Statistical method more accurately determines whether jumps in ice core data significant or merely noise.
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS
WASHINGTON, November 16, 2021 — Abrupt changes in ice core samples and other records indicate dramatic changes in climate occurred at certain points in the past.
In Chaos, by AIP Publishing, climate scientists identify abrupt transitions in climate records that may have been caused by the climate system crossing a tipping point. This happens when self-reinforcing feedbacks in a system push it away from a stable state, leading to dramatic change.
Identifying these events in the Earth’s past is critical to understanding the tipping points likely to be encountered this century as a warming climate destabilizes the Earth’s physical systems and ecosystems.
The researchers from CNRS (France), UCLA, and Columbia University devised a statistical method to determine whether transitions seen in climate records such as ice cores are simply noise or evidence of a more significant change. This has typically been done by visual inspection, a process that is time-consuming and subjective.
Their method is less error-prone, since it doesn’t rely on human determination of whether a jump is a significant transition. It allows comparing different records consistently and can identify important events that may have been overlooked in older studies.
An augmented Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test, a statistical technique named after its original authors, provided an alternative approach to recurrence analysis. The KS test has been successfully applied to other inherently noisy systems, such as finance and signal processing.
The method compares two samples taken before and after the potential transition point to test whether they come from the same continuous distribution. If they don’t, the transition point is identified as a significant abrupt change indicative of a true climactic shift.
“We applied our method to two paleoclimate records of the last climate cycle, a Greenland ice core and a speleothem composite record from China,” said author Witold Bagniewski.
Analysis of ice cores reveals that the ratio of two oxygen isotopes varies over time. This ratio depends on the local temperature at the time the ice formed, providing a measurement of the climate at that particular time.
Speleothems are mineral deposits in caves showing a similar pattern of isotope ratios varying as the climate changes.
“Many of the abrupt transitions in the Greenland ice core record correspond to shifts between a warmer climate, known as Greenland Interstadials (GIs), and a colder climate, the Greenland Stadials (GSs),” said Bagniewski.
The existence of these two climate states, GI and GS, is an example of a bistable climate system, in which two distinct states are both stable. The climate may jump abruptly from one to the other when crossing a tipping point.
“Our methodology is very effective in correctly detecting abrupt transitions in climate records,” said Bagniewski. “Its wider application may help reconstruct the chronology of Earth’s climatic events.”
###
The article “Automatic detection of abrupt transitions in paleoclimate records” is authored by Witold Bagniewski, Michael Ghil, and Denis-Didier Rousseau. The article will appear in Chaos on Nov. 16, 2021 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0062543). After that date, it can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0062543.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
Chaos is devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena in all areas of science and engineering and describing their manifestations in a manner comprehensible to researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/cha.
###
JOURNAL
Chaos An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science
DOI
ARTICLE TITLE
Automatic detection of abrupt transitions in paleoclimate records
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
16-Nov-2021
“Tipping Point” is an assertion without standing in science.
For me, it rings the alam bell that indicates superstition, bad science, propaganda.
I stop reading when I see that expression, whatever the publication, whatever the peer review that it passed.
I agree.
My tolerance of the use of the term tipping point, is at a tipping point.
The same applies to the term stable state when describing earth’s climate. Take a gander at the image at top. Stable, please point out a time when it was stable, and please don’t tell me between 1850 and 1980.
Greenland is located on the super highway of ocean and wind movements toward the Arctic.
It used to be that we thought that the planet was coming out of a glacial period 13–14000 years ago, warming up nicely. Then, something knocked it back into glacial and it took a few 1000s to warm up again.
However, more likely now is that a bolide hit the northern ice sheet, blasted huge chunks of ice, gouges from which can be seen in the Carolinas as oblong lakes oriented northward, and threw the planet into a warm period. The planet then cooled back to glacial conditions and came out of the period naturally as planetary and solar cycles changed as they normally do. As planetary impacts always introduce a lot of energy, this is the more likely scenario. Not a tipping point in sight.
That would be the tipping point of impact.
Didn’t David Middleton write an article on the Carolinas lakes and the BS of that sort of ice gouge nonsense. Perhaps I miss remember.
Those “as oblong lakes oriented northward” lakes are not all oriented northward.
Quite a few are aimed eastward, westward and many other points of the compass.
All it takes is a few minutes study using Google Earth.
Not even YDIH pushers still claim that the Bays were made by chunks from an impact on an ice sheet. The original goony notion was a hit on the much closer Laurentide ice sheet, not the Greenland.
The abrupt cold snaps during glaciation termination are caused by meltwater and iceberg surges into the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
“Tipping Point” is one of those assertions that appeals to warmists because it implies potential for catastrophe. There are very few examples in the real world that one can point to and exclaim, “See, you just pushed it over the tipping point!” Allowing the bath tub to overflow, might be one such example…. But as applies to the planet, gradual change seem to rule the day. Sea level slowly increases or decreases, temperatures rise or decrease slowly over years. We don’t go to bed one balmy day and wake up the next day in the midst of a full-blown ice age.
It is also a way to make dire claims when the historical trends do not support that claim. One can have constant sea level rise that will cause no problems, but if we are approaching a “tipping point”, one can claim meters rather than centimeters of rise.
“…meters rather than centimeters of rise.”
Like biblical fundamentalists who think there really was a Great Flood, caused by God to punish the wicked humans – all except Noah and his family. So now, the entire human race, evil in its use of fossil fuels, will be flooded again by Gaia. So the myth of tipping points is an ancient one- especially by those ancient, uneducated people.
Warming up from the glacial max, did result in pretty serious flooding (eventually a rise of 120 m). Legends are oral history.
This is 9500 year old Ancient Dwarka which was inundated by rising seas.
That looks like the governor of Oregon before she went on a diet.
