By Javier
This is an answer to the Geological Society of London position statement on “Climate Change: evidence from the geological record,” published in November 2010, and the addendum published in December 2013. They can be found at:
https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/climaterecord
This article was first written as a long comment contributing to a discussion over the Geological Society statement at the energy and climate blog Energy matters. Scientists of the Geological Society that authored the statements participated in the discussion to defend their views.
Climate change is a reality attested by past records. Concerns about preparing and adapting for climate change are real. However, the idea that we can prevent climate change from happening is dangerous and might be anti-adaptive. Certain energy policies that might have no effect on climate change could make us less able to adapt.
Physics shows that adding carbon dioxide leads to warming under laboratory conditions. It is generally assumed that a doubling of CO2 should produce a direct forcing of 3.7 W/m2 [1], that translates to a warming of 1°C (by differentiating the Stefan-Boltzmann equation) to 1.2°C (by models taking into account latitude and season). But that is a maximum value valid only if total energy outflow is the same as radiative outflow. As there is also conduction, convection, and evaporation, the final warming without feedbacks is probably less. Then we have the problem of feedbacks that we don’t know and cannot properly measure. For some of the feedbacks, like cloud cover we don’t even know the sign of their contribution. And they are huge, a 1% change in albedo has a radiative effect of 3.4 W/m2 [2], almost equivalent to a full doubling of CO2.
So, in essence we don’t know how much the Earth has warmed in response to the increase in CO2 for the past 67 years, and how much for other causes. That is the reason why, after expending billions on the question of climate sensitivity to CO2, we have not been able to reduce the range of possible values, 1.5°C to 4.5° C[3], a factor of 3, in the 39 years that have passed since the Charney Report was published [4]. A clear scientific failure.
Climate is a very complex system and adding CO2 to the atmosphere in great amounts since 1950 led first to cooling, then to warming, and lately to a stilling of temperatures until the 2014-16 El Niño. A different explanation is required for every period when the expected warming doesn’t take place, an approach that leaves Occam’s beard unshaved.
A very big assumption underlies the 2010 Statement and 2013 Addendum by the Geological Society of London. And in science assumptions are very dangerous, because they are not subjected to the scientific method. The big ugly assumption in these reports is that past changes in CO2 were responsible for planetary temperature changes. At most, what we can extract from past data is a correlation between both, and even that correlation is tentative, as the quality and nature of the data makes any conclusions in the statement and addendum questionable.
We do know that temperature affects CO2 levels, as an increase in temperature leads to a release of CO2 by the oceans, due to the gas solubility dependence on temperature. So, the causality is confusing. Is the CO2 mainly the result of temperature changes or is the temperature mainly the result of CO2 changes? We don’t know. The proposed positive feedback where each one enhances the other must be very limited, if they were significant, we wouldn’t be here. The extraordinary claims by the authors of the Geological Society statements are not accompanied by extraordinary evidence. Quite the contrary.
We believe that over hundreds of millions of years CO2 levels have been decreasing dramatically in the Earth’s atmosphere. We also believe that over that time Earth’s temperature has been kept within a very narrow range compatible with life. So, a clear relationship between both does not exist. Some evidence suggests ice ages are compatible with high CO2 values.
“The last (and thus best known) Late Ordovician Saharan ice sheet formed during a time of high (16 × the modern value) atmospheric CO2. The ice sheet may have been comparable in size to the last North American Laurentide Ice Sheet (∼36×106 km3) and expanded eastward from North Africa onto the Arabian platform.” [5].
Using the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) as an analog is misleading. We don’t know what caused it, although hypotheses have been proposed. However, we must consider that the PETM took place during a warm (hothouse) period of the planet, while currently we are in a cold (icehouse) period, as attested by the massive ice sheets over Antarctica and Greenland. The long-term real danger for humankind is a return to the average glacial conditions of the Late Pleistocene, as our interglacial is already long in the tooth. The report final paragraph: “the massive injection of carbon into the atmosphere 55 million years ago that led to the major PETM warming event,” shows the authors’ overreaching assumption. They simply lack the evidence to say that CO2 caused the PETM, or even to say how much of the warming was caused by the increase in CO2.
The authors also talk about more recent abrupt shifts in climate during the last glacial stage (100,000 – 11,500 years ago), known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. This is the best example we have of abrupt climate change (it was the basis of that concept), but the report should mention that although the temperature shifts were accompanied by changes in methane, CO2 records in most cases don’t show them [6]. The best example we have of abrupt climate change, not driven by orbital changes, has nothing to do with CO2.
So, the first question we should ask ourselves is how unusual is present global warming. This is a difficult question to answer, as we now measure temperatures with a resolution we cannot achieve with past temperatures. Last 2015-16 El Niño caused a temperature increase of 0.4°C over the course of two years that is now receding. We are not able to see these short-term fluctuations in past temperatures from proxies that, at best, have decadal resolution and represent local conditions. And most proxies cannot be trusted to faithfully reproduce recent changes as they usually lack enough resolution. So, we can’t compare recent temperatures with past temperatures. Biology offers us an answer. The tree-line represents the limit where climatic conditions allow the growth of new trees. Every year new tree seedlings attempt to establish themselves further up the mountain and generally fail. 52% of studies show the tree-line has been going up over the past century, and only 1% show a tree-line receding, indicating that mountain trees are generally responding to global warming and increased CO2 by raising the tree-line [7]. However, many studies show that at most places the present tree-line is still 100-250 meters below Holocene Climatic Optimum tree-line levels [8][9][10]. Figure 1 illustrates this in the Swiss Alps.
Figure 1. The approximate Holocene timberline and tree-line elevation (m above sea level) in the Swiss central Alps based on radiocarbon-dated macrofossil and pollen sequences [8].
We must take into account that present elevated CO2 levels are a huge bonus to tree growth, so if placed at similar climatic conditions present trees would have a significant, but unquantifiable, advantage over Early Holocene trees. So, the first answer to the question of how unusual is present global warming is that it is not unusual enough to have returned us to Holocene Climatic Optimum conditions. Therefore, present global warming is within Holocene variability. Reasoner and Tinner [8] quantify the summer temperature difference in the Alps between now and the Holocene Optimum as:
“Assuming constant lapse rates of 0.7° C / 100 m, it is possible to estimate the range of Holocene temperature oscillations in the Alps to 0.8–1.2° C between 10,500 and 4,000 cal. Y[r.] BP, when average (summer) temperatures were about 0.8–1.2° C higher than today.”
Without question we have undone most or all the cooling that took place between the Medieval Climatic Anomaly at ~1100 AD and the bottom of the Little Ice Age at ~1650 AD. Is this countertrend, multi-century, global warming we are experiencing worrisome? By objective reasons, the Little Ice Age was very worrisome. Glaciers advanced to their maximum Holocene extent, destroying farms and villages. Crops failed repeatedly causing famines like the one that killed one third of Finland’s population in 1696. Population in Iceland declined from 77,500 in 1095 to 38,000 in 1780 [11]. Conditions have improved greatly since the Little Ice Age, coinciding with Global Warming.
It is only since 1950 that anthropogenic forcing (human GHG emissions) has really taken off. Professor Phil Jones, former director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, admitted in an interview on the BBC in 2010 [12], that “for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different.”
Table 1. Data provided by Prof. Phil Jones to the BBC showing that different warming periods are significant but not statistically different.
