By Andy May
I last wrote about Climate Change and Civilization for the past 4,000 Years in 2016. Since then, a lot has changed, and I’ve learned a lot more about the subject. First, we learned that various air and sea temperature proxies, such as ice core δ18O or tree rings, are all different. For a discussion of some temperature proxies used and the problems with them, see here. Proxies have different accuracies, they are often sensitive to the temperature of different seasons, and they have different temporal resolutions. Thus, as pointed out by Soon and Baliunas in 2003, they are all local and “cannot be combined into a hemispheric or global quantitative composite.”
The global average surface temperature (GAST) reconstruction relied upon in the IPCC AR6 report was by Kaufman, et al. The authors admit that the average spacing of each temperature (the temporal resolution) is 164 years. Thus, to compare the entire global instrumental temperature record to the proxies in a valid way, one must average all the daily readings since 1860 into one point. That is, the rate of warming since 1860 is irrelevant, the proxy record cannot see a 164-year increase. The problem of comparing daily modern instrumental temperature records to proxies is discussed by Renee Hannon here.
Temperature Proxies
Most temperature proxies are sensitive to only one season, yet it is clear that seasonal temperatures vary at different rates and yearly average temperatures vary differently than seasonal temperatures. Mixing them statistically to create an accurate GAST record of the distant past is not possible. This problem is discussed in more detail here and here. Further most proxies are affected by precipitation frequency and/or CO2 levels as well as temperature. We know CO2 is higher today than in the past few thousand years and cannot correct for precipitation frequency or amount.
While combining hundreds of proxies into one composite “global” or “hemispheric” record is a fool’s errand, we can look at high-quality, high-resolution local proxies from multiple places to get a qualitative sense of global or hemispheric climate changes, which is also what Soon and Baliunas did in 2003. Two records are especially helpful, they are the Greenland ice core record by Vinther, et al. and the Indonesian Throughflow 500-meter water depth record from the Makassar Strait by Rosenthal, et al. The Makassar Strait record is representative of northern Pacific sea surface temperatures and the Vinther Greenland record is representative of air temperature in the Greenland-Renland-Agassiz area. The Vinther record is superior to the more commonly used GISP2 record (Alley, 2004) & (Alley, 2000) because it accounts for elevation changes and ice flow. Both corrupt the GISP2 reconstruction.
Both the Vinther and Rosenthal temperature records have a 20-year resolution over our 4,000-year period, which is a good resolution for proxies. Accuracy is good in both records and about ±0.3°C. Both are Northern Hemisphere proxies but are located 9,500 miles apart. They are compared to a comparable (10-year resolution) Antarctic proxy (Jouzel, et al., 2007) in figure 1. As you can see, averaging Northern Hemisphere proxies with Southern Hemisphere proxies is not always a good idea, temperature trends vary with latitude.
As figure 1 suggests the long decline in temperature labeled the “Neoglacial” is mainly a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon, this is more clearly seen in figure 1 here. Figure 2 compares the Vinther and Rosenthal records from figure 1 with selected historical events and Usoskin’s solar grand minima (SGM) record (Usoskin, 2017) shown as orange outlined black dots. Notice the smoothed version of the Vinther record is plotted in figure 1 and the unsmoothed 20-year record is plotted in figure 2. To see figure 2 in full resolution, click on the image or here. The figure prints well on 8.5×11 inch or A4 paper.
The Blytt-Sernander climatic periods (Schrøder, et al., 2004) are identified at the top of figure 2. Below that the Vinther and Rosenthal proxy temperature records are plotted along with major historical events. The red dashed line on the right is a smoothed HadCRUT4 composite of the six populated grid cells (meaning grid cells with temperature values) near Greenland that have sufficient data since 1850. The line was adjusted vertically to the Vinther record where they overlapped. Both the Vinther and the 20-year smoothed HadCRUT4 records show a peak near 1934. The Rosenthal record is from 500 meters down in the Makassar Strait in Indonesia. The red box is the average temperature, at the same depth, from 2004-2016, from the University of Hamburg global ocean climatology database (Gouretski, 2019).
Major historical climatic periods are identified below the solar grand minima. Both proxies show a decline in Northern Hemisphere temperature that bottoms out between 1700 and 1810. Taken together they show peaks from 800 to 1000AD (the Medieval Warm Period), 500BC to 400AD (Roman Warm Period), and 1700BC to 1000BC (Minoan Warm Period). Significant differences in the proxies appear from 1400 to 800BC, 200BC to 0AD, and 300 to 500AD.
Historical Details
In 2000BC the most advanced cultures in the world were in the eastern Mediterranean and they were in disarray. The Egyptian Old Kingdom had collapsed and was in the Egyptian Dark Age, before that the Akkadian Empire (mostly in present day Iraq) had collapsed. What grew out of the chaos were the Egyptian New Kingdom in 1975BC and the development of the great Minoan “Palaces” on Crete and the surrounding islands. The Minoans had the most advanced ships of the time and traded widely. The Minoan trading culture peaked between 1690BC and 1450BC when an unknown catastrophe destroyed all the palaces except Knossos on Crete (Cunliffe, 2008, p. 190). Knossos survived until the Mycenaean and Hittite civilizations collapsed in the great catastrophe of 1177BC (Cline, 2014).
Farther east, there was an advanced civilization in northwest India and Pakistan called the Harappa. While the Harappan civilization can trace its roots to 5500BC or earlier, the mature Harappan period existed between 2600BC and 1300BC when it collapsed. Although the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations pre-date the Harappan, it was probably larger than they were (Britannica).
In China, the Shang Dynasty ruled most of the Yellow River valley from around 1600BC until about 1046BC (Britannica) when it collapsed and was overthrown by King Wu of Zhou. The final decades of the Shang Dynasty were very turbulent climatically and unusually cold and dry, with common dust storms. Ice appeared in the Yellow River and there were frequent harvest failures and famines. The poor weather aided King Wu’s conquest (Behringer, 2010, p. 57).
