We panic about the next half degree of warming (above the 1.5 we’ve already had) but the depth of the ice age was savagely cold. For years the experts told us what Earth’s temperature was then, but apparently they were wrong.
And yet corals and rainforest survived. Plus turtles, whales, kittens — lots of things. And all without research grants.
…
Nice line on the Nobel gas calibration with ground temperatures. Nice proxy.
Two studies have come out in the last 10 months both showing that at its coldest point about 25,000 years ago, the Earth was on average six degrees cooler Celcius than it is today. And this new study includes estimates of temperatures of tropical land near the oceans which ought to be more stable and less prone to big extremes.
This comes from a newer style of proxy based on noble gases dissolved in ground water. It appears to be quite an accurate proxy, judging by the graph to the right. And it solves a lot of problems with other proxies. We can take samples from all around the world instead of just the polar ice caps (like we can with ice cores). And it’s not dependent on living things which like higher CO2 levels and inconveniently move location as the climate changes.
It’s always worse than we thought
“The real significance of our paper is that prior work has badly underestimated the cooling in the last glacial period, which has low-balled estimates of the Earth’s climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases,” said paper co-author Jeffrey Severinghaus, a professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. “The main reason that prior work was flawed was that it relied heavily on species abundances in the past. But just like humans, species tend to migrate to where the climate suits them.
The real significance is that 1. Experts are often wrong. 2. Real climate change is brutal. and 3. We don’t know when the next one is coming.
If this is right, all the other big experts were not. But what’s two or three degrees between friends?
Extended Data Fig. 5 Comparison of AP2 LGM cooling estimates to literature values. The worst cooling was in the Northern hemisphere in Europe and Canada. Horizontal scale is in degrees latitude. ie 40 = 40N and -40 = 40S.
So the study finds that natural climate change is larger than anyone thought, and the next ice age is more scary than anyone realized, but this apparently means CO2 is more awful than ever. It seems the tropics can cool more than anyone thought, therefore they can also warm more than anyone expected. Got that? Because whatever happened, CO2 did it.
“The rather high climate sensitivity that our results suggest is not good news regarding future global warming, which may be stronger than expected using previous best estimates. In particular, our global review reinforces the finding of several single noble gas case studies that the tropics were substantially cooler during the last glacial maximum than at present. The unpleasant implication for the future is that the warmest regions of the world are not immune to further heating,” commented co-author Werner Aeschbach, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Physics, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
Of course, it all comes down to how these proxies are then used to guesstimate the effect of CO2 (while ignoring the effect of every other climate variable).
Don’t get the idea that I’m 100% sold on the deep cold and the new proxy. It’s not confidence building when researchers announce results in terms of CO2 when they didn’t have to. Confirmation bias?
Would you like more circular reasoning with those green colored glasses?
Thanks to obsessive Government funding, the point of every new proxy is to recalculate the “climate sensitivity” of CO2, never to test the climate models, or calculate the effect of the sun, the moon or the effect of space weather on Earth. But they effectively are using a model to find a number that “shows models are right”. If solar-magnetic-wind-or-cosmic-factors affect the climate, the models (and researchers) are oblivious. Instead of finding “the sun did it” they will auto-attribute most of the Sun’s driving force to CO2 instead, because the models assume all those solar effects have zero effect on Earth’s weather. And because the magic stardust of CO2 will always explain all the gaps, researchers will never find out how much influence the solar factors have because they aren’t looking.
The paper does broadly support a recent marine proxy study by Tierney et al. published last year that found substantially greater low-latitude cooling than previous efforts and, in turn, suggested greater climate sensitivity than prior studies. That earlier paper suggested the equilibrium response of Earth’s global-mean surface temperature is 3.4 degrees C per doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in line with the consensus range of estimates from state-of-the-art climate models, but somewhat higher than the usual best estimate of 3.0 degrees C.
“The rather high climate sensitivity that our results suggest is not good news regarding future global warming, which may be stronger than expected using previous best estimates. In particular, our global review reinforces the finding of several single noble gas case studies that the tropics were substantially cooler during the last glacial maximum than at present. The unpleasant implication for the future is that the warmest regions of the world are not immune to further heating,” commented co-author Werner Aeschbach, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Physics, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
The ice sheets are coming back sometime:
This is where the ice got to last time around in the United Kingdom. What’s the plan for next time?
