[Interesting conclusion which I’ve bolded for emphasis. Perhaps the beginning of the climb down~cr]
Ice core samples reveal significant smoke aerosols in the pre-industrial Southern Hemisphere
HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
Centuries-old smoke particles preserved in the ice reveal a fiery past in the Southern Hemisphere and shed new light on the future impacts of global climate change, according to new research published in Science Advances.
“Up till now, the magnitude of past fire activity, and thus the amount of smoke in the preindustrial atmosphere, has not been well characterized,” said Pengfei Liu, a former graduate student and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and first author of the paper. “These results have importance for understanding the evolution of climate change from the 1750s until today, and for predicting future climate.”
One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to predicting the future impacts of climate change is how fast surface temperatures will rise in response to increases in greenhouse gases. Predicting these temperatures is complicated since it involves the calculation of competing warming and cooling effects in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the planet’s surface while aerosol particles in the atmosphere from volcanoes, fires and other combustion cool the planet by blocking sunlight or seeding cloud cover. Understanding how sensitive surface temperature is to each of these effects and how they interact is critical to predicting the future impact of climate change.
Many of today’s climate models rely on past levels of greenhouse gasses and aerosols to validate their predictions for the future. But there’s a problem: While pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gasses are well documented, the amount of smoke aerosols in the preindustrial atmosphere is not.
To model smoke in the pre-industrial Southern Hemisphere, the research team looked to Antarctica, where the ice trapped smoke particles emitted from fires in Australia, Africa and South America. Ice core scientists and co-authors of the study, Joseph McConnell and Nathan Chellman from the Desert Research Institute in Nevada, measured soot, a key component of smoke, deposited in an array of 14 ice cores from across the continent, many provided by international collaborators.
“Soot deposited in glacier ice directly reflects past atmospheric concentrations so well-dated ice cores provide the most reliable long-term records,” said McConnell.
What they found was unexpected.
“While most studies have assumed less fire took place in the preindustrial era, the ice cores suggested a much fierier past, at least in the Southern Hemisphere,” said Loretta Mickley, Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry-Climate Interactions at SEAS and senior author of the paper.
To account for these levels of smoke, the researchers ran computer simulations that account for both wildfires and the burning practices of indigenous people.
“The computer simulations of fire show that the atmosphere of the Southern Hemisphere could have been very smoky in the century before the Industrial Revolution. Soot concentrations in the atmosphere were up to four times greater than previous studies suggested. Most of this was caused by widespread and regular burning practiced by indigenous peoples in the pre-colonial period,” said Jed Kaplan, Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong and co-author of the study.
This result agrees with the ice core records that also show that soot was abundant before the start of the industrial era and has remained relatively constant through the 20th century. The modelling suggests that as land use changes decreased fire activity, emissions from industry increased.
What does this finding mean for future surface temperatures?
By underestimating the cooling effect of smoke particles in the pre-industrial world, climate models might have over-estimated the warming effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in order to account for the observed increases in surface temperatures.
“Climate scientists have known that the most recent generation of climate models have been over-estimating surface temperature sensitivity to greenhouse gasses, but we haven’t known why or by how much,” said Liu. “This research offers a possible explanation.”
“Clearly the world is warming but the key question is how fast will it warm as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. This research allows us to refine our predictions moving forward,” said Mickley.
###
The research was co-authored by Yang Li, Monica Arienzo, John Kodros, Jeffrey Pierce, Michael Sigl, Johannes Freitag, Robert Mulvaney and Mark Curran.
It was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Geosciences Directorate under grants AGS-1702814 and 1702830, with additional support from 0538416, 0538427, and 0839093.
Take that, Warmists!
Let’s face it, Climate Models are Junk.
Here is an alternative view:
Climate Science Destroyed In 8 Minutes
Works Referenced:
Zhu, J., Poulsen, C.J. and Otto-Bliesner, B.L., 2020. High climate sensitivity in CMIP6 model not supported by paleoclimate. Nature Climate Change, 10(5), pp.378-379.
Zhu, J., Otto‐Bliesner, B.L., Brady, E.C., Poulsen, C.J., Tierney, J.E., Lofverstrom, M. and DiNezio, P., 2021. Assessment of equilibrium climate sensitivity of the Community Earth System Model version 2 through simulation of the Last Glacial Maximum. Geophysical Research Letters, 48(3), p.e2020GL091220.