In 800BC there was a “Climate Plunge,” sometimes called the Hallstatt disaster, in Europe and the Middle East (Behringer, 2010, p. 60). It marks the beginning of the Iron Age in Europe and is associated with a drop in temperatures, longer winters, and glacier advances. Large scale migrations occurred, and civil wars broke out in Egypt.
China was finally unified by Ch’in about 200BC, but chaos ensued after his death and the Han Dynasty formed in 202BC. It lasted until 220AD. This is also the period when the Roman Empire was at its peak (Behringer, 2010, p. 62).
Grapes were introduced to Britain by the Roman Emperor Probus in 280AD. A worsening climate initiated the so-called “great migration” period about 250AD, it led to troubles in the Roman Empire and the collapse of the Han Dynasty in 220AD. Later, around 375 the Huns invaded Europe, driving the Germans toward Rome, which they destroyed. Rome had a brief revival about 400AD, but eventually collapsed. A climatic disaster about 537AD, possibly due to a major tropical volcanic eruption, aided in the fall of the Empire. This was near the beginning of the European Dark Age.
One of the most catastrophic climate disasters in recorded history occurred around 800 AD. In 843 a starving wolf burst into a church in Sénonais, France during services and attacked the flock. Wolves were such a problem at this time, Charlemagne deployed teams of wolf hunters in every county of his kingdom sometime between 800 and 813. A third of the people in Europe died in 784AD. The decades around 800AD were miserable in Europe. Yet the period was unremarkable in China and Japan. However, the Maya suffered several severe droughts between 760 and 910AD and the Mayan government and nobility disappeared around 900AD amid a severe population decline (Behringer, 2010, p. 71).
Around the mid-800s the Vikings emerged as the North Atlantic warmed and they conquered portions of Britain, Ireland, Russia, France, and Sicily. The Medieval Warm Period began earlier in Northern Europe than in the south, which benefited the Vikings. They settled in Greenland in 985AD and they prospered until around 1410 when the last letter from Greenland arrived at the Vatican. Sometime after 1410 they all perished and some of their farms are now in permafrost. Ships trying to sail to Greenland during this time could not get past the abundant icebergs.
Little Ice Age
While most sources start the Little Ice Age around 1300, it did not begin in earnest until the late 1400s. The most severe part of the Little Ice Age was from about 1645 to 1715, although extremely cold periods occurred from 1310 to 1322, 1560-1600, and 1800-1850. The period from 1560-1660 became known as the “age of the witch persecutions” (Behringer, 2010, p. 130). There had to be someone or some group to blame for the lousy weather, and the group most often blamed were older single women. Others claimed the weather was a punishment from God for sins such as sodomy or staging plays.
The effect on society of the poor weather of the Little Ice Age was horrible. The mid-1600s saw more wars around the world than any other era until the 1940s (Parker, 2008). In the 1640s, the Ming Dynasty and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapsed. Serious revolts shook the UK, Spain, Russia, France, and Istanbul. In London, King Charles I was the first king to be put on trial. One of China’s later emperors, Yongzheng, estimated that during this period over half the Chinese population died (Parker, 2008).
In France the Fronde Revolt (1648-1653) and the resulting illness, want, and misery may have killed two-thirds of the population of the villages around Paris. Thomas Hobbs wrote in 1651 that the “life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Parker, 2008).
It wasn’t just the cold that made the Little Ice Age miserable, it was also drought, severe storms, and the occasional summers with extreme heat (May & Crok, 2024). The weather in the Little Ice Age was much more extreme than now. I have written elsewhere that storminess was worse during the Little Ice Age see figure 6 here. This is logical since colder periods have a steeper temperature gradient from the tropics to the poles and it is the gradient that powers storms.
As Geoffrey Parker writes, the extraordinary claims of misery of the people that lived in the 1600s have been shown to be correct. It is understandable that many today looking back on the period are skeptical of the stories, but they have been repeatedly shown to be true. The Little Ice Age was real, and devastating to humanity.
Conclusions
Many paleoclimatologists, archeologists, and historians agree that there is a correspondence between the level of solar activity and climate. They also agree that humans do better in warmer times than in colder times. It is time for the “consensus” to face up to the historical and archeological facts.
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Without a doubt, Gates and other WEF’s would like to make famine and black death great again.
Oof! I bet that hurt poor Billy.
Nice post, Mr. May!
I hope that Bill has some climate justice coming his way.
It’s interesting that the black death occurred at the beginning of the little ice age when people, rats, and their fleas moved indoors as temperatures started to fall. The climate crazies think that warmer temperatures cause more illness, but it’s the cooler temperatures that do so.
Excellent point, thanks.
“beginning of the little ice age when people, rats, and their fleas moved indoors as temperatures started to fall.”
Rats go indoors every winter
A slightly colder or warmer winter will not change that behavior.
Rats and other rodents seek warm places to nest when temperatures drop in the fall and winter. Homes are ideal because they are constantly warm and may have food sources.
Entering homes. Rats and other rodents typically enter homes between October and February.
and the ball-bearing mousetraps have their bibs on in anticipation of a good feed. Their girlfriends do, too.
By the time fall and winter occurs the rat population is usually at a low ebb due to lack of food. It’s when they don’t move out during spring and early summer (while their populations are growing) that their inside population peaks. Therefore long, hard winters cause more rat-spread disease.
The relationship between the various factors of the biosphere is convoluted and intricate. But it is pretty obvious that cold temps, especially extended ones, are harder on the human species than any other seasonal period with warmer temps.
The worse the WX, the more do people stay indoors.
They also went on a rampage and started killing cats which exacerbated the problem.