Last Glacial Maximum, Ice Extent, UK, Map.
REFERENCES
Seltzer, A.M., Ng, J., Aeschbach, W. et al. Widespread six degrees Celsius cooling on land during the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 593, 228–232 (2021). doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03467-6
Jessica E. Tierney, Jiang Zhu, Jonathan King, Steven B. Malevich, Gregory J. Hakim, Christopher J. Poulsen. Glacial cooling and climate sensitivity revisited. Nature, 2020; 584 (7822): 569 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2617-x
Britice project (Map of UK and Ireland)
By Ittiz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, , CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Last Glacial Maximum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum
Nobel gases?
Both of these papers are quite disturbing, higher climate sensitivities are not a good thing.
[A proofreading thank you from me – Jo]
121
‘The six naturally occurring noble gases are helium (He), neon (Ne), argon (Ar), krypton (Kr), xenon (Xe), and the radioactive radon (Rn). Oganesson (Og) is variously predicted to be a noble gas as well or to break the trend due to relativistic effects; its chemistry has not yet been investigated.’ wiki
101
In the NGT literature, one usually refers to the 5 “stable noble gases”. This excludes Rn, which would not be a good temperature indicator anyway. If it is present in groundwater, it would come from radioactive decay. For similar reasons, He is avoided because both He-4 and He-3 contributions from sub-surface sources can easily swamp the atmospheric temperature-sensitive component (He-4 from alpha decay and He-3 from mantle sources and for young water, bomb tritium). Researchers use only isotopes that are dominated by atmospheric sources, which means that typically they are based on the 4 isotopes Ne-20, Ar-36, Kr-84, and Xe-132. Sometimes Xe-130 is substituted as there can be a tiny fissionogenic component to Xe-132.
20
Higher climate sensitivities? As always, the papers have got CO2 and temperature backwards. They continue to assume that the low CO2 levels drove the previous temperature reduction, even though it has been understood for a very long time that those temperature reductions were caused by orbital changes. Answer me this: how could the low CO2 have been driving temperature, if the temperature started rising when CO2 was at its lowest level ‘ever’, and then continued rising even though CO2 was at all times at an amount where it had been driving temperatures lower?
There’s a very good paper on CO2 and temperature and orbital changes here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
I addressed the issue of climate sensitivity and glacial-interglacial temperature changes here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/31/the-mathematics-of-carbon-dioxide-part-3/
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/clip_image0042.png
420
.
Global temperature reductions were indeed initiated by Milankovitch cycles, but they also need a feedback agent.
The problem is that climate scientists have assumed that CO2 is the feedback, when it was actually ice-sheet albedo that cooled the northern hemisphere (and darkened ice sheets that warmed the world again). And this makes sense of the known climate reactions.
a. During ice ages, the world cools when CO2 is at its highest, and the world warms when CO2 is at its lowest – a counter-intuitive response that is unlikely to happen if CO2 was the primary feedback agent. But ice sheet albedo would give exactly this response – a cooling world gives more ice and greater surface albedo. A dusty and darkened ice-sheet gives a lower albedo and a warming world. And it so happens that the ice sheets get covered in dust just before each and every interglacial.
b. Ice sheet albedo also explains the hemispherical asymmetry. Interglacial warming only happens on northern hemisphere Milankovitch maxima (northern Great Summers). But CO2 is a global gas, so could and should feedback interglacials on northern or southern maxima. Conversely, albedo is asymmetric – the continents and so the large ice-sheets are all in the north. So interglacials, when assisted by surface albedo feedbacks, will always happen during a northern maximum (a northern Great Summer).
c. Ice sheet albedo also explains the missing interglacials. The world experiences many northern Milankovitch maxima (northern Great Summers) during an ice age, and yet the global temperature does not change. A huge increase in forcing, and yet no temperature response. CO2 as a feedback cannot explain this. But albedo can – it happens because fresh high albedo ice can reflect and reject all that extra Great Summer insolation, and so the world continues in the grip of an ice age. What is needed is dark ice, to lower the albedo. And as it happens, the northern ice sheets get covered in dust just before each interglacial.
