Evidence preserved in glaciers provides continuous climate and vegetation records during major historical events
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
This press release and accompanying multimedia are available online at:
https://news.agu.org/press-release/1000-years-of-glacial-ice-reveal-prosperity-and-peril-in-europe/
AGU press contact:
Liza Lester, +1 (202) 777-7494, news@agu.org (UTC-4 hours)
Contact information for the researchers:
Sandra Brugger, Desert Research Institute, sandra.brugger@dri.edu (UTC-7 hours)
WASHINGTON—Europe’s past prosperity and failure, driven by climate changes, has been revealed using thousand-year-old pollen, spores and charcoal particles fossilized in glacial ice. This first analysis of microfossils preserved in European glaciers unveils earlier-than-expected evidence of air pollution and the roots of modern invasive species problems.
A new study analyzed pollen, spores, charcoal and other pollutants frozen in the Colle Gnifetti glacier on the Swiss and Italian border. The research found changes in the composition of these microfossils corresponded closely with known major events in climate, such as the Little Ice Age and well-established volcanic eruptions.
The work was published in Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
The industrialization of European society also appeared clearly in the microfossil record and, in some cases, showed up sooner than expected. Pollen from the introduction of non-native crops was found to go back at least 100 years ago and pollution from the burning of fossil fuels shows up in the 18th century, about 100 years earlier than expected.
Existing historical sources such as church records or diaries record conditions during major events like droughts or famines. However, studying data from the glaciers contributes to the understanding of climate and land use surrounding such events, providing non-stop context for them with evidence from a large land area. Precisely identifying the timing of these events can help scientists better understand current climate change.
“The historical sources that were available before, I don’t think [the sources] got the full picture of the environmental context,” said Sandra Brugger, a paleoecologist at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and lead researcher on the study. “But also, with the ice core, we couldn’t get the full picture until we started collaborating with historians on this. It needs those two sides of the coin.”
Evidence on high
The new study analyzed microfossils frozen in two 82- and 75-meter-long ice cores pulled from the Colle Gnifetti glacier, which are the first two ice cores from the continent of Europe studied for microfossils. Similar studies have sampled ice cores in South America, Central Asia and Greenland, but those regions lack the breadth of written historical records that can be directly correlated with the continuous microfossil data in ice cores.
Over the centuries, wind, rain and snow carried microfossils from European lowlands, the United Kingdom and North Africa to the exposed glacier. Ice in this glacier site dates back tens of thousands of years, and the altitude of Colle Gnifetti — 4,450 meters above sea level — means the ice was likely never subjected to melting, which would mix the layers of samples and create uncertainty in the chronology of the record.
“They can actually pinpoint and identify the relationships between what’s happening on the continent with climatic records inherent in the ice,” said John Birks, a paleoecologist at the University of Bergen who was not associated with the study. “They can develop, in a stronger way, this link between human civilization and change and climate, particularly in the last thousand years or so where conventional pollen analysis is rather weak.”
Evidence of pollution due to fossil fuel combustion also appeared earlier in the chronological record than expected. The researchers found evidence of the early burning of coal in the United Kingdom around 1780, much earlier than the expected onset of industrialization around 1850, which could have implications for global climate change modeling.
The records also showed evidence of pollen from non-native European plants from 100 years ago, showing a long legacy of the existing ecological problems created by invasive species transported across continents through trade.
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Notes for Journalists:
This research study is published with open access and is freely available. Download a PDF copy of the paper here. Neither the paper nor this press release is under embargo.
Paper title:
“Alpine Glacier Reveals Ecosystem Impacts of Europe’s Prosperity and Peril Over the Last Millennium”
Authors:
- Sandra Brugger (corresponding author), Division of Hydrologic Sciences, Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV, USA
- M. Schwikowski, E. Gobet, C. Schwörer, C. Rohr, M. Sigl, C. Pfister, T. M. Jenk, W. Tinner, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
- S. Henne, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland
- P. D. Henne, U.S. Geological Survey, Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center, Denver, CO, USA
JOURNAL
Geophysical Research Letters
DOI
ARTICLE TITLE
Alpine Glacier Reveals Ecosystem Impacts of Europe’s Prosperity and Peril Over the Last Millennium
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
23-Sep-2021
That confirms much that was already known.
The key takeaway is that we need fossil fuels and technological innovations to survive natural climate variability.
it further suggests that there is nothing currently observed which goes beyond natural climate variability.
There is a heavy burden of proof on the alarmists and they have not discharged it. Indeed they seek to avoid it via hysteria and hyperbole.