You can see a dip then a jump up in the graph at about 9300 years ago. Maybe a coincidence or maybe the sea went down for a short period (cooling) and then up again (warming).
The start of agriculture seems to correspond to the temperature jump 11700 years ago.
That statue isn’t anywhere near that old. Ancient Dwarka flourished c. 200 BC to AD 1200. The submerged part of the city was lost to coastal erosion, not sea level rise.
It is likely that there have been more than one great flood in human history as inland seas below rising sea levels eventually were flooded as the sea overtopped whatever barriers stood between them and the oceans.
We know that sea level rises of ~150m post the last ice age occurred and that is easily enough to have very catastrophic effects on low lying areas.
I think that what alarmists claim regarding “tipping points” is actually correct; that we enter a weather period that mankind cannot reverse.
What the alarmists refuse to acknowledge is that is basically a true statement for mankind every year, all year.
Their message is really that mankind is ineffectual against weather and a multitude of similar natural processes every day of every year.
Which backs up alarmist messages that their real goal is to redistribute the wealth of richer nations, not reverse weather.
Overflowing a bath tub is not an example of a tipping point, but rather an example of a natural limit.
A dam collapse on the other hand might be an example of a tipping point.
Do you mean an example of a tipping point of faulty engineering? A dam collapse is just the same: overwhelming a natural limit ofthe resistence of the dam… On the other hand, bad engineering can increase until and after the point when it draws dams that collapse…
When a dam overflows, it either erodes or gets undercut, leading to a rapid collapse, leading to all the water draining out.
That’s a rapid change of state which is what a tipping point is all about.
On the other hand, when a bathtub overflows, there is no change to the amount of water in the bathtub.
“Let them eat cake” was a tipping point. One perhaps with a lesson for today.
Or, the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.” It is something from which there is no recovery. It is not just a transient deviation from a metastable state, from which it will recover.
Not a tipping point.
That is simply removing an obstacle to the natural flow of water.
One that would not have been removed, had the dam not overflowed.
The authors probably chose the term for effect, maybe to attract funding.
The main aspect shown is that climate periods need to be 10,000 thousand years or more. Anything on the order 30 years isn’t even a blip. Also, an actual change would appear to be 2-300 years long.
Their sample graph would have stood out to any observer as a major change in the state of the process being tracked. At first glance a complex bit of math is not required. A step change in a process range 2-3 times the previous operating range is, by any standard a large, erratic change.
Given the data, a more important distinction is that the “process” has about 1/3 the range of the in between periods. Why? is a better question.
The ordinary range for a “stepping point” seems to be about 1000 years. doubt any one has tested further for that because it wouldn’t be of use to the current “climate change” aficionados. They want to be able to call a 2-5 year range indicative of a change in climate.
To make this graph a valid for a stepping point it would need a 10%changef O2 in the atmosphere over 100 years to signal another rapid change in climate. Lack of detail in ice core measures will be very difficult to compare with other climate measures.
For last 2 million years, we have been in a full-blown ice age.
Cold periods have more extreme changes.
Back in warmer period of our Holocene when Sahara Desert was grasslands and forests, there would be less extreme weather {or long term warmer periods in Ice Age have less extreme changes]. But if we weren’t in 34 million old icehouse climate- and instead warmer global climate, one would a more uniform global temperature as compared to the Holocene Optimum.
The reason one seldom encounters tipping points in real life, is because by their very nature they are unstable and transitory.
Instability is not temporarily persistent…
Nah, “…Allowing the bath tub to overflow…” isn’t a tipping point. Jacking up one side of the bathtub until the center of gravity lies outside the base of the tub + jack and the bathtub falls over with a crash sending a wave of water up against the back of the bathroom door and trapping you inside, now that’s a tipping point.
Even by the study author’s own statements, the climatic changes they inferred from their data and statistical analysis show a relatively rapid shift from “stable” to “unstable” … so obviously in every instance, stability was restored not long thereafter.
The fact is that the earth’s climate, on geological timescales, is extremely stable. Even glaciations occur over tens of thousands of years, as do interglacials. It’s not as if you wake up one morning in Florida and discover that you’ve got a 2 km thick ice sheet over your head.
The common definition of a tipping point is the point at which a system irretrievably shifts to some new state over a short period of time.
“It’s not as if you wake up one morning in Florida and discover that you’ve got a 2 km thick ice sheet over your head”
I used to have an air conditioner like that.
But regardless of the state our climate has been, it always comes back. So there has never been, nor will there ever be, an “irretrievabl[e]” shift in climate. I would hazard a guess… all climate feedbacks are negative in the long-term. In the short term, some feedbacks may be positive, such as the combination of things that must happen to create a thunderstorm, until the state of the climate reaches some limit, or expends the available resources, and then the negative feedbacks begin to damp it out/down until restored to its previous condition. Sort of what Willis Eschenbach has been hinting at with his “emergent phenomena”, an idea that I like by the way.
Didn’t Hansen (Manhattan will be under water by 2000) and Gore (Arctic sea ice will be gone by 200?) have their own tipping points?
Yes: the point of no-return, irreversible idiocy.
The whole climate catastrophe movement is headed for a tipping point of loss of credibility, when in the next decades, maybe soon, we enter a period of natural cooling a la 1945-76.
Of course, then the same actors will imbibe the spirit of Stephen Schneider and return to the “Ice Age Coming” meme.
problem there is they fudge the figures, it may be cooling already. I suppose it would get to the stage where they say “hottest ye-ar evah” and everyone just laughs in their face. But then they will switch to climate change causes global warming…and global cooling, so keep paying the rent seekers.
I believe that Hansen considered weather caused sea level rise disasters to be cascade events.
Yeah, tipping points can be cascade events. Cascade is generally more descriptive where one effect triggers other effects.