This is just folklore. There have been many plague outbreaks through Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance, some during colder times, but not all. Poor hygiene certainly contributed to severity of the spread, and in the Middle Ages practices were worse than in Roman period. The outbreak during Little Ice Age affected warmer areas more, probably simply because they were more populated.
“This is just folklore.”
The black death was folklore? What are you smoking?
Folklore is not the Black Death, but its causation by cooling climate.
So flu season during the Fall and Winter is also folklore? Stating nonsense does not make it true.
Please clarify what you think is folklore. That the plague occurred in the “warmer areas” means little if this particularly deadly plague killed more while those exact area were colder than normal.
When comparing with past plagues (and their vectors) we need to make sure our comparisons are correct (regarding which variables are different and by how much).
Direct causation of Middle Age plague outbreak by cooling climate is a conjecture. Part of the folklore is that the bacteria made it to Europe with migrating rodents due to climate change. This is very unlikely. Multiple previous plague outbreaks happened before including warmer periods. More likely, humans travelling along Silk Road brought it.
Cooling may or may not have made it worse than it could have been (harder life conditions do not help during a pandemic with such mortality rates), but I have not seen a study, precisely, like you said, making correct comparisons disentangling all variables. So, while some plague outbreaks happed during cooling climate, causation by colder climate remains a conjecture.
People at the time and historians since knew and know how the plague arrived in Europe. You could easily have looked it up.
Colder climate drove rats west to Crimea, thence on a plague ship to Italy.
Longer, harder winters meant people stayed inside more, where rats and fleas joined them. Two of the three European plague epidemics were during cold periods, and the other coming out of one, with more global travel.
“…which variables are different…”
A major variable. In 1666 most ‘homes’ in London had thatched roofs. A nesting area for rats. After the “Great Fire” of that year replacement homes were roofed with tile. London hasn’t had a plague outbreak since.
“The Minoan trading culture peaked between 1690BC and 1450BC when an unknown catastrophe …”
This may be reference to the eruption of Thera (aka Santorini) about 1600BCE. Wikipedia has it as: Minoan eruption
Not likely, the dates are wrong.
Seems that the history of the human race is one catastrophe after another. So much for anybody’s theory of a past golden age of peace and climate stability.
That’s the history of life, period.
It’s the kind of stuff you remember through the ages, unlike a warm sunny day in the spring.
Absolutely. According to the climate cultists our civilisation is doomed because the planet got one degree warmer.
In reality we are incredibly lucky to have lived in an age when the climate has been incredibly benign. All the important global indicators (deaths from extreme weather, food productivity, human life span etc etc) show dramatic improvements over the last 100 years. Human welfare indexes (e.g. the OECD human welfare index) show that the lot of humanity has been steadily improving. Strangely, the OECD index has not been updated for several decades – I wonder why? Could it be that the OECD, like all the other global organisations, has been taken over by the cultists?
In contrast, the Little Ice Age was a truly terrible time for humanity. Storms were far worse than those we have experienced. Studies have shown that bones from the LIA are significantly shorter than in the modern period – and also shorter compared to the Medieval Warm Period. Starvation and disease was far more common.
When I first became interested in climate change, whenever I came across a date for the demise of a civilisation (e.g. the Mayans and Akkadian Empire) I plotted them on a graph of the GRIP ice core temperature. Without exception, every civilisation demise occured in a cold period.
Truly, warm is far better than cold.
Chris
“In contrast, the Little Ice Age was a truly terrible time for humanity. Storms were far worse than those we have experienced.”
That was because the temperature variances were greater. In a warmer world, the temperature variances are less, which tends to make storms less intense. The idea that global warming causes worse storms is “folklore” (to quote Someone).
…. as evidenced by the hurricane intensity data, yes:
there were several eruptions of that island/volcano. And one may have been a source for the Exodus stories in the Bible.
Thanks, Andy. Great article, as usual.
I’ll try and track down the Vinther reconstruction and take a closer look at it. The data source wasn’t immediately obvious from your bibliography reference. I’ll admit I have some reservations about it being more accurate than GISP2. It appears to have a greatly attenuated millennial cycle between 4000-6000BC.
Here is the link:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08355
I think he explains it pretty well.
That one is paywalled, here you can get it for free:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26817271_Holocene_thinning_of_the_Greenland_ice_sheet
I also discuss some of the details about Vinther here:
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2021/06/23/how-to-compare-today-to-the-past/
Thank goodness it didn’t keep heading downwards. !!!
It will Just wait.
Think I’ll be lucky enough in my life time not to have it drop down to debilitatingly cold temperatures.
Especially here on the East Coast of Australia. 🙂
The Little Ice Age is a major embarrassment for the “CO2 is the climate thermostat” crowd, so Mann eliminating it with his hockey stick was rather too convenient.
Nor was the LIA limited to the North Atlantic region and caused by volcanoes, as asserted by Mann. Speleothem data from China:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002AGUFMPP71C..09L/abstract#:~:text=A%20brief%20cooling%20during%20this,ended%20in%20the%20mid%2D1800s.
Solar mínima were the main cause, with the deepest cold during the Maunder.
People F-up data to support a cause, then the cause changes and they have nothing left but F-ed up data – which they don’t always tell their students.
It will take decades to un-FU “climate data”.
Why bother!? Just move it over into the college of “soft” sciences, with feminist glaciolgy and gender studies! Then all the phantasmists can more easily put what passes for their minds together to come up with new panics, and everyone else has a an easy target for pranks on April 1st!