Ma, H.Y., Siongco, A.C., Klein, S.A., Xie, S., Karspeck, A.R., Raeder, K., Anderson, J.L., Lee, J., Kirtman, B.P., Merryfield, W.J. and Murakami, H., 2020. On the correspondence between seasonal forecast biases and long-term climate biases in sea surface temperature. Journal of Climate, 34(1), pp.427-446.
Viglione, G., 2020. Ozone-depleting gases might have driven extreme Arctic warming. Nature. 20 January 2020
Tokarska, K.B., Arora, V.K., Gillett, N.P., Lehner, F., Rogelj, J., Schleussner, C.F., Séférian, R. and Knutti, R., 2020. Uncertainty in carbon budget estimates due to internal climate variability. Environmental Research Letters, 15(10), p.104064.
Huguenin, M.F., Fischer, E.M., Kotlarski, S., Scherrer, S.C., Schwierz, C. and Knutti, R., 2020. Lack of change in the projected frequency and persistence of atmospheric circulation types over Central Europe. Geophysical Research Letters, 47(9), p.e2019GL086132.
Modak, A. and Mauritsen, T., The 2000‐2012 global warming hiatus more likely with a low climate sensitivity. Geophysical Research Letters, p.e2020GL091779.
Zhang, P., Ren, G., Qin, Y., Zhai, Y., Zhai, T., Tysa, S.K., Xue, X., Yang, G. and Sun, X., 2021. Urbanization Effects on Estimates of Global Trends in Mean and Extreme Air Temperature. Journal of Climate, 34(5), pp.1923-1945.
Starr, A., Hall, I.R., Barker, S., Rackow, T., Zhang, X., Hemming, S.R., van der Lubbe, H.J.L., Knorr, G., Berke, M.A., Bigg, G.R. and Cartagena-Sierra, A., 2021. Antarctic icebergs reorganize ocean circulation during Pleistocene glacials. Nature, 589(7841), pp.236-241.
Miles, M.W., Andresen, C.S. and Dylmer, C.V., 2020. Evidence for extreme export of Arctic sea ice leading the abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age. Science advances, 6(38), p.eaba4320.
Snow chaos in Europe caused by melting sea-ice in the Arctic 13 April 2021 Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate
Christodoulakis, J., Varotsos, C.A., Mavromichalaki, H., Efstathiou, M.N. and Gerontidou, M., 2019. On the link between atmospheric cloud parameters and cosmic rays. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 189, pp.98-106.
Singh, A.K. and Bhargawa, A., 2020. Delineation of possible influence of solar variability and galactic cosmic rays on terrestrial climate parameters. Advances in Space Research, 65(7), pp.1831-1842.
Shao, X.M., Ho, C., Bowers, G., Blaine, W. and Dingus, B., 2020. Lightning Interferometry Uncertainty, Beam Steering Interferometry, and Evidence of Lightning Being Ignited by a Cosmic Ray Shower. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 125(19), p.e2019JD032273.
Zhang, L., Tinsley, B. and Zhou, L., 2020. Low latitude lightning activity responses to cosmic ray Forbush decreases. Geophysical Research Letters, 47(4), p.e2020GL087024.
Lavigne, T., Liu, C., Deierling, W. and Mach, D., 2017. Relationship between the global electric circuit and electrified cloud parameters at diurnal, seasonal, and interannual timescales. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 122(16), pp.8525-8542.
Zhou, L., Tinsley, B., Wang, L. and Burns, G., 2018. The zonal-mean and regional tropospheric pressure responses to changes in ionospheric potential. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 171, pp.111-118.
Lee, Y.S., Kim, K.C., Kwak, Y.S. and Kim, Y., 2019. High-latitude mesospheric intense turbulence associated with high-speed solar wind streams. Astrophysics and Space Science, 364(11), pp.1-10.
Harrison, R.G. and Lockwood, M., 2020. Rapid indirect solar responses observed in the lower atmosphere. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 476(2241), p.20200164.