Well, as but one example, there is definitely a tipping point where in the process of compressing a sufficient mass of highly enriched U-235 or highly enriched Pu-239, the atomic fissioning therein goes from subcritical to supercritical.
A more common example of a tipping point is that seen upon heating pure, liquid water at sea-level pressure at the temperature of 100 °C, where at first there are no bubbles in the water then there is the appearance of steam bubbles, all happening at the same temperature of 100 °C.
I never heard ANY of my teachers and professors (high school and university) refer to the passage from subcritical to supercritical as a “tipping point”, not the change of state of water when boiling as a “tipping point”. Perhaps that expression would be found, 50 years ago, in the pages of “Reader’s Digest”, not in scientific literature.
I gently suggest that you read Critical Mass and Tipping Points: How To Identify Inflection Points Before They Happen (available at https://fs.blog/critical-mass/ ) wherein you will find no less than ten references to “tipping point” in a variety of physical and social sciences.
Quoting the first sentence in that article:
“Critical mass, which is sometimes referred to as tipping points, is one of the most effective mental models you can use to understand the world.”
The article makes direct reference Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, which was published in 2000, and the article itself has a copyright date of 2021 . . . thus, both are quite a bit more recent than 50 years ago.
By the way, what is/was “Reader’s Digest”?
The most read magazine in the US for decades. It was published in the physical form of a small paper back book unlike Life magazine, because it’s primary medium, as it’s name suggests, was primarily the written word and not photographs or illustrations.
We are getting too old, Rah… and not losing memory…
Oh . . . you mean something like McGuffey Readers?
Not quite. Check Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest
I reciprocate your gentleness by declaring that I shall not pursue this argument for one simple reason: not deviating of the scope of the comments towards the analysis and discussion of the harm done to sciences whenever one clear and well defined concept is replaced by another word presented as synonymous, which in fact will serve as a smokescreen to enlarging the scope of the definition to outside its limits or to, through antonomasy, include under that new word several other objects that have no relation whatsoever with the ones refered to by the original concept (and thus creating confusion and leading to that original concept lose its operationality); in other words, making what your first quoted link tries to do.
I gently suggest you read about “run on sentences”.
BTW, I will not apologize for my “antonomasy” confusing you. The link that I quoted is real and discusses, in a contemporaneous sense, “tipping point” as a clearly defined scientific term.
Whether or not you declare to “not purse this argument” is no real concern of mine.
From the graph, it appears “tipping points” are less frequent and of a lesser magnitude in warmer periods. Shuckie-darn.
Exactly right. The “tipping points” apparently always occur from cold climates like the glacial periods to climates like today’s, and back again. There’s no occurrences from warm climates like today’s to even warmer ones.
I also agree this is essentially alarmism writ large.
It reminds me of my favourite paper on this topic, Steffen et al 2018, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”.
According to this masterpiece, “self- reinforcing feedbacks”COULD push the Earth System “toward a planetary threshold” that IF crossed could prevent stabilisation of the climate, and cause continued warming on a pathway to a ‘Hothouse Earth’.
“ We examine the evidence that such a threshold MIGHT exist and where it MIGHT be.
Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a POTENTIAL threshold and stabilise it in a habitable inter- glacial like state.
Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System- biosphere, climate and societies- and COULD include decarbonisation of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioural changes, technical innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.”
( Capital Emphasis mine).
Can anyone top this pseudo-scientific rambling?
Apparently we are not currently living in a “ habitable inter-glacial state” but teetering on the edge of a “ Hothouse Earth”.
World governance, anyone?
These people are lost in a green miasma.
The “ Anthropocene” of course is a give away.
So, everyone should have stopped reading your post after reading your first 2 words.
How funny!…
Have you not seen the quotation marks? If you have not, go and see an ophthalmologist; otherwise, get a life!
‘Tipping point’ is just mumbo jumbo talk to hide what the implications of the pale climate data.
This is the proxy temperature data from the analysis of the Greenland Ice Sheet Two project for the last 11,000 years, from Richard Alley’s paper.
The ice sheet data/analysis unequivocally shows that both hemispheres simultaneously warm and cool cyclically. What caused the past warmings?
https://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC
i.e. The temperature increase (same regions of the planet) has happened before. CO2 did not cause the past cyclic warming events.
These cyclic warming and cooling events are called Bond events or Dansgaard-Oschger events. The warming and cooling periods correlate in time with changes in cosmogenic isotopes (that are deposited on the ice sheets) that change because of changes to the sun and/or the geomagnetic field. (Or a supernova.)
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles.
When the Greenland Ice Sheet warmed in the past, the Antarctic Ice Sheet cooled. The Climate community call that physical observation the polar see-saw. It is interesting that when the Greenland Ice sheet warmed this time the Antarctic Ice sheet cooled. Same pattern as past D-O warmings.
The Antarctic Peninsula juts out of the Antarctic polar vortex and has a high snowfall rate so it captures changes to the South sea temperature. The south hemisphere has warmed cyclically in the past, exactly like it is warming now. This is a recent discovery.
Does the Current Global Warming Signal Reflect a Recurrent Natural Cycle.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/davis-and-taylor-wuwt-submission.pdf
The paper, entitled “Recent Antarctic Peninsula warming relative to Holocene climate and ice-shelf history” and authored by Robert Mulvaney and colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey (Nature, 2012, doi:10.1038/nature11391), reports two recent natural warming cycles, one around 1500 AD and another around 400 AD, measured from isotope (deuterium) concentrations in ice cores bored adjacent to recent breaks in the ice shelf in northeast Antarctica.
“Public media in the U.S., including National Public Radio (NPR), were quick to recognize the significance of this discovery. The past natural warming events reported by Mulvaney et al. are similar in amplitude and duration to the present global warming signal, and yet the past warmings occurred before the industrial revolution and therefore were not caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.”