I look at it more as the amount of energy transported from the tropics where it is absorbed and where it is expressed. If it is express at the poles it’s a warm world. If it’s expressed at the tropics it’s very cold. Today is very cold because of the locked in nature of our oceans. The oceans are 90% between 0-4 degrees C, it’s very cold. Temperature isn’t as important to density as salinity. When we have passages that can make dense rivers of water to the bottom of the ocean the world we see a greenhouse world as it gets distributed to the whole planet. During this coldest period of the last 480 million years, interglacials are a brief interlude where energy gets built up in the oceans through stratification in the tropics and then gets transported for a time towards the poles then this slows down and more of the energy gets evaporated in the tropics as we see with growing and large deserts during the ice ages and changes during the Holocene due to strength and where the Hadley Cells come down. One can see it in the Makassar Straits cooling of the oceans, the D-O events shows brief warming that stalls. The changeover from 100k years to 40k years as the world cooled into the icehouse world we live. Ocean transport of heat are by far the biggest factor of our climate.
Speaking of the last 480 million years, don’t forget the two earlier ice ages,
Andean-Saharan (460-420 million years ago)
years ago)late Paleozoic (360-255 million).
Adding in the 2.6 million years of the current ice age, we get 147.6 million of 480 million that were ice ages, perhaps all with many cycles between glacial and interglacial. The other 332 million years were apparently much warmer than today.
Very shocking, climate is variable over the years and it is mostly caused by Sol’s variability. And people can grow more food in warmer times and live easier.
“And people can grow more food in warmer times”
Enhanced atmospheric CO2 helps quite a bit too.. as do manufactured fertilisers.
Oddly, these three things, warmth, CO2, fertilisers, are all under attack from the far-left. !
Far left is too generous a description. The agents destroying civilised society are actually off the scale. Insane socialists might be closer to what they are. Maybe criminally insane Marxists’ is closer to describing the mindset engaged in what is happening across mostly Western societies.
Given that they lie about everything, the fact that they identify as the far-left has about as much truth to it as they are “progressive”.
Organized human parasitism doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though, does it?
As long as they aren’t being lied to and ruled by a cult that wants to destroy their liberty, economic freedom, and dictate that they eat highly processed soy slop.
Remember, we have to self flagellate to atone for environmental sins and to save mother earth.
Eating gruel and turning your thermostat down is just another way to do that.
I have read some of May’s and Vinos’s articles. I am still trying to figure out why the temperature gradient itself would lead to bigger storms. I am taking the example of tropical storms which i assume happen because of a buildup of energy/ heat at the tropics. Correct me if im wrong but i think the jetstream affects its severity. Maybe someone can explain how the temperature gradient differences work to make storms more severe. And: is there a difference between winter and summer storms in this matter? I am aware of the mechanism and effect of colliding preasure zones ( low/high) and always thought they influenced severe weather a great deal almost in a swings and roundabouts way. Please school me..
Temperature is one thing, and very important, but rainfall is just as important. Was Egypt much more rainy back 4000 years ago?
Well about 1800 BC one of the Pharaohs – Pepe II I think, was overthrown because natural climate change caused the rains to fail in East Africa, hence the Nile failed to flood, hence starvation, and proof the Pharaoh didn’t have sway over the gods.
====
Incidentally, it was so cold about 900 AD the Nile froze – as did the Black Sea.
Pepe II ruled from 2278 BC to 2184 BC. It seems that his reign ended in a revolt which also ended the 6th Dynasty and the end of the pyramid builders. But it was usual to blame the Pharaoh if the Nile didn’t flood, and the people sometimes would revolt.
To the green elites, the common people are revolting
People will notice that Pepe II’s reign lasted 94 years. His reign was the longest in Egyptian history. He became Pharaoh at the age of 6, but everyone considered he was Pharaoh since birth. The real question is if the scribe who wrote the particulars of his reign mistook 64 for 94 as the cursive hieratic scripts are similar. –source: “Chronicle of the Pharaohs” by Peter A. Clayton; pp 64-67.
What is the cause of deserts today? The Hadley Cell. Where the Hadley Cell comes down is where the deserts are and they move along with the seasons and why we have various aspects like monsoons.
Now why was there a few thousand years of more rain 4-12k years ago in today’s Sahara Desert? The Hadley Cell is mostly caused by storms in the tropics that forces air high up that cools and rains squeezes out, the highest atmosphere by far is at the tropics shows its power. As it it gets pushed up it starts to move to towards the poles because of Coriolis Effect and as it descends it warms up through the atmosphere from the Adiabatic Process like a Chinook Winds or Diablo Winds, and very very dry warm wind descends causing deserts where it lands. Now why did this change? The oceans were not as static and were pushing much more warm water to the poles and not stagnant stratification that happens when it is more powerful. So the answer is a change in the oceans that was transferring more energy to the poles that melted the giant glaciers that were once on the NA and Europe, oceans are the only thing that can transfer enough energy to the poles.
The rainy Sahara is evidence of this change of oceans and the effects of changes to the Hadley Cell in the past. There used to no arctic tree line 9k years ago, trees all the way to the arctic ocean. A much warmer Arctic Ocean, one can see at least 6 degree warmer ocean from the types of shelled animals that lived there.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683617715701
“I am still trying to figure out why the temperature gradient itself would lead to bigger storms.” Air at uniform temperature has no inspiration to rise or fall. Air temperature gradient can describe air temperature differences that somehow got into a pattern that does not match expected “warm up, cold down”. When air finds itself in an unexpected way, it corrects itself by moving. Moving air causes weather.
To get why “warm up, cold down” is expected, see bouyancy from Archimedes (less dense things float on more dense things) plus the ideal gas law from Boyle et al (hotter things get less dense). The assumption is that other factors like a giant spinning Earth with ice and clouds heated by a changing sun doesn’t constantly rearrange air in unexpected ways.
The modelers seem to omit as many factors as possible from the models because there are too many factors to model and because there is too much about the factors they’d have to agree about.
Oh, so
bigger temperature gradient = bigger storms
because
bigger temperature gradient = bigger inspiration for air to move.
Basic energy physics.
Weather is a thermal engine.