So, to explain why the warming rate has not accelerated despite the huge addition of CO2, we are told that prior to 1950 global warming was mostly natural, and after 1950 is human-made. A convenient explanation for which there is no evidence, just assumptions on top of assumptions.
And it is not only temperature, but rising sea levels that show little to no acceleration [13], in sharp contrast to predictions. Reducing our emissions will not significantly affect sea level rate of increase, because increasing them didn’t.
Figure 2. The rise in sea level [14] predates IPCC calculated anthropogenic forcing [15] and shows no clear response to it.
The CO2 hypothesis of global warming has been consistently wrong in its predictions. In science, if your hypothesis predictions fail, there is something wrong. In 1990 the IPCC predicted a warming rate of 0.3° C/decade [16] for the next century, nearly double the observed rate for the past 27 years. It also predicted a 1° C warming by 2025 (0.5° C observed). In 2001 the IPCC predicted that milder winter temperatures would decrease heavy snowstorms [17]. In 2007 the IPCC claimed that by 2020, between 75 and 250 million of people would be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture were to be reduced by up to 50 % [18]. It later had to withdraw that prediction. Arctic sea ice predictions have also been consistently wrong with many polar scientists predicting the demise of summer Arctic sea ice by dates as early as 2008 [19] to as late as 2030 [20]. The reality is that in September 2017 there was more sea ice in the Arctic than 10 years earlier. And we could continue with many other predicted climate horrors that have failed to pass, regarding polar bears, sinking nations, food shortages, climate refugees, and extreme weather events, too long to detail [21], but that show a shameless promotion of alarmism based on unrealistic worst-case scenarios.
Most of these predictions arise from models that have not been properly validated and do not adequately represent the climate response to increased CO2. The current crop of models used by IPCC, CMIP5, shows a worrisome deviation from observations just a few years after being initialized in 2006 (figure 3).
Figure 3. Model CMIP5 temperature anomaly under the RCP 4.5 scenario, compared to observed HadCRUT4 temperature anomaly, both relative to 1961-1990 baseline.
Despite the recent El Niño, temperatures do not show a significant deviation from a linear increase since 1950, while models predict a much higher rate of warming.
Geologists should be aware that some emission scenarios being promoted as business as usual are completely unrealistic. RCP 8.5 contemplates a shift to a mainly coal economy with total disregard for coal reserves. How can unlimited coal growth be business as usual? Fossil fuels are finite resources and their abundance must be taken into account. Climate alarmism is being promoted as if fossil fuels were unlimited. The burning of 100 % of oil, gas, and coal proved reserves (BP Factbook of World Energy) would increase atmospheric CO2 levels to 620 ppm [22]. By using a supply-side analysis, the value reached is equivalent, 610 ppm maximum this century [23]. RCP 8.5 based predictions require 950 ppm by 2100. The alarmist projections clearly lack any rational basis and are agenda-driven. The reality is that we have had no problem adapting to a global warming that has been taking place since at least 1860, and there is no evidence that we will have problems adapting to future global warming until it ends.
By writing the 2010 statement and 2013 addendum, the authors are just setting the Geological Society of London in line with the politically promoted consensus on global warming. It is not different from what many other scientific societies have done recently, but it is a breach of the scientific principles that should guide the Society and an attack on the plurality of views that characterize healthy scientific debate over a hypothesis that so far is short on evidence and long on claims.
This post was lightly edited for readability by Andy May.
References
[1] IPCC TAR. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/
[2] Farmer G.T., Cook J. (2013) Earth’s Albedo, Radiative Forcing and Climate Change. In: Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis. Springer, Dordrecht.
[3] IPCC AR5. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
[4] Charney Report (1979). www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/charney_report1979.pdf
[5] Eyles, N. (2008). Glacio-epochs and the supercontinent cycle after ∼ 3.0 Ga: tectonic boundary conditions for glaciation. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 258 (1), 89-129.
[6] Ahn, J., & Brook, E. J. (2014). Siple Dome ice reveals two modes of millennial CO2change during the last ice age. Nature communications, 5.
[7] Harsch, M. A., Hulme, P. E., McGlone, M. S., & Duncan, R. P. (2009). Are treelines advancing? A global meta‐analysis of treeline response to climate warming. Ecology letters, 12 (10), 1040-1049.
[8] Reasoner, M. A., & Tinner, W. (2009). Holocene treeline fluctuations. In Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments (pp. 442-446). Springer Netherlands.
[9] Cunill, R., Soriano, J. M., Bal, M. C., Pèlachs, A., & Pérez-Obiol, R. (2012). Holocene treeline changes on the south slope of the Pyrenees: a pedoanthracological analysis. Vegetation history and archaeobotany, 21 (4-5), 373-384.
[10] Pisaric, M. F., Holt, C., Szeicz, J. M., Karst, T., & Smol, J. P. (2003). Holocene treeline dynamics in the mountains of northeastern British Columbia, Canada, inferred from fossil pollen and stomata. The Holocene, 13 (2), 161-173.
[11] Lamb, H. H. (1995). Climate, history and the modern world. 2nd edition. Routledge. London. Pg. 172.
[12] BBC News. February, 3, 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm 13
[13] Fasullo, J. T., Nerem, R. S., & Hamlington, B. (2016). Is the detection of accelerated sea level rise imminent?. Scientific reports, 6, 31245.
[14] Jevrejeva, S., Moore, J. C., Grinsted, A., & Woodworth, P. L. (2008). Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?. Geophysical Research Letters, 35 (8).
[15] IPCC AR5. https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter08_FINAL.pdf
[16] IPCC FAR. 1990. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_spm.pdf
[17] IPCC TAR WG2. 2001. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/index.php
[18] IPCC AR4 Synthesis Report. 2007. https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains3-3-2.html
[19] National Geographic. June 20, 2008. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080620-north-pole.html
[20] The Telegraph. September 16, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/8005620/Arctic-ice-could-be-gone-by-2030.html
[21] Javier 2017. Some Failed Climate Predictions. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/30/some-failed-climate-predictions/
[22] Fernando Leanme 2014. https://21stcenturysocialcritic.blogspot.com.es/2014/09/burn-baby-burn-co2-atmospheric.html
[23] Wang, J., Feng, L., Tang, X., Bentley, Y., & Höök, M. (2017). The implications of fossil fuel
That the addition of more CO2 leads to warming, rather than cooling, has never been proven in a reasonable experiment. Tyndall and Arrhenius looked at closed box experiments which do not give a balanced result.
Furthermore, it could be argued that
more warming =.> more evaporation = > more clouds => leads to more cooling
[noting that a few clouds can decrease local T max by as much as 5-10 C]
That means that excessive or catastrophic global warming is not possible by design.
Anyway, my results show that on average it has started cooling since the new millennium, in line with our position on the sine wave that has a 87 year wavelength, i.e. the Gleissberg solar cycle.
Note results Table 2 and 3. I found this study after determining our current position in the Gb cycle.
http://virtualacademia.com/pdf/cli267_293.pdf
“more warming =.> more evaporation = > more clouds => leads to more cooling”
The intriguing question is: does more cooling lead to more warming?
zasove
you are a clever man.
It seems you agree with me, then, that indeed, there is no concern for global warming.