The present global warming cycle lies within the range of these past natural warming cycles, suggesting that the present global warming cycle may be of natural origin and not caused by human activity–as climate skeptics have been arguing for some time.
The act of tripping is a tipping point . . . as in instantly transitioning from stability in walking to instability, with the good chance of falling down.
Intimately related to the science of gravity and balance.
In fact, my feeling is if “…two distinct states are both stable…” then it wasn’t a tipping point. It is more accurately described, as the title of the paper clearly states, as an “…abrupt transition…” The Tipping Point used in the headline was a blatant scare tactic.
All without human emissions …
And we are still here.
The rumors that we all starved to death in 2000 are untrue, Beagle. I’ve actually gained a few pounds.
The Malthusian soothsayers need a new Ouija board.
It’s different this time and worse than we thought. /s
Yes! Unprecedented extreme!
or extremely unprecedented
No it’s an emergency
Believe it or not there is a tipping point in driving combination vehicles as with semis. The tipping point is reached when backing. When the rotation or lateral motion of the trailer exceeds it’s rearward motion the tipping point has been passed. A drivers ability to judge when to pass that tipping point and when and how much to counter steer to straighten back out again are key factors in determining their ability to back into tight spots.
I am always impressed while watching a truck driver back a 53′ trailer up to a loading dock. However, it turns out that the shorter trailers are harder to back up, due to the shorter wheel base. Back to the paper, are the authors looking at the Dannsgaard-Oeshger events and do they line up with other chronologies? If not, can they explain the difference? How much did the climate change and how quickly? This will have real-world implications as we are probably on the verge of the next ice age, perhaps initiated by whatever causes the D-O events.
I backed plenty of 48’ trailers in the past and they generally were easier and not harder to back. BTW since one can slide the trailer tandems on a 53 the turning radius can be changed. When blurry eyed from fatigue and trying to get into the last parking spot in a truck stop in the dark I will slide the tandems to the rear to minimize the amount of trailer over hanging the rear axle. This helps prevent hitting the mirror of the truck parked on the outside, referred to as the blind side of the back.
It’s always tandems to the rear when loading/unloading with 10000 lb fork trucks.
Stay safe out there, road warrior Rah. You are in my prayers every day (one of my brothers drives a big truck, so it’s easy to remember )🙂. Remember, when dispatch/customer/other tells you to do something you know is unsafe, JUST SAY, “NO.”
Doing my best. Thank you so much. BTW just some general info. The average age of the pool of active class A CDL drivers in the US is now over 56y/o. The oldest it has ever been.
The US is currently short 80,000 Class A drivers. The most severe shortage is in Over The Road (OTR) drivers. This despite the fact a hard charging, efficient company OTR driver can make six figures a year. What other job can you think of where a person without so much as a GED can make that kind of money?
In my on call trouble shooting job that is a salary position with OT pay when I am worked on my scheduled days off I am driving an average of less than 2,300 mi a week and making between $1,600 and $2,240 a week not counting per Diem and bonuses.
Well, yeah, that is something I have experience with, backing up a truck with trailer attached and have experienced the angst of reaching the tipping point too many times.
Those single axle trailers with ball hitch require a great deal of attention when backing.
Yep! The fifth-wheel trailer was a whole lot easier to deal with. Those tag-alongs have minds of their own and like to wander.
Similarly, high-performance vehicles can be designed so that that they cease to be drivable in a slow degradation, sometimes called a ‘soft failure,’ allowing time for recovery, or, alternatively, may fail suddenly without warning, allowing no opportunity to recover. I would consider the latter to be a “tipping point.”
When I was a young man, I bought a used ’60 Falcon that showed signs that it had been in an accident. (Bondo!) After previously driving for 5 years without an accident, I lost control of the Falcon on wet pavement shortly after buying it. I later sold the car to my father, whom I had never known to have an accident. He also had an accident with the car. The ’60 Falcon was a ‘Tipping Point’ on wheels!
great and nice sharing, it will help me in my business excellent
“abrupt transitions in climate records that may have been” to “This happens”. And all that without missing a beat.
I may have been a dragon in a previous life. This happens when I eat the magic mushroom.
Well observed! Eating magic mushrooms push you beyond tipping points! (as a matter of fact, not only you…)
The mere existence of a tipping point at some time in the past is irrelevant to human influence on the future.
It demonstrates that the evidence for human influence is fundamentally flawed.
If climate models cannot simulate the current warming without CO2 – and can only simulate no change without CO2 – then the models assume no chaotic tipping points with unseen causes.
The models assume that this can never happen – without CO2.
But it can.
“may have”
Got to get that caveat out of the way
“as a warming climate destabilizes the Earth’s physical systems and ecosystems.”
This is not based in fact, they have a real blind spot when it comes to the year on year record crop yields around the world – even in Africa. Not to mention the general greening.
They speak of these tipping points but have no actual idea on what is behind them. Statistical analysis won’t tell them that.
For me the first paragraph was a tipping point towards the exit.
The polar vortex will soon split into two centers consistent with the geomagnetic field. This is characteristic of periods of low solar activity.
The Polar Vortex has only had one center up until now, and then it is going to split into two centers in the near future?
Vuk says these two centers will rotate in opposite directions and will interfere with each other as they rotate, and this interference will slow the vortexes down, which affects changes in the jet streams. It looks like you are descibing the same thing, at least the splitting of the vortex part.
The polar jet stream is dipping pretty far south already. What can we expect the jet stream to look like once the Polar Votex splits?
The 500 hPa flux level in winter is a representation of the stratospheric polar vortex in the upper troposphere. You can see the very large disentanglement of this region.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/11/17/1700Z/wind/isobaric/500hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-339.11,91.53,372
The plural of ‘vortex’ is’ vortices’.