Like an electric engine, the greater potential difference, the greater the power/work that can be generated.
Weather, like climate, is not due to a single control knob.
My understanding of it is this. As cold air meets warm tropical air, low pressure systems form as the warm air rises over the top of the cold air, while at the same time, the cold air rushes to fill the vacuum left by the rising warm air. The bigger the differential between the cold and warm airmasses, the more aggressive this process becomes, causing the warm air to rise more quickly, and the cold air to sink more rapidly into the depression. This in turn causes a rapidly deepening low pressure system to form.
During the Autumn months, relatively cold air starts to sink towards the tropics, where sea surface temperatures are still very warm. So this very warm, moist air causes aggressively deepening lows to form, aka tropical storms and hurricanes, typhoons etc. By the time winter has arrived, the tropical climes have been moderated, with much heat driven upwards by the many Autumn storms and redistributed into the upper atmosphere and cooled. However, because there remains a fair bit of warmth from the tropics constantly moving northwards with ocean currents, such as the NA conveyor (AKA Gulf Stream) and interacting with the cold air to the north, this continues to maintain a fairly steep temperature gradient. This of course still allows for fierce winter storms to develop. Although not usually as powerful as the Autumnal storms, still a force to be reckoned with. Rapidly forming cyclogenesis forms for example often off the coast of NE America, where warm waters from the Gulf meet the cold Labrador current. Such storms are notorious driving extreme blizzards inland into Eastern Canada and the Eastern Seaboard.
Some have suggested that, with Polar regions warming more rapidly than the tropics, this actually reduces the temperature gradient, and should in theory reduce, rather than steepen the temperature gradient, thereby potentially reducing also the power of the Autumnal storms, and by extension, also the winter storms – eventually!
Although most heat from the Sun is absorbed by the tropical oceans, very little heat travels directly from the oceans to space. It must first go to the atmosphere and then travel (usually as latent heat in water vapor) to the upper atmosphere, above most water vapor, to radiate to space as the water vapor condenses into snow or rain.
Due to the high humidity, and CO2, in the lower atmosphere, it is near opaque to most IR, this is why the thermal energy must be high in the atmosphere to get radiated to space.
Periodically, the tropical oceans warm enough to send a lot of heat to the atmosphere, this is the Pacific El Nino and the comparable weather feature in the Atlantic. Both set off storms that naturally work their way toward the poles. Nearly all thermal energy makes its way to the poles in mid-latitude storms, and they are more common in the winter. Winters enhance the equator to pole temperature gradient since the winter pole is dark and cold. The poles emit more of their incoming thermal energy in the dark winter. In the summer, the incoming heat just melts ice and snow.
The heat traveling from the tropics to the poles does work and the work is our weather. Bigger gradient, bigger storms. The Little Ice Age was much stormier than today
More detail here:
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2022/08/16/the-sun-climate-effect-the-winter-gatekeeper-hypothesis-iii-meridional-transport-the-most-fundamental-climate-variable/
Here we go for a second time, somehow my first attempt at explaining this was lost. Low pressure systems form when cold air meets warm air. This is because warm air rises and cold air sinks. As the warm air rises, it leaves a vacuum, which is filled by denser cold air. The steeper the temperature difference between the two airmasses, the more quickly the low pressure system forms and deepens.
In Autumn, the temperature difference/ gradient between airmasses steepens, particularly in the tropics, where waters are still very warm. As air heading south from the cooling N Atlantic meets with the very warm, moist air in the tropics, this causes a very steep temperature gradient. As a result extremely rapid and intense low pressure systems form, causing tropical storms and hurricanes/typhoons.
By the time winter arrives, tropical airmasses have been moderated, so that the temperature gradient in those regions isn’t as extreme. However, the formation of sea ice, drives warm waters northwards, creating currents such as the NA conveyor (AKA Gulf Stream). Where these warm currents meet colder currents such as the Labrador Current, there is still the potential for rapidly deepening low pressure systems. Although not usually as extreme as tropical storms, such as hurricanes or typhoons, they can still pack a pretty severe punch. Such winter storms off the NE coast of N America, for example are notorious for driving powerful winds and blizzards into NE Canada and the Eastern Seaboard of the US – commonly termed Nor’easters! On the other side of the Atlantic, the UK also sits in the mixing zone of cold and warm air masses. However, during the winter months the UK tends to sit on the south side of the polar front, that marks the boundary between cold and warm. As a result, winter storms lash the UK with strong winds, usually (but not always) accompanied by rain, rather than snow.
Some contend that as the Arctic warms more rapidly than the tropics, this by definition, means that the temperature gradient will become less steep, therefore creating less powerful storms of tropical origin. By extension, this should also eventually mean less powerful winter storms as well.
But of course, the Arctic warming may well stagnate or even go into reverse. Certainly the loss of Arctic Sea Ice area, seems to have levelled off since 2012. Volume may still be reducing but I believe this is harder to determine accurately. If Arctic Sea Ice area continues to hold steady over the next decade, I believe it will become increasingly difficult for AGW supporters to continue to justify their reasoning. If it starts to rebound, then I think the science will be become even more “unsettled”. If on the other hand, we see another surge of sea ice loss, alongside observed more general warming, then it’s important to keep minds open to all of the possible forcing agents – including CO2😉
“Volume may still be reducing”
NOPE.
“including CO2″
You need to present some actual scientific evidence for this conjecture.
Did you know that there has been far less Arctic sea ice than now for most of the last 8000 or so years !
The Barents Sea Was Seasonally Ice Free For Much Of The Holocene…Today It’s Ice-Covered Year-Round
This matches many other proxy Arctic sea ice articles
Just need to go back to the 1920’s…
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22120865-arctic_ocean_getting_warm/
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/168839462?searchTerm=arctic%20glaciers%20%20melting&searchLimits=
The N-S movement of the sun is greatest at the equinox and smallest at the solstice, which is a large part of Tropical weather.