See: ‘Modulation of Ice Ages via Dust and Albedo’.
Ralph
260
.
See the graphs in the paper.
Modulation of Ice Ages via Dust and Albedo.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
Ralph
50
Sorry, I should have checked this first. Have downloaded it.
20
Interesting.
There is a question. The four similar glacial experiences we are looking at all had periods of about 100,000 years. These are from the ice analyses, but on checking just now it seems that plant analysis extends this several more cycles.
In both sets of graphs the glacial maximum is clearly defined but the warmer periods show more irregularities. Are these messy periods due to albedo change during cooling?
31
.
The length of each interglacial is determined by orbital mechanics. The climate needs a cold northern Great Winter, to make the polar ice grow and initiate a new ice age.
When eccentricity is low, precession only has a small influence, and thus the normal northern Great Winter is not cold enough to trigger a new ice age. So the interglacial becomes dependent upon the obliquity cycle, which is about 42k years long, and this will extend the interglacial out to 20k years or so.
The current Holocene interglacial is one of these low eccentricity, obliquity dependent interglacials, which is why it has lasted so long. It is due to end in one or two thousand years.
Ralph
91
Thanks Ralph. I look forward to reading the download.
It looks like it might answer a lot of my questions.
🙂
KK
40
I was just wondering the other day why NASA hadn’t predicted the end point of the current interglacial, and speculated that if they had it would have exposed the real proportions of climate change and its primary causes.
That might have interfered with their funding.
100
.
Indeed – it would highlight the fact that we are on the cusp of an ice age.
And so any CO2 induced warming (if it is providing any increase in warming) is a good thing.
Warm is good, cold is bad. During the Holocene Maximum, just 8,000 years ago, polar temperatures were 2 degrees warmer than now, and the Sahara Desert turned green and fertile.
R
130
Ralph,
It’s interesting that you say;
” During the Holocene Maximum, just 8,000 years ago, polar temperatures were 2 degrees warmer than now, ”
A year or two back I was able to access high resolution graphs of Earths sea levels; they showed an oscillating fall from at least 4.2 metres above present over the last six or seven thousand years from the overshoot.
Some studies suggest that the fall could have been six metres in some areas.
Specifically I can remember being told in Geology 1, nearly six decades ago, that oceans had fallen 1.2 metres in the last 2,000 years.
These records of sea level are surely a confirmation that Earths poles are cooling, or at least not warming, and holding more water.
The relative stability of sea levels in my lifetime is surely confirmation that the Earth is not “warming” and my perception of summers in recent decades is that they are mild compared to pre 2000.
So much for modern science.
KK
80
(Sea Levels)
Indeed. If you look around the Mediterranean, nearly all of the Greek and Roman ports are now above sea level. So either the whole Mediterranean basin is rising, or the sea is falling.
R
30
I don’t know if we are on the cusp of an Ice age or not. However what concerns me is that natural variability is much greater than was commonly believed, as Phil Jones confirmed in 2004 when he examined the extraordinary warmth in Britain during the 1730’s which came to a shuddering halt in the winter of 1740. He was obviously surprised, as everyone, including the Met office, believed the climate to be relatively stable within quite tight bands (not historians of course)
The current very chilly weather much of Northern Europe has had during April and May is of course only ‘weather.’
But suppose that cooler weather started to predominate, then after 30 years was seen as the ‘climate’?
We have a highly detailed and expensive Plan A to cater for warming and all that goes with it. But just suppose there is cooling instead? There is no Plan B, yet the consequences of cooling would be catastrophic
90
Oh Yes Tony. We don’t know. In the face of Ma Naychur’s come -what – ever, eschew hubris.
10
Consider also that alleged blocking of IR back ratidation is only in a very narrow part of the infrared spectrum, so unlike water vapour.
The radiation from a cooler planet and especially from an ice surface would potentially not be in the part of the surface radiation spectrum where CO2 has an effect. CO2 needs to block IR radiation from hot land, not water which covers 75% of the planet (including Antarctica) and in an ice age with growing ice sheets and permanent ice and snow cover over much of the land. So it is not just about albedo as such, reflectivety which would cool the planet, but about the shift in the reflected radiation pattern spectrum away from the CO2 notch so the concentration of CO2 becomes even more irrelevant.