This is due to the behavior of this wonderful molecule which we have called water. We have the oceans full of it. Together with our weather systems this substance is unbeatable in protecting earth. Unless there was some major orbital change, it is very unlikely indeed that earth will overheat.
me thinks the opposite is not so true. As you can imagine:
more cold => more ice and snow => more light being deflected away from earth => more cold =>
which is why we would fall in the ice age trap….
It has been suggested that sprinkling the ice and snow with carbon dust might help in keeping earth warmer.
There, we have it again: we need more carbon. Not less.
Anyway, I would not worry too much about it getting too cold.
looking at minimum T, my results show that we are currently globally cooling at a rate of -0.01K/annum and this cooling will last until at least 2037. That is about -0.2K from the current level. Not enough to start an ice… I think.
You are far too generous calling me clever.
“me thinks the opposite is not so true. As you can imagine:
more cold => more ice and snow => more light being deflected away from earth => more cold =>
which is why we would fall in the ice age trap….”
But why isn’t the opposite true ie:
more heat=>less ice and snow => less light being reflected => etc?
zasove
good comment.
Unfortunately the actual decrease in (arctic) ice is caused by warmer water, coming from the equator, and/or from elsewhere…ask me where…
Clouds are not formed much beyond a small section on both sides of the equator.
That’s life for you, isn’t it.
@zazove
“But why isn’t the opposite true ie:
more heat=>less ice and snow => less light being reflected => etc?”
It IS true, but doesn’t matter much, because there is pretty much no ice or snow where the sun actually shines, you find them where and when the sun is faint (polar region, winter). While clouds exist where the sun shines, so the they are the main reason why Earth albedo is ~30% instead of Moon’s ~14%.
It mattered when Earth exited a glacial era when ice existed at low latitude, in Sahara for instance.
Javier
I readily admit to being enthusiastic about reading your posts. This post grabbed my interest when it came to this part.
“Without question we have undone most or all the cooling that took place between the Medieval Climatic Anomaly at ~1100 AD and the bottom of the Little Ice Age at ~1650 AD.”
Recently, I finished analyzing the most recent H4 data with my cyclical analysis. Things changed very little it only required three iterations.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZxSJsnkDfzp9FfEQ
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZyqRjZi5kjEBRe8w
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZz0NtMzLbcUlsQNg
Here is another that nobody has seen and the reason for that is simple. I think it is problematic to take slightly less than 170 years’ worth of data and go too far forward or too far backward with it. Well, here it is.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ0SR7k855sZhygUg
From the looks of it if the MWP and the LIA shifted slightly to the left just a bit it would match exactly what you were saying.
There is more. The following comes from your reply to Dr. Norman Page in an earlier post.
“Then we go to the Roman solar grand minimum dated at ~ 1300 BP (~ 650 AD).
That gives us 10,240 – 1,300 = 8,940 / 9 = 993 years. Close enough.
Now let’s move by that amount, 650 AD + 990 = 1,640 AD (Maunder Minimum).
1640 + 990 = 2,630 AD (the next grand minimum).
And now for the midpoints.
650 AD + 495 = 1,145 AD (the Medieval Warm period peak)
1640 AD + 495 = 2,135 AD, the Modern Warm period peak, give or take a couple decades at most.
Global warming is due to have a hiccup until around 2035 due to the centennial solar minimum, but should stay with us until the end of the century.”
In his calculation Javier used 933 years for the Eddy cycle. In my H4 analysis I have a long period cycle of 1025 year.
I decided to see if my long-term cycle would match Javier’s value of 2135. I did this by setting the derivative of the sin wave to 0 and then making a guess for the date.
Here is the equation and the result.
sl=DERIV(“‘Amp[2]*sin(2*pi()*’Freq[2]*x+’Phase[2]),x”,xx,1)
Status Input Name Output Unit Comment
0 sl sl is the slope that I set to 0
F xx 2135.53882 xx is the year that the slope is 0. The F indicates that I put in an initial guess for the value. In this instance it was 2100.
Javier, I could not match your prediction much better than that.
I then decided I needed to work with a smaller number of cycles and not the 90 that I use to model the H4 data. I sorted all the frequencies by the absolute value of the magnitude since some of them are negative. I selected the 12 most important cycles using this criterion.
Making projections from only 170 years’ worth of data is problematic. However, here is what resulted.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ15pnsQC_N3f3LJQ
Keep in mind that this is only 12 cycles and the contribution of CO2 has been omitted along with the DC offset. I think it adequately captures the essence of the data. I then put the data into a spreadsheet where I have better graphing tools.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ2cCesPO72ku39pQ
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ3GKt7jIbjx4iHhw
I apologize that I am unable to post my graphs but must provide links instead.
I admit to being uneasy about doing this with only 170 years’ worth of data but it seems to line up with what Javier has been saying.
Take your shots and have fun but I will pay attention to constructive criticism.
Hi Charles,
I am glad that my musings serve as inspiration for your work. I find it interesting and keep some of your graphs in my hard drive to check them against future climate changes.
If you want to post your graphs you need to get them into a place that allows linking, like Imgur. One Drive images do not end in .png .jpg or .gif and thus are not recognized as images.
Your data points to a higher rate of cooling the first half of 2018. I’m looking forward to that.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:2000/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:2000
Javier, it’s amazing just how cool the southern hemisphere has gotten already. Among the lowest temps we’ve seen from 2000 onward. Should be interesting to see if the relatively unstable northern temps fall to the level of the relatively stable southern temps (as is the norm for the past historical record). Finally (at long last!), things could get really interesting real soon…
Charles/Javier . Rather than calculate by mathematical cycles over just 170 years of data it is better to use the actual empirical picks from the data. -see figs 3 and 4 from https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html
Fig.3 Reconstruction of the extra-tropical NH mean temperature Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012. (9) (The red line is the 50 year moving average.)
Note that the overall curve is not a simple sine curve. The down trend is about 650 years and the uptrend about 364 years. Forward projections made by mathematical curve fitting have no necessary connection to reality, particularly if turning points picked from empirical data are ignored.
Fig 4. RSS trends showing the millennial cycle temperature peak at about 2003 (14)
Figure 4 illustrates the working hypothesis that for this RSS time series the peak of the Millennial cycle, a very important “golden spike”, can be designated at 2003.
The RSS cooling trend in Fig. 4 was truncated at 2015.3 because it makes no sense to start or end the analysis of a time series in the middle of major ENSO events which create ephemeral deviations from the longer term trends. By the end of August 2016, the strong El Nino temperature anomaly had declined rapidly. The cooling trend is likely to be fully restored by the end of 2019.
From Figures 3 and 4 the period of the latest Millennial cycle is from 990 to 2003 – 1,013 years. This is remarkably consistent with the 1,024-year periodicity seen in the solar activity wavelet analysis in Fig. 4 from Steinhilber et al 2012
This is correlates very well with the solar activity peak (neutron minimum ) seen in the neutron data in Fig 10 at about 1991. Because of the thermal inertia of the oceans there is a 12 year delay between the solar driver peak and the climate RSS millennial temperature peak at 2003/4 +/-
To my mind the millennial peak is almost trivially obvious at about 2004.For projections to 2100 see my earlier response https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/30/what-are-in-fact-the-grounds-for-concern-about-global-warming/#comment-2730381
Dr. Page and Javier
Dr. Page I have analyzed the data you present in the first figure. Dr. Evans constructed a composite from several of the proxy records, but it very much looks like the figure you referenced. You may remember this.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ4_Cj5yap2exnoDw
I am also reasonably sure that Javier has seen this too. I think he offered a comment about volcanic activity.