Perhaps another tipping point is approaching.
The article says,
“Many of the abrupt transitions in the Greenland ice core record correspond to shifts between a warmer climate, known as Greenland Interstadials (GIs), and a colder climate, the Greenland Stadials (GSs),” said Bagniewski.
I write to explain that Bagniewski is wrong to imply this has any relationship to present day.
A basic assumption of climate models is that climate change is induced by change to atmospheric CO2 concentration. The longest data series of atmospheric CO2 concentration measurements is less than 63 years: it began at Mauna Loa in 1958.
But the Greenland ice core has a temporal resolution of more than 63 years: the IPCC says 86 years.
So, if one wishes to compare the ice core data with modern measurements then an “abrupt” change cannot be compared. This is because,
(a) if “abrupt” change is defined as taking less than 63 years then the ice core data cannot indicate it,
and
(b) if “abrupt” change is defined as taking more than 63 years then the modern measurements cannot indicate it
Richard
Well, that certainly puts the alarmists in a bit of a cleft stick.
Except that a “pulse” of CO2 into the atmosphere (such as present) would take centuries to dissipate – so it would certainly be detectable from a resolution of 86 years, even if the pulse was shorter than that.
And I said “pulse” because someone on here is bound to come along and say that “a CO2 molecule has a lifetime of xxxx in the atmosphere”.
Yes indeed – just like a shopper in a supermarket may only stay 10 min but there are many others replacing him when gone. IOW: There is a steady state replacement.
There is no science to support your belief that a CO2 pulse would persist for centuries.
The only science that does exist, following the various open air nuclear tests, indicates residency times of just a decade or two.
By definition, a pulse is a one time event. Once the pulse is over, only the background rate of insertion remains. So the return to the background rate is determined solely by the lifetime each molecule has in the atmosphere.
Again, you’re expressing your scholarly opinion as usual, right? 🙂 FYI this is not Anthony’s belief, this is the current scientific understanding. And the results based on the observations about the nuclear tests’ do not contradict it.
Actually they do. Not that you have ever let being wrong slow you down.
Anthony Banton,
How does your comment about a “pulse” relate to what I wrote in any way?
The issue is ability to compare two data sets with very different temporal resolutions.
Richard
RICHARD!!!! 😀 Oh, how glad I am to “see” you. You are on my prayer list — have been for years 🙂
And, not only are you strong enough to post, you wrote a post full of keen insight and razor-sharp analysis.
And, far from drowsy, you sound as feisty as ever….. Praise. The. Lord.
Your ally for truth,
Janice in the USA
P.S. Given Blanton’s unsupported, barely coherent, assertions, e.g., a steady state replacement, 🙄 I would suggest that you not dignify his trolling with a response.
This is your mother speaking, dear Richard: “Pick your battles. Save your effort and time for opponents worthy of you.”😊
Dear Janice,
Sincere thanks for your kind words.
As you probably know, I am recovering from multiple organ failure (heart, lungs and liver) and recovering from a subsequent stroke but am coping with terminal prostate cancer that – having destroyed my prostate – has gone to my bones where it is active in my skull, my neck, four other places in my spine down my back, in my left shoulder blade, and in my right hip.
My heart condition prevents me having chemo. but I am treated with radiotherapy and had been having hormone treatment that was halting progress of my cancer. The side-effects of the hormone treatment are so unpleasant that I have stopped having it. The experts say my cancer will finish me but I think it will be the emphysema which combines with the disease of my ribs to make breathing difficult.
So, I am not much use now. I could conduct worship any day but my pain relief inhibits thought (it is like thinking through fog) so I need to stop my pain relief to prepare sermons. This means I cannot fulfil more than one Service Appointment a month. This is accepted and a special Service was conducted where I was presented with a Certificate from the President of the Methodist Conference. My next appointment is this coming Sunday when I am being carted to Mylor Methodist Church where I am to conduct Morning Worship.
I know The Boss works in mysterious ways but I do wonder why he keeps me here doped up on opiates and ‘happy pills’ when I am no longer much use and I want to go home.
So, until I am called home I will try to share the little I have learned where I can including here.
In conclusion, considering what I have written here, I think you can understand it really is good to hear from you.
Richard
Oh, Richard.😟 Yes, indeed, no wonder you are asking “why am I still here, Lord?” There is still something for you to do. Someday, “we shall know fully, even as we are fully known.” Courage.
It is comforting (I think of this often in the hard uphill push that life has become for me — not as difficult as your trail has become, though 😥) to realize: this won’t last forever. The nightmare will end. Maybe not for another 30 or 40 years, but, it will END. All of us are, someday, going to leave. For me, it can’t come too soon, though I do want to give God every second of good I can do for all that Jesus did for me…. I will be praying for you as you wearily wonder, “why?”
Take heart! One day, we WILL round the last bend and be… HOME.
And we will find as C. S. Lewis put it in The Last Battle:
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.
Moreover (Ibid.),
And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
And we WILL meet.😊 And we will meet ….. Margaret Thatcher (heh, heh, heh). And all will be well.
Until then, hold tight to Jesus’ hand and know that you (and your family) are being prayed for by
Your sister in the Lord,
Janice
P.S. I am still going to ask God for a miracle of healing for you, though. Even now…. “With God, all things are possible.” All things.
Paper funded by EU Horizon 2020 budget of Euro95 billion.
¨It tackles climate change, helps to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and boosts the EU’s competitiveness and growth.¨
This is contribution number 126 of :
https://www.tipes.dk/tipping-points/
And :
https://www.tipes.dk/climate-change-tipping-points-back-to-the-drawing-table/
So back to the drawing table, then.