Plus the more of the ocean surface itself which is blocked, the smaller the area of exchange becomes for CO2 equilibrium which only happens at the water/air boundary. In fact the smaller the ocean becomes with lower volume, exposing more land as well. The implications for CO2 concentrations in the air are not clear but CO2 is likely not a player at all in an ice age. A cooler water surface would means less CO2 in the air in an ice age but the reducing ocean volume and total surface area might produce other effects.
We all understand that the allegation that CO2 controls our weather is driven by the $1.5Tn spent annually to ‘save the planet’ but somewhere science went missing. And no one bothers to measure the effect the $1.5Tn is having on CO2 levels anyway. None.
100
Do you guys realise that you’re contradicting over 120 years of peer-reviewed scientific literature?
The reason that CO2 lags temperature in the paleoclimatic record is because any warming due to Milankovitch cycles or volcanic activity causes CO2 outgassing from the oceans which further raises the temperature. This continues until a new equilibrium occurs, it is a positive feedback mechanism that increases climate sensitivity.
353
.
Rubbish. The feedback is FAR to small to make a difference.
The total CO2 feedback-forcing is assumed to be 4 W/m2, over the 6,000 years of the interglacial. That is 0.007 W/m2 per decade.
Note that the climate has to be feedback-forced from one decade, to raise the temperature to the next decade. And 0.007 W/m2, together with a temperature rise of 0.017 degs centigrade, is not going to force the next decade to be warmer.
Conversely, if the northern ice sheets are covered in dust, this can provide an extra 240 W/m2 of insolation absorption, over all of the northern high latitudes, every annual summer for the entire interglacial warming period. Ice sheet albedo feedback-forcing, is orders of magnitude greater than CO2 forcing.
Ralph
341
How is this “new equilibrium” established against the positive feedback that you assert?
170
“Do you guys realise that you’re contradicting over 120 years of peer-reviewed scientific literature”.
I know.
How dare we.
And we’re not even peers.
Perhaps we should just listen to those that have no peers.
I get a bit confused sometimes.
I think Google, Facebook, and Twitter have a list.
230
Naturally present or human origin, it doesn’t matter, CO2 has no effect on atmospheric temperature over and above any other atmospheric gas.
Consequently the “special global warming” potential of CO2 is characterized as SFA.
The criminals who created and perpetuated this criminal contra scientific piece of rubbish knew what they were doing and should be jailed for life.
My apologies for using the U.S. form for incastration but many probably would associate “gaoled” with soccer.
btw if you ever catch one of those “photons” that are claimed to be spat out by atmospheric CO2, please save it and let me have a look.
KK
170
KK, you’ll have trouble seeing that photon unless you have infrared vision. But spectrometers have been catching them for years. CO2 does absorb and emit, but the effect is mostly saturated at 400ppm, and water, in all its forms, is far more important.
202
Hi Jo,
I’ve been reading the constant warmer interpretations of CO2 sending out “photons” uniformly in every direction and “naturally” some therefore head to earth.
Not really.
The lab experiment described in the link uses a gas burner to move things along and apparently the give and take points corresponding to the movement of electrons from higher and lower orbital paths are identified.
In the atmosphere CO2 is bound by the obligation to follow the gas law PV=nRT and so only receives those specific parcels of energy from ground up to an altitude of around 30 metres.
To that point the atmosphere is settling in, taking in energy by conduction with the ground, and becoming less dense so it can rise as a coherent parcel of atmosphere.
Then at about 11,000 metres altitude the CO2 reaches a temperature at which it can no longer hold the “greenhouse” energy and lets it go.
It has to move to space.
As Will Janoshka neatly outlined, there’s a buildup of potential for energy movement between two locations and I might add that the trigger temperature for CO2 is about 243°K.
Given that for most habitable areas of the surface the night time temperature is rarely below 273°K, there’s no way energy is going to move from up there to down here. Energy always moves down the temperature gradient.
To compound their poor science they talk of photons as if they were white marbles and being discreet objects.
In real life there’s no such thing as a photon; the concept being developed in order to frame the mathematics around something familiar.
There is no Greenhouse Gas effect.