Dr. Page here is an alternate record.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ5uxb_E_a37RAhEA
What captured my attention in this record are the twin peaks around 1000. This approximates what I presented in my comment.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ2cCesPO72ku39pQ
Here is my dilemma. The alternate record was something new to me in the past year. My recollection is that you offered a comment on this alternate record.
I don’t recall the article where this figure appeared but when I searched I could not locate the raw data. I would like to try an analysis of these data. This record also seems to be aligned with what Javier offered.
“Then we go to the Roman solar grand minimum dated at ~ 1300 BP (~ 650 AD).
That gives us 10,240 – 1,300 = 8,940 / 9 = 993 years. Close enough.
Now let’s move by that amount, 650 AD + 990 = 1,640 AD (Maunder Minimum).
1640 + 990 = 2,630 AD (the next grand minimum).
And now for the midpoints.
650 AD + 495 = 1,145 AD (the Medieval Warm period peak)
1640 AD + 495 = 2,135 AD, the Modern Warm period peak, give or take a couple decades at most.”
Look at the figure I offered. Javier’s identified dates of 650, 1640, 1145, 2135 and 2630 are all approximately there.
Dr. Page you know I tried to get the 1000-year cycle to match up with your date of 2003 and could not make it happen. Instead, that date seems to line up with a peak in the de Dvries cycle.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AkPliAI0REKhgZZ3GKt7jIbjx4iHhw
I nominate this for 2018 WUWT Best Explanatory Overview.
It is still early.
Itis a good summary I agree though.
Earlier in this thread there was some discussion about “anomalies” and normalisation. Monthly data – which I regard as the most suitable metric for numerical dissection of climate time series, are very strongly affected by the seasonal changes that are familiar to us all. They are obviously far removed from being “normally distributed”. A histogram (which I do not know how to display here) makes this very clear indeed.
However, the simple technique of subtracting the average month data over the period of interest from the individual values transforms the data into values that are (in general) very close to being normally distributed. I call these quantities “monthly differences”, to emphasise that they are not anomalies, since this word has pejorative implications.
The property of “normality” is regarded by many as a desirable statistical feature, particularly when computing inferential statistics.
Of course, no real-world property is actually normally distributed, but many approximate to it.
“Just saying!”
Where do you live? Where I do, we have, all year round, weather alternating between mild+humid and strong+dry (by strong I mean: cold in winter, hot in summer). The weatherman very exceptionally says we have “normal temperature for the season”, most of the time he says we have either colder or hotter. Meaning, “daily differences” are NOT normally distributed, but rather like a “M”. I guess this balances out on a month, so a normal distribution may appear, but it is an averaging artifact that mask the underlying bipolar data.
From the article:
Physics shows that adding carbon dioxide leads to warming under laboratory conditions. It is generally assumed that a doubling of CO2 should produce a direct forcing of 3.7 W/m2 [1], that translates to a warming of 1°C (by differentiating the Stefan-Boltzmann equation) to 1.2°C (by models taking into account latitude and season). But that is a maximum value valid only if total energy outflow is the same as radiative outflow. As there is also conduction, convection, and evaporation, the final warming without feedbacks is probably less. Then we have the problem of feedbacks that we don’t know and cannot properly measure. For some of the feedbacks, like cloud cover we don’t even know the sign of their contribution. And they are huge, a 1% change in albedo has a radiative effect of 3.4 W/m2 [2], almost equivalent to a full doubling of CO2.
This is the crux of it. This is the Physics, the evidence. One can quibble about the “probably less” and the “don’t even knows” but the evidence suggests that the unsettled science is: by how much, how quickly. The Coolists, the Solists, the Pausists, the non-Leftists and the Gravitists et al have argued themselves into corners and now are frankly just clutching at straws. They should go the way of the Dragon-slayers and Chem-trailists. It is a pity their repeatedly de-bunked zombie myths are still encouraged here.
It’s our CO2 and it’s not coming down any time soon.
Attempts to gather clearer, more accurate data and develop greater model sophistication are not a bad thing. That is not a plot. AGW may be tolerable, but I’d like to have a bit more information on that thanks.
Javier, albedo seems to be a major driver given those numbers, what is your best estimate for albedo change over the next 10 years?
I have no idea. NASA has a graph around from CERES and MODIS data that shows no appreciable albedo change between 2000 and 2012, but of course that was the pause.
I have not been able to find good bibliography and data on global albedo, but I have not searched extensively. I think it is an important gap in our knowledge.
Zaz,
CO2 is cycled such that it anthropogenic CO2 emissions completely ceased overnight, it would fall at least as fast as it is currently rising, probably more, something like around – 4 to -5 ppm/yr. That says CO2 at 410 ppm is a fertilizer is a limiting biological resource and the competition in the biosphere for it would consume it back to ~310 ppm within 50 years (at least 100 ppm in < 50 years).
Claims that current emissions of CO2 are completely unfounded based on sources and sinks fluxes seen by OCO-2 in its limited time so far.
Claims that current emissions of CO2 are “not coming down any time soon” are dead wrong. Dead wrong.
This is a very important point, joelobryan. At previous instances of CO₂ decrease, at glacial inceptions, CO₂ levels remained elevated for thousands of years because they were accompanied by a great dying at the biosphere as the world cooled, that released enough CO₂ to maintain levels while decreasing the biological sink. The oceanic sink is larger but very slow as the ocean cools very slowly. In the absence of cooling, the present pulse of CO₂ will be 80% wiped by the biosphere and oceans in a matter of a few decades if/when we stop emitting. CO₂ sinks depend on atmospheric CO₂ levels, not on our emissions.
First to make sure you understand what I wrote. I didn’t mean the rate of emission I meant atmospheric concentration. Doesn’t make much difference given we are just sharing opinions.
But ok if you want take my throw-away line and make deal out of it lets puts some numbers to it.
Currently 130ppm above pre-industrial and rising exponentially (I know human contributions may have paused for the last couple of years but the Keeling curve is accellerating – who knows what has been making up the difference).
If human emissions level off in 20 or 30 years that would take us up to about say 500-550 maybe topping out at 600ppm. That is a minimum. That assumes no additional CO2 from thawing storages of methane sources. But if I was a betting man I would add in another couple of hundred ppm from natural sources but caused by human activity. So somewhere between 700 and 800ppm. Falling at your 4-5ppm/yr that is at least 100-200 years to get anywhere back near pre-industrial.
But why 4-5? The ocean is warmer and CO2 saturated, where is it going to go? Into limestone? The biosphere? The world’s forests have become a source not a sink anymore. 1-2ppm/y is completely plausible so is a methane burp – then yes it will take a thousand years for this plume to subside.
So best case a couple of hundred years, worst a thousand plus. And I make all these numbers up out of my head.
But this dead-wrong? You think we like topping out at 675 instead? Great.
And if you are talking about emissions – when do you think the Keeling curve peaks?
I am talking about concentration not emission rates, but ok if you debate my throw-away line, when do you expect the Keeling curve to plateau, given it is still climbing exponentially?
the Keeling curve is NOT climbing exponentially. It wax and wanes according to season, meaning sources and sinks alternatively dominate (you never see that in an exponentially climbing curve).