Kikuchi, T., Chum, J., Tomizawa, I., Hashimoto, K.K., Hosokawa, K., Ebihara, Y., Hozumi, K. and Supnithi, P., 2021. Penetration of the electric fields of the geomagnetic sudden commencement over the globe as observed with the HF Doppler sounders and magnetometers. Earth, Planets and Space, 73(1), pp.1-13.
Schwartz, S.J., Kucharek, H., Farrugia, C.J., Trattner, K., Gingell, I., Ergun, R.E., Strangeway, R. and Gershman, D., 2021. Energy Conversion Within Current Sheets in the Earth’s Quasi‐Parallel Magnetosheath. Geophysical Research Letters, 48(4), p.e2020GL091859.
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See also Publications – Space Weather News
How did you get away with so many links? I thought that two was the limit.
Clyde,
It turns out that 3 is the limit. When I tried 4 my comment went for approval, so I simply loaded all of the rest in one go.
(When a comment with at least 4 links are in it causes it to stay in the moderator bin requiring approval)
SUNMOD
Thanks for approving.
Excellent video!
Thanks for the link.
The technical term is “Bunk.”
“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates
Don’t think that for example; saying crap smells bad, is slander when it’s true.
CAGW is bunk to the max.
Ian,
It is not possible to slander an inanimate process.
Climate Models don’t have feelings.
I hate that corporate crapola jingoism stuff like “moving forward”
#
” climate models might have over-estimated the warming effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses”
So the
scienceséance isn’t settled then; Well, who’d have thunk !!To move forward, and to account for findings, a model was developed to move forward to account for findings.
The model must be tuned to “circle back” after moving forward.
Science from youngsters who have not learned how to spell ‘gases’.
More seriously, there is too much loose talk about what fire management was used by indigines like Australian aborigines. Reflect that, apart from rock art, there was no record carried from generation to generation other than verbally among groups that were probably ignorant of much that happened more than a hundred km or so away perhaps more in the central desert. What is taken as native wisdom is almost always an interpretation or an invention, mostly by academic researchers in anthropology. Why would the natives show researchers more than practices that seemed to work at the time? How can we know what they knew of fire management 500, 1,000 or more years before? Geoff S
Gassse emissssions are becoming ever more important as evidenced by the number of sesss usssed.
Sssounds like ssssnakesss.
Wow! Who knew Voldemort was behind the CAGW scam?
Virtually nothing of what we know about Abos comes from tribal mythology as you claim, but from science. Lacking written languages, the Abos could not write down what they did, only clumsily attempt to describe it graphically on rock etchings, or on animal skins that of course do not survive the centuries.
First person narratives from early European contact clearly describe the typical lifestyles of the aborigines in the Americas. Including many written by sympathetic Catholic priests who were trying to protect the Abos.
Plus every time a forest or prairie is burned off, it leaves a visible black residue in ash and carbonized material easily observed, identified, and chemically analyzed by archaeologists from their diggings.
And now we have ice core data to prove it conclusively.
To your point, there are redwoods (hundreds of years old) and oak tree forests in California that were agriculturally managed, including with fire, that show evidence of such practices spanning thousands of year.
This has always fascinated me. Here’s a link to a document concerning tribal warfare, some of which involves disputes over acorn growing grounds.
https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/anthpubs/ucb/proof/pdfs/arf023-003.pdf
The great captain Cook, as he sailed the east coast of Australia in 1770 saw so much smoke in the coastal hinterland, that he actually mentioned in his log that there must be a great deal of fire to cause it.
Tierra del Fuego was named for the fires burned by the indigenous peoples.
Yes, they were not small-scale native signal fires, as observed in other voyages by other explorers.
Seems the Portuguese referred to southern Africa as “Terra dos Fumos” (spelling ?) – from a paper by Winston Trollope, a South African veldt researcher
Perfect fit with my constantly asserted theory..
Quote“Most of this was caused by widespread and regular burning practiced by indigenous peoples in the pre-colonial period,” said Jed Kaplan”
Basically = the creation of deserts. Very easy to do on highly weathered soils.
We call that place now ‘Australia’
For folks obsessed with ‘temperture’ and not ‘energy’, yes the temperuture did rise and thus pull the world out of the Little Ice Age.
