Mike Jonas
My paper (“the paper”) on the “100,000-year problem” has been published. Many thanks to WUWT reader Burl Henry for recommending the WJARR journal – most journals are quite simply too expensive for unfunded authors like me (eg, 9,500 Euros to be open-access in Nature).
The paper: The inter-glacial cycle is not a 100,000-year cycle, it is a shorter cycle with missing beats
The main point of the paper is that the 100,000-year and 41,000-year inter-glacial cycles that are the subject of the “100,000-year problem” never existed.
I won’t repeat the abstract here – you can access it, and the whole paper which is open-access, at the above link. I find it difficult to believe that any rational person could still believe that climate models can work, given the IPCC’s statement that “long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible“. The paper provides empirical evidence supporting that IPCC statement. Even though the paper refers only to multi-thousand-year cycles, it seems reasonable to suppose that similar non-linear chaotic features apply at both longer and shorter time-scales too. There still seem to be plenty of irrational people in climate science, though.
This supposed “100,000-year problem” has an interesting history:
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- Wikipedia states : “The 100,000-year-problem refers to the lack of an obvious explanation for the periodicity of ice ages at roughly 100,000 years for the past million years, but not before, when the dominant periodicity corresponded to 41,000 years.“.
- The “problem” has been written up in Wikipedia since at least 2007 (possibly much earlier?), when the article ended with “Alternatively, the 21,000 year Precession cycles may be responsible.“.
- Once there was an established perception that the inter-glacial cycles changed dramatically from a 41,000-year cycle to a 100,000-year cycle about a million years ago, that idea got “stuck” and couldn’t be removed. When Liesecki and Rahmo put together their temperature chart for the Quaternary ice age, for example, they “tuned” the data to make it come more into line with the 41,000-year obliquity cycle: “In our second tuning we loosen the LSR constraint in order to keep the δ18O signal approximately in phase with the obliquity component of the ice model.“.
- Back in 2006, Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer published a paper which identified the much shorter Precession cycle as the main driver, but with missing cycles. ie, the cycle sometimes failed to start an inter-glacial period, with very low versus not-so-low concentrations of CO2 being a significant factor. The whole Ellis and Palmer paper is really worth reading!
- For a long time, the Wikipedia article on the 100,000-year problem had no indication that the Precession cycle played a role in the inter-glacial cycle, with the 2007 “Precession” statement having been removed[*] . In particular, there was no mention of Ellis and Palmer.
- It is difficult to believe that the Wikipedia authors were unaware of the Ellis and Palmer paper, because there was a “Ralph Ellis” page in Wikipedia, which explicitly referred to the Ellis and Palmer paper under the heading “Ice ages, precession and dust-albedo feedbacks“.
- Even worse than that, and looking suspiciously like an attempt to remove Ralph Ellis’s ideas completely, in 2017 the “Ralph Ellis” page was deleted from Wikipedia. See Deletionpedia.
- A recent addition[*] to the Wikipedia “100,000-year problem” page now mentions Precession again, but still with no mention of Ellis and Palmer.
[*] I say this from memory, because I cannot remember seeing in the last year or two any Wikipedia suggestion that Precession plays a significant role. I may be mistaken. The Wikipedia page has been edited 5 times in March 2022 alone, so unravelling its history would be rather time-consuming.
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The paper should be indexed in Google Scholar in due course. Journal editing placed the “Discussion” section before “Conclusion”, although I thought the other way round was more natural because “Discussion” discusses issues arising from the Conclusion.
I hope that the paper will go at least some way towards resurrecting the ideas put forward by Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer, and that the climate modellers will start to take seriously the IPCC statement that “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.“.
Mike
How are they to have any fun if they aren’t allowed to make scary predictions?
All they have is terrifying children and the gullible, why prevent the most fulfilling aspect of their lives?
Everything is a pendulum. Waves on water, rabbits go up and rabbits go down, and hawks/coyotes follow. Day/night, seasons, temperatures, birds/bees wings go up and down. EM waves, sound waves, and so on. Orbits, precessions, convections, and comets all are cyclical. ENSO, PDO, AMO all are cycles. Nature is cyclical. The trick is to find the frequencies, phases, and interactions.
