In the August issue of Physics Today, climate scientists Toby Ault and Scott St. George share a pair of startling research findings. Between roughly 800 and 1500 CE, the American West suffered a succession of decades-long droughts, much longer than anything we’ve endured in modern history. And statistical models suggest that, as the climate warms, such megadroughts are increasingly likely to return.
Ring-width analyses provide the most complete set of data on past moisture levels. But researchers have other ways of determining those conditions. Here are four of them:
- Underwater tree stumps
- Archaeological artifacts
- Sand-dune cores
- Pollen-grain deposits
Full story here
h/t to WUWT reader “Theo”
We already knew the past history of droughts – ask the Anasazi . The American Southwest has been in a drought condition of one sort or another for a long long time, and it repeatedly gets decades of really dry weather. Nice to know that they acknowledge that this is not new.
There is also evidence of Hyper-El Ninos in South America in the per-Colombian period. Entire cities that depended on fishing were abandoned because there were no fish in the warmer waters. In addition the warmer moister air hit the Andes which wrung out the excess moisture to produce massive flooding. Musta been CO2 though, Mann can’t be wrong.
Isn’t there grass colony organisms that are tens of millennia old? Would there be a way to use those to extend this analysis back even further with genetic analysis or carbon dating? What about sediment layers? More rain = more sediment. Have they tried taking cores from the Salton Sea bottom, maybe deeper cores from San Francisco bay?
This research, which was reported earlier in 2018 in the Journal of Climate, is attempting to turn the tables on honest science by claiming that results from fraudulent GCMs should really be regarded as data which should be used to make decisions about the future. The authors also discount and devalue historical data because it represents only one state (even though the honest/truthful state) and models are capable of cranking out way more outcomes to consider than the historical record. The senior author of this so-called research, Ault, I think has played too many video games.
CE? Are these people total pagans? WTV?
So we had mega droughts pre CO2 blaming.
Could we make an argument that the Climate changes with or without CO2?
CO2 follows climate changes. It doesn’t cause them.
The magical tree rings again.
The droughts indicated in blue and yellow (through eastern Nevada and Utah) correspond to the Medieval Warm Period, while the wider drought area in red corresponds to the cooling near the end of the Medieval Warm Period near the end of the 13th century. So which was worse for the people living in the American west during those times–the warming in the 10th through 12th centuries, or the cooling during the late 13th century? If the latter, we could infer that a cooling climate causes worse droughts in this area than a warming climate.
In general, cooler is indeed drier.