Stephen,
How can you claim that natural variability encompasses all the observations that alarmists shriek about!?
All good alarmists know that there were no extreme weather events before humans began the systematic destruction of our planet by burning fossil fuels! Just look at the vast swathes of death choked wasteland throughout the North America, Europe and the U.K.!
For most Climastrologists, history begins around 1850 or later; like many early Bible scholars, they believe there was only a void before the CO2 Creation!
Plenty of evidence for past human misbehavior, for which reparations are now due.
Don’t give the whales any ideas!
Mind you, they must secretly celebrate the onset of coal burning instead of whale oil burning.
pochas94 – I am still waiting for the reparation payment from the Romans and the Vikings. All Roman monuments and statues in the UK must be torn down as every time I look at them I feel oppressed.
As for the Normans, well we are still under that yoke…..
Reparations from the Angles, the Saxons, the Celts, Europe seeks reparation from the Mongols, the Huns, various other Pontic tribes, from the French supporters of Napoleon, from the Russian Communists, from the Turks, from the various slave trading pirates in the Mediterranean. Ah yes. The reparation business is just getting started.
But a cold climate is so much better.
Crops thrive in the ice and snow.
“But a cold climate is so much better”
Just ask Oetzi – found up in the Italian alps after 5000 years.
“Industrialization and import of maize and other new crops enabled European societies to transcend the crop failures and famines of the Little Ice Age climate period during the 19th century, but unintended environmental consequences resulted, which are now culminating in global warming and species loss.”
Above quote from the abstract. The authors discovered evidence of pollution created by humans with their irresponsible use of coal to heat their houses, starting in the 18th C. It’s much worse than we thought!
Pamela,
It is possible to trace European knowledge of use of coal back to at least the 14th Century.
Marco Polo (1254 – 1324 ) reported in his record of travels to Cathay:
Concerning the Black Stones that are Dug in Cathay, and Are Burnt for Fuel
Thanks Philip, I was aware of the use of coal much earlier than the 18th C, but was making reference to the paper, further proof of sloppy research by Alarmists.
I agree.
Pamela (and Philip,)
They’re so used to making $h!t up, that they forget how to research!
With some of these clowns I have to wonder if they have any idea how to collect actual data. Observational skills are in very short supply with some. Certainly the actions of Mann suggest he is not on good terms with this basic scientific skill. Computer models do not produce data no matter how hard they try to convince themselves and the world that they do.
Pamela,
It’s so much more fun to figure out what the data should be, and then manufacture some to fit the bill! I remember doing that in Physics and Chemistry 1 classes, but I wasn’t being paid with govt grants, just tired from being a triple major in SDR&R!
Local history of our village in Ayrshire shows the local poverty was not pulled out of until new forms of transport allowed the price of coal from 15 miles away to drop substantially. The coal had been known about for some time and used close to the mines, the introduction of canals followed by trains made its use universal as the transport cost became a smaller % of the total cost.
So, China was out of step with right-thinking people in the rest of the world even longer ago than we thought!
The Chinese were mining and burning coal long before Marco Polo – it’s estimated to date back to at least 1,000 BC. But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the mining and burning of coal significantly ramped up.
Coal is of course but one source of fuel – wood was used by humans ever since the discovery of fire by early hominids roughly 2 million years ago. Burning wood also releases carbon dioxide.
Native Americans also burned off the trees and brush from large sections of the Great Plains in order to improve grass production that fed buffalo.
Coal was also used by Bronze Age peoples as early as 3,000 BC in northern and southern Europe. Large amounts of coal was found in easily accessible outcrops and burned by the Brits as early as 1,000 AD.
Similarly, I recall reading that eastern tribes also set deliberate fires to change the forest cover in ways that facilitated hunting game animals. Not so much annual fires, but episodes that cleared forest floor understory growth which then took time to close back in.
The game animals trails to water became more predictable as a result of the impacted forest architecture and hunters’ movement when stalking made easier. European settlers arrived and, in some localities, found a forest that had been altered by native hunter-gatherers. Meadows among the tree forest which the early settlers encountered were presumably small and a consequence of ancestral native fire shaping.
Pretty much how the Maori wiped out the moa
The Maori also used fire in wiping out the Moriori. I believed they usually cooked them before they ate them.
You would also have to consider how long humans have been burning peat. By any definition, a fossil fuel.
Peat was still being cut for burning in Somerset in the 1960s, also the Norfolk Broads (large expanses of water, not the local women!) were formed by the subsequent flooding of pits left by peat digging in the Middle Ages.
Freezing to death in the dark is the ultimate virtue signal.
But how can people see you doing good?