“Tipping points?” Sure. There are about 1,800 thunderstorms active at any point in time on the planet (from NOAA.) Every single one of them began because a “tipping point” is reached in an unstable atmosphere as a source of lift emerges. Do non-condensing GHG’s have the ability to suppress this phenomenon to produce a dangerous shift in the overall operation of the climate system? I don’t see how. If anything, the incrementally increased strength of the radiative coupling between the atmosphere and the surface would promote the initiation of the convective response wherever it is ready to start.
In fact, according to Willis’ very believable theory, thunderstorms actually promote climate stability. Over water, they primarily form when temperatures get hot, and then they pump untold millions of BTUs of thermal energy into the upper atmosphere where it can be radiated to space without interference from the air and clouds below. This can act as earth’s ‘thermostat’ to oppose any so called greenhouse heating.
Exactly the point.
If I reverse the section between 14700 and 11700 ybp I get a smooth transition from cold to warm. I wonder if the record as presented was properly verified against the raw ice core data.
Just saying.
Going by the past of alarmist climate science, it’s worth double checking the numbers.
The only convincing tipping point regarding climate was the comet or asteroid that hit the planet 65 million years ago wiping out the dinosaurs and allowing our rat like ancestors to take over the planet.
The use of the term tipping point in your example is meaningless, as the asteroid hitting earth was random. It does not define anything and it detracts and misleads.
The correct and best way to describe it is… As a result of the asteroid hitting earth a series of reactions occured with the outcome of ………..
Or similar.
Climate science is full of dramatic statements and terms, and when that occurs you know that there is a real problem. Look at the alarmist garbage leading up to and during COP26. Not so long ago these people would be burnt as witches, and yet the prebriefing to COP26 was held under the umbrella of the Pope, historically the champion of witch burning.
If God created earth and all living things as the Bible states, perhaps the Pope could ask God where they left the manual, to explain why a system was designed to sequester and store CO2 away from the atmosphere, the very essence of all life that was created and cause it’s demise. That’s about as narcissistic as it gets.
Fortunately humans had the intellect through necessity to progressively release the CO2 and reverse this planned demise and allow human prosperity to flourish, and the Vatican’s coffers to boot.
The asteroid was clearly a terminal event. However, my view of a ‘tipping point’ is a dynamic system that can change naturally over time, and if it exceeds the range of stability, the system fails. I think that a better analogy would be an aircraft that has wings that are icing, or the pilot is increasing the angle of attack. It the plane loses lift, it stalls. That is a ‘tipping point.’ It is not the same as being hit by antiaircraft fire, albeit the results might be similar.
“tipping points likely to be encountered this century as a warming climate destabilizes the Earth’s physical systems and ecosystems.” So they have their politically derived conclusion and whip up some “data” to support it. Okely dokely.
That’s what it sounds like.
Except the study’s “data” show that the actual warming climate (Holocene) results in fewer tipping points with lesser magnitudes. Tell me what I am missing when I assert the evidence given shows that a warming climate stabilizes the Earth’s physical systems and ecosystems rather than destabilizing them.
Warm good, cold bad. And yet leftards screech the exact opposite. Lying liars screeching lies.
I’m not that into “tipping points” but I do know you can get abrupt changes in the weather/climate that people often use to say we are close to “the end”. A good one was the 1920s/30s which were warm(hot) and had many years with little rain. That is until 1940/41 came along, when it suddenly went much cooler and stayed cool for 40 years and then(shock) it went warmer again from 1980. I see no problem in it going cooler again this year and staying cool for 40 years or maybe it won’t…who knows. We just need to ask the sun……and we all know how difficult that is……especially if you don’t know the language.
So there we have it , increase in CO2 makes a country more wealthy.
https://realclimatescience.com/2021/11/china-up-us-down/
Obviously earth’s climate is controlled by negative feedback mechanisms, like physical systems usually are, because after so many years with all sorts of distrubances it would by now be solidly stuck in either a “hot house” or an “Ica ball” scenario. It is not i.e. any disturbance will be counteracted by the system itself.
So the dog that didn’t bark is the study authors’ failure to state that it is cooling that is abrupt, not warming. There has been no abrupt warming episode ever. So much for the tipping point threat from global warming.
Take a look at Burroughs book, “Climate Change in Prehistory” page 58, which shows changes in sea level for the past 120 years. Pay careful note to the essentially straight line decrease over some 12,000 years at the start of the last ice age, and the corresponding almost straight line increase for over 10,000 years at the end of the ice age. Keep in mind how long it takes to both create an ice sheet on land, and then melt a massive ice sheet. These charts demonstrate to me sudden changes in temperature at specific points in time, i.e. tipping points. I have seen similar charts for the same periods elsewhere.
Conversely, the past warm period for the last 10,000 years or so has been quite stable.
When talking about the rapidity of change, it is always reasonable to ask, compared to what?
The problem with “Tipping Points” is the assumption that different systems passing through adjacent points will always evolve in the same way, but in chaotic systems, different systems passing through adjacent points can evolve in very different ways.
I think it’s more like a chaotic system with two attractors, so there is stability around one attractor for some long period of time, and something causes the system to move to the other attractor, where it remains stable for a long period of time (as pictured).
They’ve taken 2 points before and 2 points after the point in question and judged using some mathematics if it was a “tipping point”.
Mind you each point in the graph is 20 years duration. In other words, they look back 40 years, and forward 40 years and tell us that the climate is tipped over within 100 years. They have no other evidence for this claim other than mathematical trickery.
I dont know you, but “tipped climate” using this method reminds me a Kyle’s attorney’s tipping point “hocus pocus, still out of focus”
The theory goes something like this.
There may or may not have been tipping points in the past.
Therefore unless you all start doing what I tell you to do, we are going to hit a tipping point at sometime in the future, and we will all die.