KK
140
KK. Photons flow “wherever” since they have no brain nor forward detection system and they know not where they are headed. Individual hot photons flow to both colder and hotter locations all the time. The Net flow is what you are thinking of, and that as you say, is always from warmer to cooler areas. No laws of science need get broken.
And CO2 only significantly sends photons to space from an altitude high enough so that the odds of greenhouse gases up higher are small enough. Down low, as you (I think) are pointing out, things are saturated. CO2 releases photons but they get mopped up by other molecules of CO2 or H20 before they go far.
113
i think the misunderstanding comes from the belief that photons have an energy level dependent on the intensity of the heat, and thus the inability of the photon to do any work on a given molecule, but it is the wrong way to visualise it. consider these points-
a photon is a bundle of energy. take for eg IR in the range most important for CO2 at 15um where it has some good absorbing properties. the amount of energy in any given photon of 15um (the wavelength) = about 20THz (the frequency) = 82.6 meV (its energy). this level of energy does NOT change regardless of its source. what does change with the level of heat from the source is the amount of photons.
think of night vision equipment which amplifies the fewer scattered photons of a light source. the image will be grainy because there are fewer actual photons. the lower the intensity of the light, the fewer you get.
in terms of water molecules and CO2, there are absorption lines at 15um, so both will intercept those photons on their path and absorb them until such a time that the bands (sets of absorption lines) are saturated. that saturation comes from both the kinetic as in bumping other molecules and being excited and em radiation. where the molecules are far apart, there is less interaction from kinetic and more from em.
i still believe that the microwave oven depicts what is going on better than anything else. microwave photons = 12cm (wavelength) = 2.5GHz (frequency) = 0.01 meV (its energy) notice how much lower it is than a photon of a 15um, that is because the energy level is derived from the wavelength/frequency. the higher the frequency, the higher the energy present. you can have a microwave transmitter such as say a bluetooth device with an output of 1W say, and the photons it sends out will be exactly the same as the ones a 1000W microwave oven sends out, but in the case of the oven there are just sooo many more of them, that the chances for those photons to come across something that will absorb in their path is impossibly higher than the chance of the bluetooth device. obviously there are still enough photons that make it to a small receiver for the signal to be received, so it is important to think of the scale of things.
the megnetron in a microwave oven does not care where the wave is going, nor does it have a temperature as such. what causes heating is the absorption of em by the water molecules. the microwave photons cause rotation in the water molecules which lead to transitions and heating (mainly kinetic of course)
60
hmm, that is of course a magnetron – https://electronicsdesk.com/magnetron.html, not megnetron…
20
Hi Jo,
As the French might say; “Incroyable”.
Mobihci describes the energy associated with “photons” as being discreet, specific amounts of energy associated with the movement of electrons to higher or lower orbital paths.
The energy put into the atom to elevate an electron to the next higher path is a constant.
Likwise when the electron drops back it gives out the same amount of energy.
In describing the emission of that “photon” the best way of looking at it is perhaps to describe it as an electromagnetic wave.
A large scale example might be with lightning. A potential difference between the cloud and Earth is built up until something has to give.
The emf stays where it is, but other charged particles respond and that gives the big flash and the loud bang.
Lightning moves to a specific point and so does the electromagnetic pulse associated with the expelled “photon”.
Perhaps I have used the wrong example because with lightning there’s actual movement of particles unlike the situation with a photon which is simply an em pulse mostly heading to a spot where the temperature is about minus 272°C.
KK
30
How can CO2 be a Cooling Gas
Here’s how I think it works, involving omni-directional photons and the gas laws (pV=nRT).
Near the ground, radiation assists heat transfer between the surface and the lowest layers of the air. This occurs in the lowest 30ft or so which is the range of a photon near the surface. Mostly the transfer of heat is from the warmer ground to the cooler air above, but it can go the other way if the air is warmer than the ground but that is less frequent. The CO2 molecule absorbs a photon then transfers its energy to adjacent air molecules by collisions.