We can only hope that some of these idiots decide to do just that this winter!
They won’t. It’s always other people who are supposed to freeze in the dark.
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They return in the evening to a nice warm home after a hard day of protesting and making life miserable for others.
“Productive? We don’ need no steenkin’ productive jobs.”
Actually, the import of maize, potatoes, tomatoes and other American species that were part of the “Colombian Exchange” took place in the early 16th century, not the 19th century. How about doing just a tiny bit of actual research before posting bullshit, please!
Of course these are the same knuckleheads who claim they were surprised to find evidence of industrialization in the mid-18th century “100 years earlier than expected”, despite the fact that every history text written in the last two centuries clearly identifies the mid-18th century as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or the “age of machines”. But the actual dates of actual changes in human society don’t correlate with warmunism dogma .. so when confronted by actual data, these “scientists” have to feign surprise.
Sadly, they don’t bother doing research anymore. It is so much easier to invent a backstory that fits the narrative. That way no energy is expended in reading papers and books written by people who actually know and understand the subject matter.
WOW!! “The researchers found evidence of the early burning of coal in the United Kingdom around 1780, much earlier than the expected onset of industrialization around 1850″,so you need to go to the Alps and drill ice cores to discover that coal was being burned in the late18th Century in England. Perhaps if the “researchers” were to bother visiting Coalbrookedale in Shropshire they would find plenty of evidence that England began using coal to industrialise in the early 1600’s, but can this be true as it doesn’t show up in the ice core record?
They seem to be confusing the “beginning of the industrial age”, often thought of generally as around 1750 or so, and “the end of the Little Ice Age”, usually put at around 1850-1880.
Atmospheric CO2 was little different in 1850 than 1750, but the narrative has to be that CO2 “pollution” from industrial use and fossil fuel (coal) burning is the root cause since 1750, not the start of natural warming since 1850-1880.
These people appear to have confirmed what the people of the time recorded firsthand. They recorded what they observed and felt no need to big climate change up as an existential crisis leaving 10 years to save the planet.
“implications for global climate change modeling.”
Give it up. They don’t work. Although we laughed at the way he said it, Donald Rumsfeld was quite right – there are things we don’t know that we don’t know.
Rumsfeld was quoting Plato, from the play Meno. I’ll wager he was also knowingly quoting it.
Rumsfeld was a Straussian – Leo Strauss’s kindergarten included Condi et al. Strauss’s perversion of Plato is on record.
“Existing historical sources such as church records or diaries record conditions during major events like droughts or famines.”
These and other written sources are often ignored by climate alarmists because they show that droughts and floods and famines have been around since the beginning of recorded history. None of these resulted in the eradication of humans who simple adapted and even benefited from the climate changes.
And during that times there were 90% less humans with half the life expectancy,zero tech,no antibiotics,no canned food ,superhigh child mortality etc etc =
the chances for survival of humanity were 99% lower than today,
but nowadays they claim that natural disasters that usually kill in a whole year less people than hunger does in a single day (that’s how distorted and perverted the AGW argument is in relation to real problems)will wipe us out.
It is the tipping points they depend upon. Some day all you heretics will be dumped out ass over teakettle.
“Evidence of pollution due to fossil fuel combustion also appeared earlier in the chronological record than expected. The researchers found evidence of the early burning of coal in the United Kingdom around 1780, much earlier than the expected onset of industrialization around 1850, which could have implications for global climate change modeling.”
If they had ever read anything about the history of coal use and industrialization in Great Britain, it would not have been unexpected at all. James Watt’s steam engines started commercial production in 1776. The use of coke (to replace charcoal) in iron smelting started in 1709, started to become widespread in the 1750s and was ubiquitous by about 1790.
Since they didn’t know any of this, nor (it can be inferred) about even earlier use of coal in China (thanks to Philip Mulholland for his comment above), they evidently haven’t read very much.
There is too much agenda to listen to on TV every day for frivolous reading.
The coal industry in the UK started much earlier than this and the main use of coal at that time was for heating, not for industrial use.
Yes, Queen Elizabeth the First had restrictions on the burning of coal in London because of the smoke pollution. I bet she kept warm, but it was OK for others to freeze.
From the article: “A new study analyzed pollen, spores, charcoal and other pollutants frozen in the Colle Gnifetti glacier on the Swiss and Italian border. The research found changes in the composition of these microfossils corresponded closely with known major events in climate, such as the Little Ice Age and well-established volcanic eruptions.”
No mention of the Medieval Warm Period major event?
Some folks think a single tree represents the planet’s entire climate.