Obviously the carbon cycle is controlled by life forms doing their best to suck it all out of the atmosphere. They find it hard at ~200ppm, and more and more easy as concentration rises. And the more those live forms eat CO2, the more numerous they are, so they eat it even more.
This means, the keeling curve can exhibit a plateau only by chance, and it will start deceasing as soon as emissions (not just humans’) stop to rise as much as sinks do.
My guess is that IF increasing atmospheric CO2 is indeed caused primarily by fossil fuel combustion, then atmospheric CO2 will peak at less than 1000ppm, a concentration that is beneficial for plants and poses no risk of dangerous global warming, wilder weather or other serious problems (unless one is worried about Invasion of the Killer Tomatoes).
CO2 is good, aerial fertilizer, and more atmospheric CO2 is better, up to 1000ppm or even 2000ppm or more, concentrations that Earth is highly unlikely to experience again.
CO2 concentrations have ALLEGEDLY increased from ~280ppm to ~400ppm since industrialization began due to fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, etc. That is from 0.0003 to 0.0004, but it is rarely expressed in these non-scary units.
CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/19/storing-carbon-dioxide-underground-by-turning-it-into-rock/comment-page-1/#comment-2347545
ON CO2 STARVATION
Summary
1. Atmospheric CO2 is not alarmingly high; in fact, it is dangerously low for the survival of terrestrial carbon-based life on Earth. Most plants evolved with about 4000ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, or about 10 times current CO2 concentrations.
2. In one of the next global Ice Ages, atmospheric CO2 will approach about 150ppm, a concentration at which terrestrial photosynthesis will slow and cease – and that will be the extinction event for much or all of the terrestrial carbon-based life on this planet.
3. More atmospheric CO2 is highly beneficial to all carbon-based life on Earth. Therefore, CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.
4. As a devoted fan of carbon-based life on this planet, I feel the duty to advocate on our behalf. I should point out that I am not prejudiced against non-carbon-based life forms. They might be very nice, but I do not know any of them well enough to form an opinion. 🙂
_________________________________________________________________________
The global cooling period from ~1940 to 1975 (during a time of increasing atmospheric CO2) demonstrates that climate sensitivity to increased atmospheric CO2 is near-zero – so close to zero as to be insignificant.
This and other evidence strongly supports the conclusion that there is NO global warming crisis, except in the minds of warmist propagandists.
There is overwhelming evidence that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans is not dangerously high – it is dangerously low, too low for the continued survival of life on Earth.
I have written about the vital issue of “CO2 starvation” since 2009 or earlier, and others including Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, have also written on this subject:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/30/life-on-earth-was-nearly-doomed-by-too-little-co2/#comment-2539859
Thoughts from 2009 – not all that bad for the time – a few corrections added later – details re C3 vs C4 and CAM plants, 180 ppm vs 200 ppm.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/#comment-79426
(Plant) Food for Thought
THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF HUMAN CO2 EMISSIONS ON THE SURVIVAL OF LIFE ON EARTH
Patrick Moore (2016)
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/moore-positive-impact-of-human-co2-emissions.pdf
Executive Summary
This study looks at the positive environmental effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a topic which has been well established in the scientific literature but which is far too often ignored in the current discussions about climate change policy. All life is carbon based and the primary source of this carbon is the CO2 in the global atmosphere. As recently as 18,000 years ago, at the height of the most recent major glaciation, CO2 dipped to its lowest level in recorded history at 180 ppm, low enough to stunt plant growth.
This is only 30 ppm above a level that would result in the death of plants due to CO2 starvation. It is calculated that if the decline in CO2 levels were to continue at the same rate as it has over the past 140 million years, life on Earth would begin to die as soon as two million years from now and would slowly perish almost entirely as carbon continued to be lost to the deep ocean sediments. The combustion of fossil fuels for energy to power human civilization has reversed the downward trend in CO2 and promises to bring it back to levels that are likely to foster a considerable increase in the growth rate and biomass of plants, including food crops and trees. Human emissions of CO2 have restored a balance to the global carbon cycle, thereby ensuring the long-term continuation of life on Earth.
[end of Exec Summary]
Low CO2 means no photosynthesis, and that means the end of all carbon-based life on Earth. During the last Ice Age, which ended only 10,000 years ago, atmospheric CO2 was so low that photosynthesis slowed to a crawl – it was close to an extinction event. In the next Ice Age, which is imminent, or the one after that, or the one after that, we could see the end of carbon-based life on Earth – due to CO2 starvation.
It gets a little more complicated – there are C3, C4 and CAM plants, but the issue is pretty much the same. Almost all plants including almost all food plants are C3 and will die out at 150 ppm CO2.
However, you warmists are not all bad: Every time you breath out, you make a little flower happy. 🙂
Regards, Allan
“The global cooling period from ~1940 to 1975 (during a time of increasing atmospheric CO2) demonstrates that climate sensitivity to increased atmospheric CO2 is near-zero – so close to zero as to be insignificant.”
?zoom=2
?zoom=2
No it doesn’t as you chose to examine aperiod when CO2 forcing hadn’t properly emerged….
The world was in the middle WW2 for one.
It was the years following it and really ~1960 for CO2 acceleration. However (see below), that is only half the story as -ve forcings need to be considered as well.
As such I have pointed out that there was a lot of atmospheric aerosol in the years up to around the 1970 as industrial activity accelerated after the war. That you do not accept observational evidence of that is not (of course) scientifically valid.
The period also covers the change from the +ve PDO/AMO combination into the -ve PDO phase. Which as we can see below gave a sig NV cooling which the weak (at that time) Anthro GHG forcing could not counter.
Look at the forcings, In 1940 there was ~ 0.6 W/m2 of +ve forcing. When aerosols thinned by ~ 1970 we see total anthro forcing really take off, such that today we have around 2 W/m2 of radiative forcing. Around 3x more.
In short, you chose exactly the most inapt period to calculate your TCS.
More falsehoods from ToneB.
Your claims re industrial aerosols causing the global cooling from ~1940 to ~1977 are refuted below, You already know this and are just repeating your false nonsense. You are not addressing my points, you are merely writing false propaganda for the imbeciles who might believe you.
Email correspondence with Dr. Douglas Hoyt (2009) and follow-up, refuting false aerosol claims:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/17/proof-that-the-recent-slowdown-is-statistically-significant-correcting-for-autocorrelation/comment-page-1/#comment-2720683
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/29/canada-yanks-some-climate-change-programs-from-budget/#comment-940093
“… adding CO2 to the atmosphere in great amounts …”
Pardon? Fifty years ago the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, in ratio
to other components, was 3:9997 … It is now 4:9996
Just sayin’
A 33% increase.
Yes, anyone can work that out. My comment was to put things into
perspective, unlike climate scientists who love using “parts per million”
so that they can cry out large numbers like 300 ! and 400 !
“The man in the street” is impressed by such cries, because he
hasn’t got a clue what “parts per million” means.
When someone (a merchant for instance) use %, instead of absolute numbers, you KNOW they are trying to F* you up.
What are, in fact, the grounds for concern about global warming?
That’s the $64K question, and I’ve never heard a reasonable answer. However, global cooling brings up lots of concerns, as seen by documented history.