The heat is then transferred upward to the top of the troposphere by convection. This can be thermal activity or large scale mixing of the atmosphere. A glance at any radiosonde flight shows that the tropopause is much warmer than it should be by the simple application of pV=nRT. This is mainly due to the change of state of water, since the environmental lapse rate is quite close to the saturated adiabatic lapse rate.
http://www.bom.gov.au/aviation/observations/aerological-diagrams/
The link is to the aerological diagram for Sydney at 2000, May16,2021 (but it updates with each new balloon flight).
One can see that the tropopause is at 35,000ft at a temperature of -60C. IF pV=nRT pertained without the modifying effects of the change of state of water the tropopause would be -80C.
KK says that the trigger temperature of CO2 is 243K (-40C). At this temperature a CO2 molecule is more likely to absorb energy from kinetic collisions with adjacent air molecules and emit the energy as a photon. The photon at that altitude is more likey to be lost to space than to make it way back down to ground level.
Consequently heat makes its way from the surface to the upper atmosphere and then to the immensity of open space, assisted by the radiative gases (which cool the surface, more than they warm it)
My thanks to KK, Steven Wilde and my late friend David Wilson and others.
30
Finally, at last, there is evidence we were after, they are real and have been located near the shores of Lake Macquarie which supplies the cooling water for the coal fired power plants.
https://joannenova.com.au/2021/05/last-ice-age-was-six-degrees-cooler-much-colder-than-previously-thought/#comment-2427831
KK
00
Peter C,
yes, these absorbers like water vapour and CO2 do cool the surface to the atmosphere->space by adding an interface for the heat to have an effective conductive/convective path to a point where radiative cooling dominates. but it is the interface doing the cooling, so entering more absorbers effectively just shifts the atmosphere to a warmer state being cooled faster.
10
Hi Jo,
You say in part;
“Down low, as you (I think) are pointing out, things are saturated. CO2 releases photons but they get mopped up by other molecules of CO2 or H20 before they go far.”
That seems to be saying that any of the imaginary “downwelling” radiation from CO2 at altitude, can’t get through the atmosphere, even if such Earth bound photons existed.
10
Keith, the pointlike properties of a photon exist just as does its wavelike properties (its propagation). like the night vision sensor mentioned before, you can see individual photons as points. this is the same for any photon regardless of its wavelength.
it is an interesting subject the dual properties. eg with the microwave oven again, you can see many 12cm wavelength photons being built up in the magnetron and then guided by a guidepath (essentially a metal/reflective surface designed to focus the photons into a beam then guided into the chamber where it bounces around from one reflective surface to another until it is absorbed by something. what is interesting here is the door where you can view the chamber. the door will normally have a mesh of some reflective material, and the size of the holes is very important. as with a lot of satellite dishes that primarily receive c-band and lower type frequencies, the mesh will still reflect photons just as well as a complete sheet of reflective material as with a solid dish. the physical size of the holes can be no larger that 1/2 of the wavelength.
so there we have a pointlike photon that cannot go through a 6cm hole, but can present itself a single point the size of an electron on a sensor.
anyway the point about lightning etc it difficult to unpack in reference to the behaviour of photons. the potential difference brought about by any influence (like wind/static) will find the path of least resistance to the lowest potential, it just depends on whether the potential barrier of each molecule involved can be overcome, and when it is, this causes ionisation and a path forms, usually in a straightish line because the odds are that the surrounding molecules are in a similar state, so by overcoming that potential barrier at first, it is more likely that closer molecules will have a higher potential, and the barrier broken much quicker. a cascade effect. the ionised air can then carry the current.
anyway, the photons as points being emitted by any source will go in a direction defined by the molecule itself (which direction it is moving, where it absorbed etc) and molecules in the atmosphere are bouncing around every which way as in any gas with temperature. the point is the photons can and do go down to the surface, but whether the surface will absorb them is another thing.
in terms of radiation, consider the saturated bands of 15um, adding more absorbers would seem to do nothing right? but it is not the case because as you add more absorbers, there is more chance for photons to be intercepted. a lot of the extra molecules will be moving to more extremes (pressure broadening of absorption lines) or just moving a higher variety of directions causing more absorption. so even if something has a 95% level of saturation, there is still the chance to absorb more with a higher quantity. this change in ppm means more and more the lower the pressure gets.
10
Hi mobi,
With regard to your most recent post I should say that my earlier comment about photons was a result of having heard too many warmers talking about “photons” being shot outwards from an atom.