This in turn = something itself entirely man-made – by King Henry 8 with his destruction of the UK forest and most of Northern Europe feeling obliged to do the same- They needed charcoal to make cannons and ammo in order to return Henry’s fire
For places above 45 degs latitude that makes it cold. For places below 45 degrees, things warm up
What I don’t get is why (black) soot particles don’t have a heating effect on the atmosphere. Surely they absorb huge amounts of Solar Radiation up high in the sky and must therefore heat the atmosphere.
yet seemingly they create a cooling effect down on the earth surface
C’mon people, wake up and smell the coffee.
THAT is a perfect refutation of the entire Green House Gas Effect
Soot absorbs and re-emits energy above most of the atmosphere and before it hits the ground. So it’s reducing the input to the whole system rather than just slowing down, alittle, the leftover energy given off the Earth and clouds.
OMG, a perspective ignored by lots of people. We should, in particular the car manufacturers, be aware of this new discovery. Recently, I also find Nissan Sylphy somewhat discharges a lage amount of exhuasts…..
Nissan Syphilis?
“climate models might have over-estimated the warming effect of carbon dioxide”
That’s just a fact, there’s no might about it.
Let’s face it; they have outright LIED about it, particularly wrt increased CO2, since the effect diminishes.
“…Most of this was caused by widespread and regular burning practiced by indigenous peoples in the pre-colonial period,” said Jed Kaplan, Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong and co-author of the study.
Or maybe fires started by lightning that burnt huge tracts of forest and plains where the population density was about 1 person per 10 sq. mile was a big factor.
Indeed, why put out a fire?
Some of the trees will not seed properly until they have been burned. Many species of beetle only lay their eggs in newly burned wood. It takes a LONG time for that kind of adaptation to take place.
If one of your food staples is grubs in burned wood – the last thing you would do is reduce the amount of burned wood.
Pre-modern people on every continent burned landscapes to: improve forage (esp. grasses) for game, improve hunting efficacy (by creating clearings), drive, game, enhance edible plants, encourage useful fibers (canes, wands, shafts), reduce fire hazards, repel predators, create firewood, etc.
Firewood was THE energy source for cooking, heating, lighting and safety for at least the last million years and probably longer. Without saws the best way to create firewood is to torch green trees, burn the leaves or needles off, and after the deceased tree dries out, knock the dry limbs off with a rock tied to a stick.
Campgrounds today are stripped of dead, downed wood in 10 years or less. Imagine what happened to the easy firewood after a few millennia of residency. Firewood had to be made.
Fires were maintained 24/7/365. Fires were sacred, not to be allowed to go out under pain of sin or taboo. That took a constant supply of firewood. The demand was universal and transcontinental.
Grubs! Trés illettré!
There’s another factor that is rarely considered.
wildfires are a threat to humans and food sources. Consider what it would be like to live in an extremely fire-prone environment with no fire trucks, no safe areas and no way of getting out of danger other than on your own feet. Consider also that a mega-fire of the kind we see today would burn out a tribe’s entire hunting area, reducing food to nearly zero.
The only tool that they had to reduce severe fire is mild fire and patchwork fire. The obvious solution to the threat of fire was to burn early in the season when fires would not travel and would self-extinguish overnight.
No mythology or appeals to “culture” are required. Only common sense.
This is before we even start to consider the difficulty of travelling and hunting through thick scrub or waist-high dry grass.
A good development; acknowledging the deficiencies of the UN IPCC CliSciFi models.
Climate is a multi-variate system and not a uni-variate system as the orthodoxy claims. The state of the system cannot be determined based on the value of a single variable, nor can it be predicted.
UN-IPCC TAR-14.pdf:
Executive Summary
pg 771, right column, beginning “Improve methods to quantify uncertainties ∙ ∙ ∙”:
“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.“
Emphasis added.
“Centuries-old smoke particles preserved in the ice reveal a fiery past….”
Gee, and that was so far in the past that people burned wood, coal and whatever else they could get to keep themselves warm and cook their food, and that was soooo long ago that they forgot to write down the dates of those fires….
As David Middleton ‘splained to me when I nattered on about the Carboniferous burning times and the wildfires that were rampaging through the vegetation, owing to the levels of O2 in the air, (never mind the prior periods of the same thing, if the O2 level gets high enough to support giant dragonflies (meganeura), we’re doomed.