The slow decline in atmospheric CO2 from ~2200ppm in Jurassic to 180 ppm at the end of the last ice age suggests a separate line of enquiry. Terrestrial plants commonly follow the C3 photosynthesis pathway but around the early Oligocene CO2 had fallen sufficiently far to apparently lead to CO2 ‘starvation’; and nature seems to have responded by evolving C4 photosynthesis, which thrives in conditions of low CO2, drought and low nutrients. Not perhaps proof of much I know without some rigorous experimentation – but an attractive thought nevertheless, showing how much better off the plant world was when CO2 was higher?
+1
Here is everything you need to know on clouds and climate..
https://www.scribd.com/document/370223733/The-Net-Effect-of-Clouds-on-the-Radiation-Balance-of-Earth-2
I wonder why no one ever tried to use real data (instead of models) to determine cloud forcing.
It is an interesting document, Leitwolf, however its conclusion appears to go opposite to the data showed at Climate4you, unless I got it wrong.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/TotalCloudCoverVersusGlobalSurfaceAirTemperature.gif
Total cloud cover vs. global surface air temperature.
Anyway I don’t think we have a clear definite answer on the issue of clouds.
The cloud cover- temperature relations and the millennial temperature peak and inversion point show up very well in Fig 11 (also from Climate4you originally) from https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html
Fig.11 Tropical cloud cover and global air temperature (29)
The global millennial temperature rising trend seen in Fig11 (29) from 1984 to the peak and trend inversion point in the Hadcrut3 data at 2003/4 is the inverse correlative of the Tropical Cloud Cover fall from 1984 to the Millennial trend change at 2002. The lags in these trends from the solar activity peak at 1991-Fig 10 – are 12 and 11 years respectively. These correlations suggest possible teleconnections between the GCR flux, clouds and global temperatures
Norman,
According to Climate4you, tropical cloud cover and global cloud cover show opposite trend and opposite correlation to temperature anomaly change.
Javier – the relationship between temperature and clouds is extremely complicated. Willis Eschenbach probably knows more about this than anyone else – see his many posts on the subject on WUWT eg https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/27/timing-is-everything-2/
I would just point out that your Fig from Climate4you plots global cloud cover v Temp – my Climate4you post plots tropical cloud cover against temperature. I think this shows where the action is. The significance
of my Fig 11 is mainly the break in the slopes at 2002/4 which marks the millennial temperature trend peak and trend inversion.
Well thanks, I have seem that too. However I am not here to “advocate” “my” data, they are what they are, for what so ever reason. If someone wants to check it for himself, I am all willing to share data and source code.
One thing got very obvious to me while running the analysis, that is to distinguish between causation and correlation. Just looking at the overall average, overcast skies are indeed much colder than any other condition. But that is due to OVC being more common a) during nights, b) in the winter and c) in colder regions. But sorting out these biases (and there some more I could not quantify) thinks look very different. On a given location, at a given time, at a given season, OVC skies are not at all colder than CLRs. And most strangely, the more you move to tropical regions, the more clouds seem to be (net) heating (26 reporting stations between 25°S and 25°N, all oceanic climates, and no, that chart is not a joke!)
http://i736.photobucket.com/albums/xx10/Oliver25/cloudsvstemp%20tropical.png.
If I look at the chart from “Climate4you” above there are two details which catch my eye. First total global cloud cover would reach from 63 to 70%. This figure is about twice as high as what I would guess. Also if you consider that clouds may reflect like 70% of solar radiation, that might result in a cloud albedo effect of ~0.67*0.7 = 0.47!? Obviously they included partial cloudiness or very thin clouds into that figure. Nothing like 70% of Earth is covered by opaque cloud layers.
The other thing is the correlation. If you prolonged the trend line linearly to 0 and 100% respectively, you might end up with 19.5°C (0%) and 13.1°C (100%). That difference of 6.4″C might be well in line with my unadjusted data.
Maybe, over time, there are simply more clouds because it turns colder, and less clouds because it is warmer? There are a lot of issues with analyzing these data right. All I can say is, that on a micro level things look the way I presented it, and sorting out these biases is mandatory.
That is next to the fundamental flaw in GH-model with regard to clouds.
“Temp – my Climate4you post plots tropical cloud cover against temperature. I think this shows where the action is. ”
No, it’s where an effect (not a cause) is.
That plot covers the “hiatus”,when there was a prolonged -ve PDO/ENSO regime.
IOW: cooler equatorial Pacific SST’s.
Hence less convection/clouds.
the take away :
“The alarmist projections clearly lack any rational basis and are agenda-driven.”
It is worth pointing out that geology is an historical science that relies heavily on inductive reasoning – arguing from known facts towards an hypothesis. For an example of this see Muller et al in Geology, 2013, where they explain the origins of the warm high CO2 world of the mid Cretaceous with its acidic ocean. Given that there is no readily observable source of heat, it seems most likely that greenhouse gases emitted by numerous mid ocean ridges provided the warmth (aided by feedback from water vapour a world with very high sea level and hence more area from which to lose CO2 and evaporate H2O. If someone has a better idea, I’d love to hear it.
Colin,
For a scientist I find you very fond of the “argumentum ad ignorantiam,” since we can’t think of anything else then it must be so.
High past CO₂ levels might not be very related to past temperatures. While Earth’s CO₂ has been on a very long declining trend, past temperatures have been cyclical. Every ~ 150 million years the Earth goes through a cooler period, and we are now in one of them. Other hypotheses have been proposed. In 2003 Nir Shaviv proposed the crossing of the galactic spiral arms by the solar system, and in 2004 de la Fuente Marcos showed a strong correlation between start formation rate within 1.5 kpc of the solar system, and not only past ice ages, but also their severity.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1384107604000806
Have you considered the possibility that you might have it wrong and temperatures drive CO₂ changes and not the opposite?
I find it incredible to believe that there is so much ignorance about a basic truth
namely
a) that there are giga tons of bicarbonates dissolved in the oceans
b) Surely anyone here knows that the first smoke from a kettle when heated is the CO2 going out?
HCO3- + heat = > CO2 (g) + OH- (more CO2 in the atmosphere)
c) the opposite is also true:
CO2 + 2H2O + cold = > H3O+ + HCO3-
[cold dissolves the CO2]
Andy,
Not with the several mines that colleagues and I found and developed. You do the geological estimation of proven reserve first, then examine the economics to deduce where to put the cutoff boundaries to the payable ore, then you fit it into a mine design that minimises cartage of waste. Frequently, you iterate a few times to optimise. But you do not decide to produce if the geological estimate is too low, with the hope that you will find more as you go.
This scenario is for hard rock mineral mines. Oilies are a different and easier case that I was not mentioning. I should have said so. Geoff.
Exemplary Javier. Thank you
So, I couldn’t resist playing with Javier’s graph again [he describes how he derived it in his comment dated January 30, 2018 at 6:06 am ]:
It seems that Nick S., zazove, and I have some disagreement about describing this graph as a “lockstep” relationship.
I seem to be tuned into the various gaps between the red and blue plots on that graph, over the span of the 800,000 years. I also seem to be tuned into the appearance of locations all along this plot where the crests of the blue and red were out of phase (i.e., opposite).
Just for a visual exercise, I marked all prominent locations along that 800,000-year time line where I could see space between the red and blue, to observe the SIZE of those spaces. I marked these spaces roughly as vertical line segments, the length of the distance between the red-blue plots at the various locations. These vertical line segments represent differences, no matter if the plots are in or out of phase at crests — the aim was to see the SIZE of the spaces, no matter what the crest-phase relationship.