To me a tipping point is where you are grubbing around in your pockets after a good meal.🤔
What about when the bellhop brings your bags up to your room, Alasdair?
The article is about possible tipping points. It took all the way down to here in comments to start discussing known tipping points.
😜
“To determine whether transitions seen in climate records such as ice cores are simply noise or evidence of a more significant change.”
You can get desired data from noise mathematically, see Michael Mann’s hockey stick. Of course it is still witchcraft, this time embedded in a computer program. It has nothing to do with a search for truth.
From the fist sentence of the above press release about the just-published, peer-reviewed AIP publication:
So, now all the AGW/CAGM alarmists have to do is come up with the fundamental reasons that greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, during the times of abrupt transitions in atmospheric temperatures (as indicated by the ice core proxy data and the applied KS testing), also had similar abrupt shifts, assuming that they did. 🙂
Or perhaps, reading between the lines as it were, this data is hard evidence that atmospheric temperatures are totally independent of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations?
A while back, out of pure curiosity about such things, I made up an Excel chart with the length of time for cold periods in blue and the warm periods in yellow. I didn’t look at anything else. Length of time is just as important as a ambient temperature. My chart only addresses North America, but Europe had the same warm and cold periods going on.
It was an eye opener for me because with maybe 2 exceptions, the warm periods were consistently shorter than the cold periods. So this one has lasted about 18,000 years, +/- a millennium or two, and the snow/cold season seems to be starting earlier than it used to in the last few years, which means that Hallowe’en trick or treating began to require warmer clothing than prior decades. We started having October snow in my area back in the 1990s. Not fun for kids with trick or treating on their minds, and — well, boys, and girls, there was snow on my front steps on October 27 last year and freezing rain on October 25 this year. Snow was in the weather forecast, per the local weather radar frost/freeze/snow warnings, starting in mid-October, blizzard warning up in Minnesota, etc., but all the snow was up in the clouds.
Take a hint. Mother Nature is telling us something. You can quibble over charts and ice cores all you like, but that doesn’t prepare you for a blizzard dumping that white fluffy stuff on you. Early snow was reported in the Austrian Alps this past summer, and in other places – does that mean ZERO – NADA – NOTHING????
Just sayin’ — if this warm period is getting shorter, why aren’t we paying attention to that? We have 7++ billion people on this planet and not all of them live in warm places. So what’s the quibbling all about, anyway? Are any of you prepared to deal with heavy snows and blizzard conditions way ahead of when winter officially starts? Or are you so inured to the calendar that “official start dates” is all you can see?
I want to see all the self-important mopes who attend those climate cons at our expense become snowbound next year in a blizzard. I will welcome that sight when it happens. 🙂
You all have a nice day.
I’m not betting on a blizzard in Egypt come next November, Sara. 😁
No, but it could happen. If it can snow in Kuwait, which has happened recently, it can certainly happen in Egypt.
The Bronze Age was a very, very warm period during which Mediterranean civilization began to develop, what preceded all of that? There are places in Algeria that used to be fertile and wet, which are now dry as a bone, but back then, they were where people were starting to farm and raise cattle and sheep. The point is that the whole Med area used to be green and fertile and a huge swath is now desert. No reason at all that it could not return to green, fertile and wet, if the weather cycles went in that direction.
The city of Ur was built when the glaciers to the north of the Mediterranean (Europe/Eurasia) were starting to retreat. Clay tablets have been collected from there that indicate it was green, wet and fertile, and trade and agriculture were developing in the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. The whole area is mostly a dust bowl now. There is nothing says that it can’t change. It was called the Fertile Crescent for a reason.
Sara,
What temperature did you use to divide “cold” from “warm”? And what was your rationale for picking that specific temperature?
It wasn’t about temperature, it was ONLY the length of time from the start-to-end of one cold period and start-to-end of a warm period. There is plenty of room between the start and the end of each of them for swings in temperature and precipitation.
There were/are many things that have a profound effect on the weather, but that does not last.
Toba’s eruption 72,000 years ago would be a good example. That was during a warm period (Sangamon) and it had a profound effect when it happened, but things warmed right back up. Doesn’t have anything to do with ice cores or temperatures switching back & forth. It’s the length of time from one chill-down to the next warm-up. If Toba ejected enough material to block sunlight, that would account for a brief cold period in the middle of a warming period.
Every warm period had cold periods, and likewise, every cold period had warm-ups, however brief they were. The millenia preceding the Bronze Age would be a good example: rising Mediterranean civilization, Jordan was being settled and turned into a agricultural area, migrating Hoomans went from Siberia across the Bering Straits to North America and spread south from there, never mind exploring parts of the Pacific. The entire Mediterranean area began to flourish and agriculture became a guarantee of food resources. A good example would be the start of cultivating emmer grains around 17,000BC, which eventually led into agriculture.
Here’s a link to a website regarding the history of food:
https://www.foodtimeline.org/
If this has anything to do with solar output oscillating over time (which is very likely), then an active Sun has as much influence on things as the planet’s own weather and geological systems do, and I’m not so sure the Sun really “recovered” from its CME outburst in 2008.
There’s no one single factor involved: that’s my point. If our Sun has gone quiet, so be it. A quiet sun, combined with the wobble of the polar axis, can have a profound effect on the entire planet in regard to weather and agriculture. When you add geological activity, such as gassy volcanic eruptions coupled with high ash content, to that along with seasonal changes, that’s an indication that we should be preparing for extremes instead of squabbling over ridiculous nonsense like “tipping points” and CO2/.methane loads produced by the planet.
Defining “cold periods” and “warm periods” wasn’t about temperature, you say.
Come again?
This looks to me like a case of: we will try different types of statistical analysis until we get one that generates the answer we want. This has become a fairly common gimmick in academia.
How many types is analysis did the do on the data before they found the K-S test gave them the answer they wanted?