The folks who wrote the above paper seem to think samples from a single location represent the entire European continent.
There is Lambic beer. It is made in open vats and the breeze wafts wild yeasts and bacteria down the Zenne valley to settle on the surface of the beer. That’s what gives the beer its distinctive characteristics. As far as I can tell, it only works in the Zenne valley.
You obviously couldn’t use samples from the Zenne valley to represent all of Europe … so therefore …
Yep. They’re going to rush right out and fix all those highly accurate climate models immediately. Question: how does one secure core samples of this length, if the glaciers have all melted?
Just the question I was going to ask.
What they don’t want to admit is that glaciers are a terrible indicator of long term climate trend, as they can reverse course within a generation:
Little Ice Age, Big Chill – The European Dark Age
https://youtu.be/OTjmq0EU_Eg?t=129
Tony Heller has a lot more on these pre-CO2 era, glacial advances & retreats on his website.
Pollen and spores are pollutants?
Take any method of viewing the world and you can make it about that view. Any religion, the occult, aliens, economic theories, race, eugenics, gender, conspiracy, and some things we’re going to think of in the future. But it’s all still a hammer with the world as nails. Control. Control. Control.
Climate may be a hammer, but right now it’s all just a contest to see who gets to swing it.
What I find amazing is that these researchers were surprised that charcoal particles as an artifact of industrialization showed up in the 18th century “100 years earlier than expected”.
Pretty much everyone who is familiar with world history knows that the Industrial Revolution or the “machine age” began in the mid-18th century, and was if full flower by the beginning of the 19th century.
So why the surprise?
The obvious answer: warmunists have been propagandized to believe that industrialization and large scale releases of CO2 only began in 1850 – their always used base year for comparing the effects of CO2 on global climate. Of course, the warmunists chose 1850 as their base year as it was the effective end of the “Little Ice Age”, and so provided the lowest possible base year temperatures to compare with later temperatures .. and obviously had nothing to do with industrialization which began a full century earlier.
I’m shocked! shocked! that the warmunists are practicing propaganda and cherry picking the data to manipulate it to support their theory.
Duane,
Earth Day, 1850, is the Day of Creation for climastrologists!
Before that event the whole world lived in a veritable Garden of Eaten; no hurricanes, no wildfires, no floods or droughts! Just all life, living in harmony; like on the plains of Africa!
Abolition Man: “Just all life, living in harmony; like on the plains of Africa!”
–
–
Yeah, and if the animal rights activists ever succeed in getting wildebeests standing in courts of law, the lions better hold onto their wallets.
😜
“researchers found evidence of the early burning of coal in the United Kingdom around 1780″
This statement shows a surprising ignorance of the history of coal burning in the UK.
Even as early as 1560, coal production in the UK was about 227,000 tons per year and by 1700 was nearly 3 million tons per year. One of the major features of coal use was the trade in coal to London, principally by sea from the Northeast. This was fuel for heating in the main and it preceded the industrial revolution by many years.
The nickname for London – “The Smoke” was derived from the almost universal burning of coal in fires within the city. Edinburgh’s equivalent nickname “Auld Reekie” has a very similar origin, although London has always had a much larger population – and so a lot more smoke! All this lasted until the 1950s when clean air legislation was brought in.
It is surprising that they don’t find evidence of coal burning well before 1780.
People were mining coal from exposed seams in England in the Middle Ages.
When have Warmists ever known anything about History?
I don’t think people ever were confused enough to eat yellow snow.
“showing a long legacy of the existing ecological problems created by invasive species”
Would Hippos swimming the Thames 120 thousand years ago during the Eemian interglacial period be considered ‘ invasive species ‘?
https://london-nerc-dtp.org/2016/02/10/a-past-paradise-in-central-london/
Google Translator
Eemian
Adjetivo
1
relating to or denoting the most recent interglacial period of the Pleistocene in northern Europe, preceding the Weichsel glaciation.
the planet was some 3 degrees to 5 degrees C (5 degrees to 9 degrees F) warmer during the Eemian period than it is today
What’s the scientific term for the linguistic term “malaprop”- the term for confusing the meaning of a word with another because they have similar sounds.
In this case the authors show their “modern education” with meaning and accuracy(not pronunciation)slip ups by using science, history, and analysis inappropriately.
“non-native” crops appeared in history during the 1500-1600’s.” “It also, however, expanded the range of species that carried disease and competed with beneficial native species, and it also permanently changed the face of each continent.”(encyclopedia.com)”
This type of information has been known since about the mid 1600’s. People in the middle ages were as intelligent as today, and much of the aristocracy were also well-educated for the times in thought, logic, history, and other organized studies. Nothing in the paper would have surprised a scientific scholar of the times.