Storms follow this N-S shift with some lag. Summer is usually wet and winter usually dry as rains follow the winds.
Thank you (and others) for your reply. I get the mechanism now. However, it doesnt seem there are less storms now because of ‘global warming’. At what point becomes it apparent? The alarmists want to push the ‘ higher temperatures lead to more storms’ etc line. People here think it is the opposite and refer to the LIA as reference. There might be an issue w reporting back then as i take it only the most severe ones would get a headline. As Koonin and others (even the IPCC) have shown there is not much change in both occurance and severity over time. I dont know but alarm does not seem to be warranted..
The steepness of any gradient of any sort is a major factor in just about anything that happens across that gradient.
Basic energy physics.
Weather is a thermal engine.
Like an electric engine, the greater potential difference, the greater the power/work that can be generated.
Weather, like climate, is not due to a single control knob.
The gradient causes bigger and larger storms because it’s the cause of storms. Why does Atlantic Hurricanes peak during September? The waters in the Caribbean are often still very warm and the Arctic is starting to cool down sending down cool air aloft through the Ferrel Cell colliding with the Hadley Cell causing the ripples and the bumps of the Tropical Storms as it forms a Hurricane. As the gradient grows, as in the Little Ice Age, there were a greater number and larger more powerful storms. During the last Ice Age, the atmosphere transported a great amount of energy around the planet often sending sand from the increased deserts to various places around the globe. There are many aspects of a cold world with a very warm middle and the transport of energy around the planet. Venus has wind speeds of 100m/s on a world that rotates once a year and energy transfers are almost all atmospheric. A warm ocean decreases the differences and the need for energy transfer to balance in the atmosphere. The current cold oceans cause more storms because of the differences and the need to balance energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation
Hope that helps.
I think the narrative is that hotter air next to colder air experiences more energy difference more convection and ergo more storminess.
If “Accuracy is good in both records and about ±0.3°C” and the two records diverge by more than 0.6°C then what does the word “accuracy” mean?
Good question. Rosenthal does that calculation and explains it in his paper. Vinther did not even try. The proxies each use were developed in the instrumental era and probably hold for that 160 or so year period. Before 1850 does the “accuracy” hold? Your guess is as good as anyone elses.
Whatever the number is, these two proxies are among the best available. I’ve looked at more than 70 proxies in detail, and most of them are crap. These two, and Dome C (see figure 1) are among the best. For more detail see here:
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2017/06/09/a-holocene-temperature-reconstruction-part-4-the-global-reconstruction/
Thanks good answer.
One possibility is that the word “accuracy” is incorrectly used instead of “precision”.
Precision is obvious in a data set, it is a measure of its scatter. Accuracy is a measure of systematic error. Knowing accuracy requires independent knowledge of the true value.
https://www.portaspecs.com/precision-and-accuracy/
Then, it is also entirely possible for two data sets to be each 0.3 away from the true value, with the difference between the two 0.6, one 0.3 above, one 0.3 below.
“Knowing accuracy requires independent knowledge of the true value.”
In other words, get rid of the targets–one doesn’t know if they’re actually close to the bullseye when making measurements.
Until the weather event has passed, we don’t how accurate the weather forecast was.
Cli-Sci seems to depend on the computing power behind their “forecast” to project it’s accuracy.
How many failed predictions have they produced over the years?
Only a ‘Texas Sharpshooter’ can reliably determine the accuracy after the fact. 🙂 Precision does not require a reference to compare to.
How can one know the precision is 0.1 mm if one does not have a standard of the mm to refer to? Of course a measurement precise to 0.1 mm might be off from true value by 2 cm but how is determining either possible with the standard?
It doesn’t matter what the measurement index is when determining precision. We used to use “finger-width” on the old farm when shooting at a target. All shots within a finger-width was considered pretty good precision.
Precision is associated with repeatability of measurement. If the same instrument consistently reads the same value for the same measurand then it is considered to be precise. That is different than the instrument giving an accurate value.
Thus for evaluating precision it doesn’t matter if the readings are off by 2cm. Being off by 2cm only affects the accuracy of the instrument readings.
But the claim of what is being measured is meaningless, no matter how consistent, if it does not actually relate to the defined standard.
That is why calibration to at least a NIST traceable standard is important.
Here is a good blog to start with.
https://www.isobudgets.com/blog/
Andy,
Here is a document that might help.
https://pressbooks.online.ucf.edu/phy2053bc/chapter/accuracy-precision-and-significant-figures/
What this means is that the accuracy of a measurement may be terrible. Yet it may give a very precise measurements because it reads the same each time. Precision and resolution are somewhat related.
A device with a resolution of 0.1 may be very precise because it always reads the same when measuring a gauge block. Whereas a device that has a resolution of 0.001 may not be precise because its readings of that gauge block vary by 0.002. However, which one gives better answers?
This is where uncertainty enters the picture when developing an uncertainty budget.
Perhaps “correlation” is a better term. These three proxies correlate best with the instrumental estimate. We don’t know how accurate the instrumental estimate is at these locations. Local instruments are used as the standard in estimating the error.
Very nice Andy.
I don’t believe it. How could the climate change before humans started adding CO2 to the atmosphere!
All these Trumpian notions now seeing the light of day. And all the social media platforms now allowing this misinformation. However it will not taint the pure minded youth of Australia because they are no longer permitted to engage with social media.
Salute!
No doubt we humans and the assocsiated vegetable and “game” critters we have domesticated have done better than during the glacial ages.
I wonder why the warmists do not see this.
Gums opines…
Andy, you must be wrong.