If I am not gone by the time the giant dragonflies come back, I will die of fright!
They need to find excuses for why they were wrong. So, they latch onto aerosols. Yeah, that’s why they were wrong. Aerosols. Yep.
Pull the other one.
Using aerosols as a ‘tuning parameter’ makes some sense – but only if every model uses them in the same magnitude and direction. If one model uses aerosol parameterization as a negative and another model uses the aerosol parameter as a positive. Then these models are not ever going to agree except in the final values – by using the 6th parameter to wiggle the elephant’s trunk. But the two models do not actually confirm each other as their logic is entirely different.
We might draw three conclusions from these statements
From a nihilistic, anti-humanist perspective, climate hysteria must be motivated to reduce human population and per-capita wealth in order to be successful. Characterizing them using any other political terminology is misleading. Any disruptive social or politcal ideology, with any label, fits the green agenda.
I have often thought that our cleaning of the air pollution of the 60s and 70s (the pea-souper fogs of London occurred until the late 60s) caused by burning coal and unfiltered vehicle exhausts is largely the cause of any observed warming since that time.
This confirms Australia has had big bushfires in the past
They are not new
The greenies need to let controlled burning take place to control the forests fuel load
The original people, the Aboriginals are great land managers and certainly have helped early Europeans avoid such large fires
We need to support this to stop out of control environmentalism and allow cold fires to eliminate these issues
From what I read this is the same in California
Send the numpties to the naughty corner
Primitive people burned the veg on every continent (save Antarctica) from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego. See World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth by Stephen J. Pyne (1995) for one of thousands of sources on this.
It’s not surprising that the soot from historical anthropogenic fires worldwide shows up in ice cores. What might be surprising is that no one noticed before.
I eagerly await incontravertable proof that nobody burned any trees in Antarctica…
As for not noticing the soot in ice cores? Maybe it just took them this long to come up with some….thing to say about it.
Next they will carbon-date that soot, and find the New Truth: humans have been ejaculating carbon since March the twenty-eleventh, 2395.
My first reaction is: So, these twerps can now model air currents back thousands of years, and proxificate (that would be the use of proxies to pontificate on approximate estimates) the exact number of trees burned on any given millimeter of the year’s ice deposit, as clearly marked and labelled and tagged by the ice core angels of Doom.
Just because something is interesting (to you) does not make it true, nor does it bestow any useful value upon your “research”. How much did these twits get paid to tell us primitive people burn a lot of wood?
I despair at the vacuity of academia these days…
Protocol 2v2: “The intellectuals …will puff themselves up with their knowledge and without any logical verification of them will put into effect all the information available from science, which our specialists have cunningly pieced together for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction we want.”
“By underestimating the cooling effect of smoke particles in the pre-industrial world, climate models might have over-estimated the warming effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in order to account for the observed increases in surface temperatures.
“Climate scientists have known that the most recent generation of climate models have been over-estimating surface temperature sensitivity to greenhouse gasses, but we haven’t known why or by how much,” said Liu. “This research offers a possible explanation.””
How can the under-estimating of the cooling effect of smoke have led to the over-estimation of the warming effect of CO2? Am I right in thinking it goes like this:
Since we know that the models do over-estimate the warming effect of CO2, this seems like a plausible explanation, but it’s only one factor of many and we still have no idea whether it accounts for all the model over-estimating.
Prediction is a dodgy exercise at the best of times, but let me have a stab at what happens next: the climate modellers will find some new factor that they can blame for some cooling in the transition from pre-industrial to industrial, so that they can keep intact all the warming that they claim for CO2.
There were bushfires in the past? Surely not! We only started having bushfires recently as a result of Man Made Global Warming.
I’ve often thought that our cleanup of air pollution caused by coal burning and unfiltered car exhaust in the 1960s and 1970s is largely responsible for any warming observed since then.
Today, however, companies like Kia are increasingly aware of their social responsibility and are constantly improving their technology to reduce the environmental pollution caused by driving. They strive to improve fuel efficiency, reduce toxic emissions, and enhance filtration of exhaust fumes.