To my eye, the largest space (indicated by an an encircling ellipse there) between the red-blue plots appears roughly around the 560K location along the time line:
Now look at present day, at zero on the time line, and look at the SIZE of THAT vertical segment (circled in red too). Compare this to the largest other such segment during the entire 800,000-year span. The present day location shows a space that is MORE than DOUBLE the size of this space at any other location on the entire timeline — the place where Javier rightly noted, “Discrepancy”.
So, yes, even the different sized vertical line segments show a cyclic patter over the 800,000-year span, … UNTIL we get to present day, which is unlike anything in the past. But what is remarkable is NOT the level of CO2, but the DIFFERENCE between the level of CO2 COMPARED to the temperature. That DIFFERENCE is unprecedented. The temperature is at an unprecedented LOW level IN RELATION TO the level of CO2. Or the level of the CO2 is at an unprecedented HIGH level, IN RELATION TO the temperature.
Nowhere else in 800,000 years has temperature been this LOW in RELATION to CO2, which is the same as saying that “nowhere else in 800,000 years has CO2 been this high IN RELATION TO temperature.” The RELATIONSHIP is what is unprecedented, which makes me ask questions like, “Do ice cores measure what we think they measure?”
I have more, but I want to see whether this posts first, because yesterday, my post would not take, even after I tried about dozen times.
[Blame WordPress’s over-protective IP Address Blacklist filter. It catches a dozen or so, otherwise worthy, comments each day. -mod]
Thanks, mods., I am honored that I am worthy of a black-list dumpster dive to rescue a WordPress-filter trashed comment.
My point was to remember that we are looking at 800 thousand years, compressed VISUALLY into a space of a computer screen, which is the effect of standing back so far that even distinct small patterns seem to disappear into the longer-term patterns. This disappearance into the longer view does NOT erase the significant departures, however. It merely DISGUISES them in such a way that we can overgeneralize and possibly miss them, to make a wrongheaded assessment of a causal relationship.
It’s like looking at the night sky and thinking that we see an indication of how far apart the different shiny dots are. Some of the dots are not even stars, and two sets of dots that look similarly spaced in our visual field are actually quite differently spaced in their TRUE measures.
In other words, “lockstep” can be a long-term illusion that disguises the truth. Sometimes, visual perspective can compromise logic.
(Rescued this comment from the trash bin, another Black-list check attack) MOD
Robert
I explained that there is a causal relationship:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/30/what-are-in-fact-the-grounds-for-concern-about-global-warming/#comment-2731256
In fact, I think the fact that you live depends on it.
Do you or anyone want to challenge me on that?
Let’s see whether this comment goes into the spam dumpster, where my longer posts seem to have been ending up lately [maybe I smell bad, or my last name sounds too funny spoken aloud] Anyhow, here goes:
I consider climate-change alarmists (formerly known as global-warming alarmists) particularly adept at making mountains out of mole hills. The classic illustration is the display of global-temperature anomalies on a graph where the y-axis is scaled at seemingly large intervals for seemingly small amounts of change in temperature. Tenths of a degree are treated visually as large quantities on the vertical y-axis, while the horizontal x-axis shows a seemingly disproportionate treatment of time, by compressing many years into the same screen-length that would be dedicated to, say, a tenth of a degree on the other axis perpendicular to it.
Alarmists, in other words, make mountains out of temperature-change mole hills, but when it comes to time, they make molehills out of mountains. I adopted the latter point of view only recently, after continuing to play with Javier’s graph of 800,000 years of temperature-and-CO2 change.
Think about how we visualize what we conceptualize. We have to accomplish this within a certain restricted range of our visual field. We draw a line that appears barely half the size of a 1,920-pixel-wide computer screen — that’s a line about nine inches long, centered in the screen. Nine inches, thus, is supposed to visually represent our conception of 800,000 years !
That’s a lot of time-compression that I think can “smash out” a lot of significant detail from our view.
I’m no statistical expert by any means. In fact, I’m as untrained in this area as they come. But, as a very visual person with just enough smarts to get the basic idea of a graph, I think I can offer a visual-logic point of view on this curious way humans can smash 800,000 years into a comfortable span of 9 inches, in order to be able to read it.
So, I looked at Javier’s graph again, and I noted what I considered a very interesting place between about 450K and 490K before present time. That’s a span of about 40, 000 years, compressed into a tiny interval on the digital drawing canvas. Although small and hard to see, interesting things seem to be going on there, namely out-of-phase crests between the red and blue plots. That’s 40,000 years of out-of-phase relationship between CO2 and temperature. Next, I looked even closer at what I roughly gauged as a 2,600-year interval within that 40,000-year interval.
In other words, I tried to decompress the horizontal time line in stages to make it visually longer, retaining the same relationship between temperature and CO2 during that tiny span. What I ended up visualizing was a span of 16 intervals of roughly 160 years. That’s about 16 historical instrumental spans of human civilization, where a steady rise in CO2 mirrored a steady fall in temperature. Think about that: sixteen spans of our small instrumental history, where CO2 and temperature where out-of-phase, … opposite of what alarmists insist is happening on the longer time scale right now.
Here’s the visual of my time-line-decompression:
I can certainly concede a ‘lockstep” relationship over the longer view. But I was hesitant to do this at first, for fear of thinking it would give an intellectual cue to be done with it. The “lockstep” relationship over the longer view is NOT a done deal.
As far as making judgments about causation, we cannot know the relationship between the two plots beyond the present or even into the very near future. On the other hand, if the distant past is any rough indication of the distant future, then my eye sees that we might be in for a bit more warming, followed by drastic cooling, where CO2, if it has any warming effect at all, has done all it can ever do. This, of course, assumes that ice cores tell us what experts think they do.
I frankly am NOT convinced that CO2 does squat. It constitutes a true molehill, NOT a manufactured mountain, as alarmists would have us believe.
Comments are not posting.
[Seems to be the IP Address Blacklist filter. IP domains can get blacklisted for a huge host of reasons…most of which have precisely nothing to do with you, the user. We go dumpster diving several times a day to find and rescue comments that shouldn’t have been trashed. -mod]
Do different people have different word limits?
Javier
“And in science assumptions are very dangerous, because they are not subjected to the scientific method.”
They are a fundamental part of the method. Assumptions come first and when you present your results they are limited to the scope of the assumptions. If you try and extrapolate beyond them then that’s what’s dangerous.
Assumptions in themselves are just necessary starting conditions.
I get your point though.
With regards to climate research a set of assumptions was used to be able to homogenise and reduce the temperature uncertainty. Any research using this data also passes into it the assumptions of the data.
The problem is when this data is applied to the real world without conforming to safety and ethical standards. Such safety and ethical standards require us to minimise assumptions and quantify repeatable uncertainty.
Ever wonder why the IPCC document is called Summary For Policymakers? That’s the ethical dilemma.
It should be Summary For Auditors. Or Summary For Verification.
I’ve always thought that we should pay more attention to the location of tree lines (as you do here) – which are a proxy for local climate – and less attention to the width of tree rings – which can respond to many factors. You showed data for the Swiss Alps during the HCO. It is my understanding that the northern tree line during the HCO was much further north – around the current shore line of the Arctic Ocean.