Forecasting a coupled, non-linear system with simple averages and linear regressions is a losing proposition. Models driven by simple linear increases in concentration of CO2 are not going to take all the interactions into account properly. Models that don’t use variable periods in cycles for various variables that interact won’t generate proper probabilities.
This is just one reason I am skeptical of models that turn into linear projections. That just can’t be science.
The underlined italicized text is a small mistake in Ellis and Palmer: “The IPCC data gives a similar figure of 2.8 W/m² for all greenhouse gases, but neither of these values include water vapour feedbacks … But since interglacial warming events average about 5000 years this represents just 0.006 W/m² per decade of additional feedbacks and warming, which is about a third of the energy required to power a honey bee in flight (Roberts and Elekonich, 2005).”
The 0.006 W/m² bee analogy seemed like a way to illustrate the tiny perturbation represented by the average annual 0.0035 W/m² perturbation from forcing by CO₂ emissions.
So I looked up Roberts and Elekonich, and they report the aerodynamic power of the honey bee as 0.2 Wg¯¹ — that is, per gram not per meter-squared.
Ellis and Palmer mistakenly equated Wm¯² to Wg¯¹.
The mean weight of adult honey bees is 120 mg. The thorax where power is generated is about 4×4×4 mm. Energy flux in W/m^2 per bee is then 0.2 W/gm × 0.12 gm ÷ 16×10¯⁶ m² = 2000 W/m². For four radiating surfaces front and rear neglected), that’s 500 W/m² per surface.
If emission is over the whole body of a honey bee (12.5 mm × 4 mm× 4 mm), the emission works out to 120 W/m² per surface (for four surfaces).
Hot stuff, the honey bee. The analogy with the annual average 0.0035 W/m² of CO₂ emissions becomes even more interesting.
It can now be said that climate modelers claim to detect a perturbation to Earth’s climate that’s 2000/0.035 = 57,143 times smaller than the energy required to power a honey bee in flight. Bonus! 🙂
There’s a mistake above, which it’s too late to edit out. So, here’s the corrected comment — same result slightly different numbers. If the moderator could remove the older one.
The underlined italicized text is a small mistake in Ellis and Palmer: “The IPCC data gives a similar figure of 2.8 W/m² for all greenhouse gases, but neither of these values include water vapour feedbacks … But since interglacial warming events average about 5000 years this represents just 0.006 W/m² per decade of additional feedbacks and warming, which is about a third of the energy required to power a honey bee in flight (Roberts and Elekonich, 2005).”
The 0.006 W/m² bee analogy seemed like a way to illustrate the tiny perturbation represented by the average annual 0.035 W/m² perturbation from forcing by CO₂ emissions.
So I looked up Roberts and Elekonich, and they report the aerodynamic power of the honey bee as 0.2 Wg¯¹ — that is, per gram not per meter-squared.
Ellis and Palmer mistakenly equated Wm¯² to Wg¯¹. And 3×0.006 = 0.018, not 0.18.
Carrying on, the mean weight of adult honey bees is 120 mg. The thorax where power is generated is about 4×4×4 mm. Energy flux in W/m² per bee in flight is then 0.2 W/gm × 0.12 gm ÷ 16×10¯⁶ m² = 1500 W/m². For four radiating surfaces (front and rear neglected), that’s 375 W/m² per surface.
If emission is over the whole body of a flying honey bee (four 12.5 mm × 4 mm surfaces), the emission works out to 120 W/m² per surface.
Hot stuff, the honey bee. The analogy with the annual average 0.035 W/m² forcing of CO₂ emissions becomes even more interesting.
It can now be said that climate modelers claim to detect an annual perturbation to Earth’s climate that’s 1500/0.035 = 42,857 times smaller than the energy required to power a honey bee in flight. Bonus! 🙂
That seems to be about in the ball park for a large butterfly flapping its wings! 🙂
If you count Ellis and Palmer’s honey bees, you will see that there are about 8 bees to the square metre.
I jest. I think what Ellis and Palmer were saying was that the bee’s efforts per gram, if applied to a square metre, ………..
So, the Earth needs a good cardiologist!