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
“Abrupt changes in ice core samples and other records indicate dramatic changes in climate occurred at certain points in the past.”
No thought given to the quality of data (missing layers/unconformities), which are common in other geological processes visible in sedimentary rocks? During the glacial max, ‘sedimentation’ of snow is very thinly bedded and can blow away sometimes at any site.
They would need to twin the coreholes to evaluate this. If there is a rapid warm up or cool down, look at the variations in thickness of layers at the point of change (warmer more snow, colder less) as a sign of sudden changes.
A gang of hubristic mathematicians and physicists without a sedimentologist on board makes their output questionable. If they had the conclusions already before the study was done, which is de rigeur in climate science, then it is activist, Lysenkoist garbage
Well said by a first class, data-driven, Geologist. 🙂
Ah, my warmest greetings to you Janice. Many good people have disappeared from this site and I find myself praying that they are still with us. I’ve experienced all or parts of 10 decades myself so am grateful for every sunrise.
😊
And still providing valuable commentary. Good gravy, Gary! My hat’s off to you. Regards,
Kevin
The only tipping point that matters to these people is the percentage retained from grants issued to write drivel such as:
No one knows if a warming climate “destabilizes” the Earth’s physical systems and ecosystems as it hasn’t been observed. To make such a statement is hubris, not science.
And it is contradicted by their own chart showing fewer “tipping points” of lesser magnitudes during the warmer Holocene.
Exactly right, Dave Fair! Those sharp Dansgaard-Oeschger warming events of which we are aware all occurred during the last glaciation. Once the great northern ice sheets were gone, those large, sudden climate changes apparently ceased. We have no evidence of sudden climate changes of such magnitude during the warmer interglacials, such as the current Holocene, or the even-warmer Eemian.
The evidence is compelling that, on millennial and shorter timescales, warm climate periods are more stable than colder climate periods. In comparison to the D-O cycles of the last glaciation, the warming and cooling cycles of the Holocene climate record are slight and slow:
IACP 🡕 RWP 🡖 DACP 🡕 MWP 🡖 LIA 🡕 Modern Optimum
The Hockey Team is trying diligently to erase even those small climate cycles from history — even while, contradictorily, claiming that global warming will make the Earth’s climate less stable. It’s almost as if they don’t know what they’re doing.
Oh, I believe they know exactly what they are doing.
I do wonder if our sun is as constant as we think. We observe repeating micro nova’sof various frequencies in other stars. The geologic record does contain magnetic anomalies that could be tied to solar outbursts. Given that in the modern record we have observed things like the Carrington Event, I don’t see how we can rule out events orders of magnitude larger that would send tremendous energy into our atmosphere and likely have major climate effects. I wish we had an accepted explanation for the Younger Dryas. This period sticks out like a sore thumb. Climate models have no clue about such events.
Pushing the earth’s climate away from a stable state? How about possibly giving it just enough push for it to transition from one stable state to another — i.e. something like a phase transition? Or even pushing it out of a stable state onto a limit cycle? And there is nothing especially magical about using Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test as it is simply more robust than other statistical tests by virtue of not being tied to a particular distribution. I am always bothered by the claim that something is less error-prone by way of being automatic. I’d really like more information on some of these “tipping points”. For example, the one that takes earth into an ice age. Can someone be more definitive about that one beyond the simplistic “solar insolation at 65 deg North” explanation? For example, how does this one work beyond simply saying that insolation decreases? What else has to happen? Why did this one change from 40kYr cycles to 100kyr cycles — or did it chnage? Did it simply transition into 40kyr cycles where one gets skipped occasionally?
abutting large changes in ice cores largely mean the scientists reading them simply don’t understand physics
the CO2 in them is only valid if they’ve been below -109°F their entire existence and have never been compressed… otherwise its an anecdotal proxy
“Tipping Point” is the most over-used expression of the 21st century. It is not formally defined. I’ve always considered it a catastrophic event, like a sailboat capsizing. The quoted statement above just suggests an accelerated change from which it might well recover naturally. It is another one of those invented terms to appeal to emotions rather than reason, such as “ocean acidification” and “global heating.”
No, its not evidence of bistability, as chaotic systems are not, in the normal sense, stable.
It is the evidence of (at least) two attractors.
Depending on which temperature index you choose (graph source), global temperatures are believed to have been rising at an average rate of between 0.06°C and 0.16°C per decade since 1958 (the start of the Mauna Loa CO2 measurement record), as atmospheric CO2 level rose from 315 ppmv to 416 ppmv.
Based on the trends in temperature and CO2 level, we could expect at most a little over 1°C of additional warming by 2100, and probably none at all after that.
That’s a small change, and a very slow rate of change, in comparison with past natural changes in the Earth’s temperatures. We know from ice core isotope analyses that over the last 100,000 years the Earth has experienced dozens of natural “Dansgaard-Oeschger events” (a/k/a “Greenland interstadials”) in which temperatures changed at rates as rapid as several degrees per decade. (Caveat: The most rapid changes are seen in Greenland ice cores, but Greenland’s temperature changes tend, in general, to be at least twice as rapid as globally averaged temperature changes, due to “Arctic amplification.”)
This graph is from an article on Dr. Curry’s “Climate etc.” site:
Those much larger and more rapid (but 100% natural!) temperature changes are known to have been globally synchronous, though much less abrupt in the southern hemisphere, and they persisted for hundreds or (more typically) thousands of years — and nobody knows with certainty why they occurred.
Fortunately, those very large, abrupt temperature changes apparently did not cause mass extinctions. Mankind, polar bears, pikas, coral, and nearly every other existing species of animal and plant all survived those sharp climate changes. That suggests we needn’t fear that the current (comparatively slight) warming trend could be catastrophic for them.