I also remember reading McIntyre’s posts on Yamal and being surprised to learn that some of those records were derived from fossil wood from the MWP collected from north of the current tree line! They processed TRW from that wood and reported temperatures colder than “today” (with endpoints around 1980 or 1990). If you are collecting wood dating to the MWP from north of the current tree line, then the MWP must be warmer than “today”. HOWEVER, we don’t know what climate determines the location of today’s tree line. Is it the average temperature over the last 10 years, the last 30 years, or the last 100 years. As it warms, how long does it take for the tree line to move north or to a higher elevation? (I suspect there is hystersis: Trees might be killed by a few cold years in a row, but require a century to return when it is warmer because that are part of an ecosystem that takes a long time to stabilize.)
I have presented treeline data on the Swiss Alps, and bibliography on the Pyrenees, and British Columbia mountains, but there is obviously a lot more data on this issue.
I am also aware of the data on the Northern limit of the treeline. However the latitudinal shift in the treeline is affected by other factors. The insolation at high latitudes is now quite different, and there may have been changes in precipitation and ecology complicating the interpretation.
The treeline changes in altitude however do not admit any other interpretation. The old treeline is only a few hundreds of meters above where trees of the same species are growing presently, and receives the same insolation, precipitation, and has the same type of soil than the new. The only thing that can prevent the treeline from rising to its former height is temperature. As Steve Keohane says above, it is a dead give-away. It demonstrates the big lie behind the climate history rewriting that Marcott, Mann, et al., are attempting.
“The only thing that can prevent the treeline from rising to its former height is temperature.”
And lack of time. As Frank says, the treeline won’t advance instantly. Trees grow very slowly there, and there may be setbacks.
I expected better, Nick. Trees grow slowly in SIZE, not in AGE. Or do you think trees don’t get a tree ring every year at the tree line?
You can cling to your beliefs, but the evidence is clear. Our climate is within Holocene variability. We can discuss how unusual it is for the past 5000 years, but it is not unusual for the past 10,000 years. CO₂ levels, however, are unusual for hundreds of thousands of years, probably millions.
The only possible conclusion is that the response of temperatures to CO₂ must necessarily be weak. More so if part of the warming is natural.
Nick Stokes January 31, 2018 at 3:50 pm: “As Frank says, the treeline won’t advance instantly. Trees grow very slowly there, and there may be setbacks.”
WR: As soon as temperature rises, seeds germinate and trees will grow. Instantaneously. And small trees are trees as well.
@Wim Röst
You lose your time with Nick. If he cannot pop up some absurd explanations as to why he must discard an inconvenient fact, he will just ignore your mentioning it. His comments deserve no more than shrugs.
Wim Röst: I don’t know how long it takes tree lines to advance in response to warmer climate. Thermometers presumably show that some tree lines are warmer now that 50 years ago. If the process were as fast as you describe, I suspect that the alarmists would be showering us with pictures of young trees growing where no old trees exist. It is possible that we need to think of the tree line as an ecosystem that requires decades of gradual evolution before a significant number of trees will grow.
What we really need, however, is reliable information about this subject, not speculation.
Recognizing a need for more reliable information, I did a little research. It’s a very complicated subject. The tree line is advancing in some places, but not others.
https://academic.oup.com/aob/article/90/4/537/185822
Abstract. The possible effects of climate change on the advance of the tree line are considered. As temperature, elevated CO2 and nitrogen deposition co‐vary, it is impossible to disentangle their impacts without performing experiments. However, it does seem very unlikely that photosynthesis per se and, by implication, factors that directly influence photosynthesis, such as elevated CO2, will be as important as those factors which influence the capacity of the tree to use the products of photosynthesis, such as temperature. Moreover, temperature limits growth more severely than it limits photosynthesis over the temperature range 5–20 °C. If it is assumed that growth and reproduction are controlled by temperature, a rapid advance of the tree line would be predicted. Indeed, some authors have provided photographic evidence and remotely sensed data that suggest this is, in fact, occurring. In regions inhabited by grazing animals, the advance of the tree line will be curtailed, although growth of trees below the tree line will of course increase substantially.
IS GROWTH ALREADY INCREASING AND IS THE TREE LINE ADVANCING?
Hustich (1958) summarized much evidence for an advance in the pine tree line in northern Europe, remarking that a period of warm summers encouraged seeding and regeneration north of the tree line in the 1920s and 1930s. Later, Kullman (1993) reviewed the Scandinavian literature on the location of the tree line in the 20th century, using mainly photographic evidence. Before 1930, summer temperatures were rather low and the tree line was in retreat. Summers between 1933 and 1939 were warmer than average, and Betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa regenerated at higher elevations. Kullman (2001, 2002) recently reported a new active phase of tree limit advance with the mild winters of the 1990s. In the Swedish Scandes mountains, several species have advanced very rapidly since the 1950s: Betula pubescens, Piceaabies, Pinus sylvestris, Sorbus aucuparia and Salix spp. Moreover, the non‐native Acer platanoides has become established just below the tree line, suggesting that floristic composition, as well as position, will change. However, in the Alps the tree line is said to behave in a ‘conservative’ way. Petersson (1998) reported changes in elevation of less than 100 m over palaeoperiods differing by 2–3 °C. High resolution palynological analysis at the tree line in the Cairngorms of Scotland showed a similar sluggishness over the last 1000 years (McConnell, 1996), though photographic evidence over the last 20 years suggested that trees are carrying more foliage than previously (Fig. 5). The unresponsiveness of the tree line to environmental change in the Alps and in Scotland, compared with Sweden, may reflect an increasing intensity of human activities: grazing of livestock, fire and, more recently, the increase in deer populations due to the elimination of most of their natural predators. A further consideration which may slow down the responsiveness of the tree line to climate change is the need for relatively high summer temperatures for successful reproduction. This aspect has been less studied than growth or gas exchange, but it has often been observed that the production of viable seeds at high elevation fails, except in exceptionally warm years (Tranquillini, 1979; Millar and Cummins, 1982; Barclay and Crawford, 1984).
Frank,
I see you are interested on this. the article that you need to read is:
Harsch, M. A., Hulme, P. E., McGlone, M. S., & Duncan, R. P. (2009). Are treelines advancing? A global meta‐analysis of treeline response to climate warming. Ecology letters, 12(10), 1040-1049.
http://www.geooek.uni-bayreuth.de/geooek/bsc/de/lehre/html/85896/Harsch_et_al_2009_treeline_climatechange.pdf
One of the most comprehensive looks at this question I’ve seen to date. Great work as always Javier.
This is a little late in the day(s), but anyway, Matt Ridley has a nice graph of the Eemian temperature and CO2 levels from the Vostok core. The link to it is at “Here” in this paragraph from his blog:
“Well, not so fast. Inconveniently, the correlation implies causation the wrong way round: at the end of an interglacial, such as the Eemian period, over 100,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels remain high for many thousands of years while temperature fell steadily. Eventually CO2 followed temperature downward. Here is a chart showing that. If carbon dioxide was a powerful cause, it would not show such a pattern. The world could not cool down while CO2 remained high.”
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/explaining-ice-ages/
Here’s the graph Don B referred to on Feb 1 2018 10:58AM:
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/eemian-Vostok-Co2.png
… another take on it from here: http://euanmearns.com/the-vostok-ice-core-and-the-14000-year-co2-time-lag/
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/vostok_T_CO2.png
Robert
Like I said
CO2 in the atmosphere follows the heat because of the chemistry of the oceans.