We aren’t having too much luck with all the proctologists
Mike, an interesting paper. You say:
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. I just did a CEEMD analysis of the EPICA data. Here are the results.
As you can see, both the 41,000 year and the 100,000-year cycles are very real.
And what’s not real is the 21,000-year cycle. I don’t mean that the 21,000-year precession isn’t real. I mean that there’s no sign of it in the EPICA temperature records.
The oddity of this to me is the 71,000-year cycle … especially since the beat frequency of a 71,000-year cycle and a 41,000-year cycle is a 97,000-year cycle … which is the accurate measurement of the “100,000-year cycle”
I do love a world full of mysteries.
My best to you,
w.
Full of mysteries indeed. The problems with using CEEMD to look for the 21,000-year cycle are that (a) it’s not a constant 21,000-year cycle, as the paper says it’s influenced by other cycles, and (b) thanks to the non-linear nature of Earth’s climate, the cycle misses beats which will create havoc with cycle-seeking software. Note that although precession plays the major role in the 65N cycle, it is not the only influence so 65N doesn’t fit it precisely, and the specific cycle I was matching was the 65N cycle not precession.
The crucial factor is that every single one of the 17 glacial terminations as identified by the authors I cite hits a 65N minimum exactly on the button. I consider that to be very difficult to argue against successfully. Note that since I played no part in identifying either the glacial termination dates or the 65N dates, I could not possibly have influenced them in any way and I could not have cherry-picked anything, etc.
We are dealing with a chaotic non-linear system, and it is very reasonable to suppose that cycle-seeking software is quite simply not going to be able to see some of the cycles. But 17 out of 17 dates absolutely smack on is surely enough for humans, if not software, to understand as being very significant.
I would have liked to look even further back in time, but the most accepted ice age temperature data appears to be by Liesecki and Rahmo, and they state in their paper that they adjusted the dates to give a better match to the 41,000-year cycle. I emailed Lorraine Liesecki to see if she could provide the unadjusted data, but I got no reply (maybe I’m in a spam filter?).
PS. My paper refers to 100,000-year and 41,000-year inter-glacial cycles, not to 100,000-year and 41,000-year temperature cycles. Yes, there are 100,000-year and 41,000-year cycles visible in the temperature data, but I was looking specifically at the dates of glacial terminations.
There are no 71kyr or 97kyr intervals between interglacials of the last 800kyrs, but curiously their sum is twice 84kyrs, and 84kyrs is a common interglacial interval.
Ellis & Palmer, 2016 is open access at Elsevier (ScienceDirect). But only in html; their PDF download is broke. I had to go to researchgate to get the PDF.
Re: Wikipedia – For years the Quantized Inertia (QI) hypothesis lingered at Wikipedia; read by few. Recently the idea got some funding to validate it – with very promising results too. But Wikipedia removed QI because it’s ‘not official physics‘!
String Theory – of course – has a massive article at Wikipedia. But there are tens of thousands of PhDs awarded studying it. It’s official physics – although nothing in it will ever be validated because it can’t be and it’s really just playing with maths – not physics at all!
Modern Science is owned by intellectual Stalinists.
Planetary cycles creating Earth’s orbital variations would be also ordering longer term changes in solar activity, in different combinations, giving rise to interference patterns.
There is a mirror image symmetry centered at interglacial 11C, including minor peaks, which has broken down since the Eemian. The red lines in the image are at 369kyrs, or 9 x 41kyrs.
The most common interval between the peaks measures at about 84,000 years.
Using the 1726.62 year cycle of grand solar minima as a unit;
49 x 1726.62 = 84,604.
And the smaller intervals like between 15a and 15c:
18 x 1726.62 = 31,079.
Adding them together is 67 x 1726.62 = 115,683 years, which coincides very closely with 25 x the 4627.33 year cycle of the four gas giants. That 115.6kyr interval exists between several of the larger and the smaller peaks, like before and after 11c, as well as between 17c and 15a, and between 15e and 13a.
The graph is from figure 2 here, zoom it out and make an 84-85kyr marked paper gauge from the time scale to measure between the interglacial peaks.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2015RG000482