The game of Hockey and, so, Hockey Sticks hadn’t been invented way back then. 😎
But there was (horse) pucky before, and there shall be pucks forevermore (because the auto revolution didn’t call for extirpation of that which had come before, like the EV revolution now demands). How one choses to deal with the pucky is up to you. Regardless of the shape of teh available tools, I would recommend using a stick to move it instead of your hands.
I would recommend a manure or mucking rake instead! And don’t let the pucks build up too much! I’ve mucked out stalls where the underlayers were so full of ammonia you had to hold your breath while shoveling! My eye brows have still not recovered!
Has Rud posted lately? I’m not reading every post, but I’ve not seen a Rud comment for a while.
Don’t know, hope he is OK.
Rud posted yesterday or today that he had traveled to Colorado to visit relatives.
Hard to see how these continual temperature changes fit the CO2 hypothesis.
They don’t. The CO2 Hypothesis has been disconfirmed.
There never actually was a falsifiable CO2 hypothesis – I mean a real one. Paraphrasing Arrhenius 1896 could have led to a real falsifiable hypothesis but, even there, the hypothesis would have been falsified at birth. Thus, although it wasn’t early on, it is now fraud.
The use of AD and BC for the timeline is refreshing. Now, it is CE and BCE – obviously for Christian Era and Before Christian Era; one of those minor nuisances by those who favor trivial change.
“Common Era”. No Christianity allowed. Otherwise keep AD and BC.
So if we’re supposed to use “Common Era”, how is common era determined? And why does it correspond so closely (i.e. exactly) with the Christian calendar?
Current Era, and Before Current Era. Can’t use anything whatsoever related to Christianity.
Or Common and Before Common. Why should there be standardized language?
There was a technical reason for the change. It was rather trivial in my opinion, too.
AC and BC were vacated due to the advent of computers.
Back then, there was no year 0.
1 AD was from the birth to the first anniversary of birth, his first year.
1 BC was the 12 months prior to the birth.
Putting a year 0 in the calendar made it easier for software programmers to calculate dates between AD and BC.
To distinguish from the former DC-AD system, they coined CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era).
Note also there never was a month 0 or a day of month 0 in the calendar.
Prior to the change there was no year 0.
The 21sth century and the 3rd millennium began on 1/1/2001
Putting a year 0 in the calendar made it easier for software programmers
Interesting – that’s what I do for a living and I can’t say I’ve ever encountered it – although I’ll grant that I have never dealt with BC date calculations. Pre-1970 has been a much more common issue for me.
“Many paleoclimatologists, archeologists, and historians agree that there is a correspondence between the level of solar activity and climate”
AM.
This is “science” by consensus based on sunspot counts that have been found to be incompetent proxies, grossly exaggerating tiny changes in top of the atmosphere TSI, as proven by satellite measurements since the 1970s.
Consensus “science” based on sunspot counts, with local / regional climate anecdotes as a substitute for real time global average temperature measurements, is junk science
Oh and here we all thought that you were all for “consensus”…
… as it seems to be your only evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2.
I agree, consensus is not part of any real science. 🙂
BeNasty, the head of the WUWT Peanut Gallery, continues his reign of error.
Science is theories based on evidence.
If the evidence is strong and has passed a long test of time, there is likely to be correct consensus.
Such as the 128 year old consensus, supported by at least 99.9% of scientists, that there is a greenhouse effect and manmade CO2 adds to it. The consensus you deny repeatedly so you can be laughed at, BeNasty.
The only consensus on the causes of climate change in the past 5000 years, is the causes were 100% natural up to the 20th century.
There is no consensus on what caused the Little Ice Age nor any measurement of the global average temperature in those centuries. It is very roughly estimated from proxies that the average temperature was -0.5 to -1.0 cooler than the average in the past 5000 years up to the 20th century. Those estimates are most likely smaller than the likely margin of error in the estimates, so are statistically insignificant.
The guesses about the causes of the little ice age period are at least six causes: Most popular are volcanoes, solar output, ocean circulation, population increases, deforestation and random variation of unknown causes.
There is no consensus that solar activity caused the Little Ice Age period and the author implying there is a solar cause consensus is BS for two reasons
(1)
THERE IS NO CONSENSUS
(2)
THERE CAN NOT BE A CONSENSUS USING INCOMPETENT SUNSPOT COUNTS
SORRY THIS COMMENT IS WAY OVER YOUR HEAD, BeNasty
supported by at least 99.9% of scientists
I’ve seen you say this several times in the past. I’m curious where you get that from? I’ve only ever seen 97%.
Post says:”If the evidence is strong…”.
This is exactly what folks have been asking you to present. What is the strong evidence you speak of?
You never show it you just say it exists.
Yes, and if you do care to answer this, could you please also give me the citations (or what you consider to be the best reference) for CO2 being responsible for increased winter low temperatures. I’m not piling on here. I’ve been intrigued by this “certitude” you keep making. So, if it isn’t just a voice in your head, I’ll take a link … please.
Talking to myself here, but just came back to see if RG responded to me or mkelly.
Starting your post again with insults.
I ignored everything you wrote.
If you can’t have a mature conversation or debate then STFU.
Consensus has its place.
Consensus gives weight to evolving ideas into hypotheses and to agree to the means to test the hypotheses.
No where did it say consensus.
“Many” is not the definition of consensus.
“Many” is not the definition of majority.
as a substitute for real time global average temperature measurements, is junk science
So paleoclimate studies are merely junk science.
(posting before reading the comments to date). A great summary Andy! I have a son in high school to whom I’m trying to pass on the scientific method but also survival skills. He wouldn’t dare bring this up in class because he knows that (on some of these topics) he knows more than his teachers, and I have cautionary tales to tell him about making educators look bad.
History is stories. Well taught history is intersecting stories. The bare-bones above can lead to well taught history. I’m not a good storyteller, but is there someone in the audience who likes to tell stories who can add in the other empires of the historic world that we know about, and give us all a better view? You might not sell textbooks, but a well written (and informative story) can lead to a lot of books sold.