They described photons being pumped out in every possible direction from up on high and as that was the case, a lot of those photons would head towards Earth and warm it.
Having regard to the thermodynamic and physical principles that would cover the situation I found that claim to be ridiculous.
At almost any altitude the air temperature will be less than at ground level and this precludes any thought that “photons” are going to move towards Earth and warm it.
I can accept that with lightning there can be movement of electrons, particles, to neutralise any potential difference that exists. Electrons may be viewed as charged particles.
With photons, as I think we both agree, there’s only an electromagnetic potential difference that exists and this seems resolution. Under the right PD the setup will give way and the energy of the photon will proceed to the region of lower potential.
Since the lower PD is present in the colder areas outside Earths atmosphere that’s where the photonic energy moves. To space, not earth.
The main reason I mentioned lightning before was to give a parallel to the buildup and resolution of the PD in the photon emission. When that, the lightning, resolves it is both visible and noisy.
Not unlike “warmers”.
00
I presume you mean there is no such thing as a photon particle in the sense of a marble. Photons per se do exist, obviously. They have zero mass since they travel in a vacuum at the speed of light. The most commonly accepted theory describing a photon is it’s a packet of energy or a wave packet.
30
Yes.
20
It’s a cross between being put in gaol and the firing squad.
[Forgive me. It’s going a bit off topic at #1. Thanks for understanding. — Jo]
30
Simon
All we have to do is just throw away all those studies showing the impact of the Suns variability (Willie Soon has done excellent work here), the Milankovitch cycles etc. Because the politically correct LEFT have declared CO2 is evil incarnate. It explains everything and anything, and any evidence otherwise is to be disregarded.
Once we have that sorted it all becomes very clear.
Unfortunately such ridiculous reasoning will not stop the climate responding to the sun, cosmic rays and all manner of other impacts, and one day people will look back and wonder how so many could be so deluded, so stupid and idiotic for so long.
210
Simon,
First of all, the radiant sensitivity of the surface is easily derived and measured, intrinsically linear and relatively constant from pole to pole (i.e. temperature and topology independent) at about 1.62 W/m^2 of surface emissions per W/m^2 of solar forcing, corresponding to about 0.3C +/- 5% per W/m^2 and no where near the IPCC’s ‘settled’ value of 0.8C +/- 50% per W/m^2. They express the sensitivity in terms of temperature and/or doubling CO2 because the 4.4 W/m^2 increase in surface emissions required for each 1 W/m^2 of forcing to increase the temperature by 0.8C is unambiguously impossible, while 3C for doubling CO2 seems plausible to those who don’t want to know any better.
Second, your obsession with feedback is why you are so wrong. Feedback amplifier analysis requires strict linearity (i.e. the incremental and absolute gain are the same) and an implicit power supply to power the gain. The incremental climate feedback model with W/m^2 in and degrees out is not even approximately linear and the solar forcing not accounted for by an incremental analysis is already completely consumed maintaining the average temperature which is also not accounted for. There are simply no Joules available to make the next W/m^2 so much more powerful than the average W/m^2.
The erroneous conclusions of climate science arose from an embarrassing violation of COE reinforced with a math error made by Schlesinger and repeated by Roe when they applied Bode’s linear feedback amplifier analysis to the climate. That error was to conflate the fraction of output returned to the input as feedback with that fraction times the open loop gain, thereby assuming unit open loop gain in one place and a non physical open loop gain that converts W/m^2 into degrees in another.
50
If that were the case, how come the papers that Jo reference here are suggesting a climate sensitivity in excess of 3 degrees C per doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide?
08
Simon,
The IPCC makes this claim all the time, but that doesn’t make it correct. The bottom line is that the bulk behavior of the planet must conform to the laws of physics and those laws tell us that the sensitivity of the plant is given exactly by 1/(4eoT^3), where T is the average temperature of the surface, o is the SB constant and e is the effective emissivity of the planet given by the ratio between the RADIANT emissions of the planet and the RADIANT emissions of the surface which is 0.62 whose reciprocal, 1.62 is the radiant sensitivity of the surface to solar forcing of 1.62 W/m^2 of surface emissions per W/m^2 of forcing.
