…No correlation to DO events. The planet is currently in the tail end of 11500+ interglacial, and the DO events took place during the continual cooling of the last glacial cycle that culminated with the last glacial maximum ~20 k years ago. The ~20 yr period (1978-1998) of AGW warming was not an event worth documenting as special. The Holocene thermal maximum was greater and occurred 8 k yrs ago, and the climate is on a slow, erratic (read no “equilibrium”) decline towards the next 100 k yr glacial period. Next question.