If temperatures can change independently of CO2 as they have for millions of years, why should current (very mild) warming not be completely natural?
CO2 has an effect, but it is an extremely minor contribution. So “completely natural” is an unsupported absolute.
Just a nit.
How do you know the effect of CO2 is detectable if it is so minor?
…. or if it’s negative even (and similarly minor to the point of non-detectability), given that all energy leaves the planet by radiation.
(Aside from rocket launches).
As measured at the North Slope Alaska (NSA) measurement site, the growth in CO2 heating effect is shown in red, and in grey the concentration of CO2 estimated to be in the bottom 2 km of the atmosphere is shown. The CO2 heating effect is in Watts per square metre, and the amount of CO2 in parts per million.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14240
Think carefully what this graph shows. At some point shortly before 2000, let’s say 1998, CO2 had no heating effect or maybe even a cooling effect.
That kinda ruins CAGW since 1850 doesn’t it?
What part of ‘since 2001’ don’t you understand? I suggest you read the paper.
That is not an answer!
You posted the graph in support of your position. It is up to you to answer questions about it.
Lastly, time is continuous. CO2 concentrations are continuous. They both existed prior to the start of the graph and will exist after the end of the graph. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate conditions prior to or in the future using the graph you posted.
Your inability to answer arises from the fact that that a linear regression of an independent variable and a dependent variable that have no linear functional relationship is nothing more than curve fitting, ala, trendology. Any conclusion from the trend is inconclusive.
That is not an answer!
You posted the graph in support of your position. It is up to you to answer questions about it.”
Reading comprehension not your strong suit I see, it was Anthony Banton who posted the graph, not I!
However, since I had read the paper I pointed out that the y-axis was the surface forcing since 2001.
“Lastly, time is continuous. CO2 concentrations are continuous. They both existed prior to the start of the graph and will exist after the end of the graph. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate conditions prior to or in the future using the graph you posted.”
Yes and if you chose to extrapolate back in time to 1998 you can conclude that the forcing was less then than when the experiment started. That’s indicative that the CO2 had a heating effect prior to 2001.
“Your inability to answer arises from the fact that that a linear regression of an independent variable and a dependent variable that have no linear functional relationship is nothing more than curve fitting, ala, trendology. Any conclusion from the trend is inconclusive”
It was you who made the extrapolation, not I.
Interesting that bnasty who’s always demanding evidence of CO2 forcing hasn’t commented.
“The Makassar Strait record is representative of northern Pacific sea surface temperatures“
we sailed that area in a small boat. It is more representative of the tropical pacific than north pacific.
A large volume of the tropical pacific ocean flows into the Indian Ocean through this choke point and I would think it is well located to serve as a proxy for global ocean temperatures due to this flow.
Don’t confuse the surface water in the Makassar Strait with the 500-meter intermediate water that I’m talking about. The surface water is a confusing mess, the 500-meter intermediate water is definitively from the northern Pacific.
From my experience sailing the tropical oceans for many years a huge factor in the tropics is the sun shifting hemispheres in spring and fall.
The tropical weather in summer and winter are relatively stable because the sun stalls out at the solstice. During equinox the sun is rapidly changing hemispheres and strong wind along with large storms can be expected.
Very true. The tropics change a lot during the year, but year-on-year they stay pretty constant for very long periods. It takes a change in the continental positions for them to change.
Great job in combining history with climate.
The risk is that people, lacking or forsaking the skills of critical thinking, will not believe in history till they live it.
There is one fascinating detail over the reconstruction of the last 10,000 years or so. People tend to ignore it, but given Milankovich cycles (or the theory hereto), we should now be in an ice age.
There are conditions more or less favourable to the glaciation in the north. As with Siberia today the winters are very cold and the summers pretty warm. Because of the extreme cold over the winter, there is little precipitation, and because of the warm summer, all the snow melts. No snow remains to go into the next winter.
If the winters were warmer and the summers colder, things could change. You’d have more snow in the winter, less melting in the summer, and at some point in some places the snow might make it through the summer leading to gradial glaciation. So the reasonable theory.
The problem is, we are closest to the sun in early January and farthest from it in early July. This offsets the seasonal cycle already as good as it can, setting the precondiction of an ice age. Like in the chart below, we should be were have been like 23,000 years ago, with temperatures falling for a couple thousand of years already and further cooling on the way.
As in the article above, a lot of climate reconstructions (or trees found in now retreating galciers) are telling just that story. It must have been a lot warmer over the last say 8,000 years.
“Climate science” however does not like that. If it has been cooling for a while, then some warming looks rather welcome, than being a theat. And so they produce reconstructions like in the chart above, with flat or even slightly warming climate over the past thousands of years. The contradiction from that is evident, because where is the Milankovich cycle and the ice age then?
What is the reference to that scientifically fraudulent chart? I’m going to propose a falsifiable hypothesis – that Mann and Schmidt are co-authors. Yes?
In the section about wars in the 1600s, why didn’t you mention the 30 Years War, which ravaged central Europe from the 1620s to the 1650s?
Also, I think some of the years referencing Charlemagne are incorrect. He died in 714, so he couldn’t have been calling out wolf hunters a century later. His heir died in 741, kicking off a 2-year war between his three sons, which ended in a peace agreement that began the fracturing of Europe into smaller countries.
Emily,
The 30-years war was a local European event. It is part of “The mid-1600s saw more wars around the world than any other era until the 1940s (Parker, 2008).”
The outbreak of war was global.
As for Charlemagne, he ruled from 768-814. He did command every village to appoint two full time wolf-hunters. He did this between 800 and 813, I’m not sure of the exact year.
The way I worded the paragraph makes it look like I was relating the break-in of the church with his order, that was not my intent. I’ll fix that.
Andy ==> Very nicely done.