The American Geophysical Union ought to be properly embarrassed for the production, in all sincerity, of a freshman college piece of homework.
So, the detritus in a glacial ice core from the Alps gives them intimate information regarding coal burning in the UK? Yeah, right. Me thinks they are reading a bit much here. What is the basis? Some trace element?
Here would be a very interesting experiment for ice core researchers in the Alps and elsewhere. Drill cores all the way to bedrock and date them, especially on mountain cols and passes and locations that could have been previously ice free in Medieval, Roman and earlier times and are not subject to lateral movement like glaciers are.
Then make a map of where the Alps were ice free back in antiquity. I understand the Romans hardly mentioned alpine glaciers in the written word, so I am guessing a large number of those passes would have been ice free.
There was a report, here I think, and I think withing the last several years, of a ice core drilling further south in Italy that found temperatures at that site 2000 years ago were 1 degree C higher than today. An Ocean sediment core drilled off the coast at the same longitude confirmed the ice core measurements.
Their surprise that evidence of coal burning was found prior to industrialization indicates their ignorance of the history of coal use in England. Coal use on a large scale preceeded the Industrial Revolution in England. These people are dangerously ignorant. This is as ignorant as claiming that malaria might someday spread to England because of climate change.
“The researchers found evidence of the early burning of coal in the United Kingdom around 1780, much earlier than the expected onset of industrialization around 1850, which could have implications for global climate change modeling.”
Why? The phrase for a futile pursuit, “taking coal to Newcastle”, can be traced back to 1538. Coal was used for brick and tile making, and cheap home heating well before 1780.
As for the modelling, there is better evidence of it being a dog’s breakfast just comparing to data post 1950, when emissions started to climb towards 3% of all sources. I guess the massive climate change before the IR can come out of the closet, now.
But, but, but, Mann’s hockey stick says the little ice age did not exist😳
The pollen shows what species were blooming in a given year. Whether or not there was a problem, it doesn’t say. The article overinterprets.
AGU is a climate fiction proponent.
“The records also showed evidence of pollen from non-native European plants from 100 years ago, showing a long legacy of the existing ecological problems created by invasive species transported across continents through trade.”
So winds which is blamed for other pollutants, is not to blame?
Good to know.
Oddgeir
A public library or a good book store with science titles for the general public might have provided the authors some knowledge of European economic and geologic history that might’ve lessened their sense of surprise and shock of the appearance of pollution in the mid 18th C rather than a century later.
Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization A History, MIT Press, 2017 has a lengthy chronology of energy related events in the Addenda that has entries from 1,700,000 BCE to 2015 CE. Smil provides references for Coke from Bituminous coal in 1709; the Newcomen Atmospheric steam engine 1712 and their common use by 1750 in Great Britain.Watt’s separate condenser steam engine design came into common use after his patent was first granted in 1769 and extended in 1775.
He also cites authors who have estimated total energy consumption in England and Wales to be 117 Peta Joules in 1650-59; 231 PETA Joules in 1750-59: and 1.83 ExaJoules in 1850-59 or roughly a 15 fold increase in 200 yrs which made exponential economic growth possible. P236.
Wm Smith, a black smith’s Son and self taught geologist was born in 1769; he developed fundamental ideas of stratigraphy and modern geology by surveying for canal construction and inspecting the walls of coal pits and mine shafts some over 3000 ft deep as a young man in Somerset that revealed the sequence of the earth’s strata bearing a predictable (temporal) relationship to one another by identifying particular species of (ammonite) fossils contained within each stratum. His life’s work of fossil collection, studying surface rock outcrops resulted in the first Geologic Survey map of Great Britain by 1801. Simon Winchester calls Smith’s color coded geologic survey as The Map that Changed the World (2001). Smith had found that coal measures were restricted to certain rock strata were found within a relatively narrow banded geographic region of Western England and Wales oriented North-South. He theorized the surface rock outcrops revealed a West to East temporal axis of very ancient to less ancient rock strata such that walking the width of England from Wales to the North Sea Coast one is walking forward in geologic time.
Imagine a layer cake with the oldest geologic layer on the bottom and more recent layers added sequently above and separate from the prior layers over hundreds of millions of years. Tilting the entire cake clockwise 90degrees the deepest and most ancient rock strata are located in the West and less ancient in the East. Wm Smith may have been born a commoner but he had a very uncommon curiosity and intellectual ability of combining induction and deduction.
William Smith and James Hutton are among my intellectual heroes.