40
I’ve never gotten in to the eccentricities of the IPCCCCCs models because the whole thing is just so ludicrous.
Whether from the quantitative point of view or analysis of the mechanism, it just won’t float.
This puts me in the position of being unfamiliar with what you’re saying but it does sound logical and well reasoned.
KK
00
From the paper “ Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the ice age were about 180 parts per million, which is very low. Before the Industrial Revolution, levels rose to about 280 parts per million, and today they’ve reached 415 parts per million.”
So low C02 – Ice Age.
237
Doesn’t quite work that way, you’re putting the cart before the horse.
At the LGM why didn’t we slip into another snowball earth?
190
.
>> why didn’t we slip into another snowball earth?
We would have done.
However, the primary feedback agent is NOT CO2, it is actually ice-sheet albedo. And it so happens that the ice sheets get covered in dust just before each interglacial, which lowers the ice sheet albedo by a considerable amount. This allows greater insolation absorption, and this the ablation and melting of the ice sheets.
Everything is explainable, if you realise that the primary temperature feedback is ice sheet albedo (and not CO2).
Ralph
290
The earth pulled out of the LGM at a very rapid rate, so I’m more inclined to believe that a volcanic eruption in the Southern Ocean was the start of sea level rise.
Which is not a criticism of your general argument, but I don’t believe Australian dust ended up in Antartica.
40
.
You cannot have eight interglacials forced by volcanic eruptions, that are ALL synchronised with a northern hemisphere Great Summer. Volcanoes are random, not synchronised with orbital mechanics.
Conversely, a darkened ice sheet can provide 240 W/m2 of additional feedback-forcing. That is a lot of extra energy entering the climate system – easily enough to melt an ice sheet in 5,000 years.
Ralph
141
Sounds interesting ralf,
Do you have a reference?
70
.
(you have a reference?)
Sure, see this link:
Modulation of Ice Ages via Dust and Albedo.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
Ralph
50
What caused Meltwater Pulse 1A? I’m thinking its a case of binge and purge.
‘Between 20,000 and 9,000 calendar years ago, this study documented eight well-defined periods of increased iceberg Ice calving and discharge from various parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The highest period of discharge of icebergs recorded in both cores is known as AID6 (Antarctic Iceberg Discharge event 6).
‘AID6 has a relatively abrupt onset at about 15,000 calendar years ago. The peak interval of greatest iceberg discharge and flux from the Antarctic Ice sheet for AID6 is between about 14,800 and 14,400 calendar years ago. The peak discharge is followed by gradual decline in flux until 13,900 calendar years ago, when it abruptly ends.
‘The peak period of iceberg discharge for AID6 is synchronous with the onset of the Bølling interstadial in the Northern Hemisphere meltwater pulse 1A.’ (wiki)
11
‘Volcanoes are random, not synchronised with orbital mechanics.’
Yes of course, my bad. Anyway, on closer scrutiny there were no large eruptions around the time of Meltwater Pulse 1A.
31
I hear a lot of talk about dusty glacial ice sheets melting more quickly, but has the darkened ice sheet hypothesis been confirmed?
Every spring in my back yard, the clean white snow melts away before the dirty dark snow. That has been my observation.
20
.
There have been many soot-on-snow experiments, and the darker snow does indeed melt much faster.
The insolation absorption of darkened snow can increase by 240 W/mw, which is a huge increase. Compare this to the supposed 4 W/m2 increase caused by CO2.
Ralph
10
Once the ice begins to melt it becomes a reinforcing cycle. All that fresh water entering the oceans is slow to mix so the mixed layer shoals and the surface temperature rises faster than it would with a deeper mixed layer.
The preferential warming of the freshwater inflow can be observed every year. Oceans actually reach their maximum energy uptake in April each year but the ocean surface temperature peak is in August. That is due to the runoff around the northern land masses getting warmed up and not mixing well. Sea surface temperature adjacent to the land masses increases by as much as 6C in a single month:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aq1iAj8Yo7jNg0lXWzyccVHItf34
80
.
Rick – I disagree.
The power of ice sheet albedo is very large, and would have initiated further cooling. We saw this during the last ice age, with large D-O warming events (8 degrees in ten years) that looked like an incipient interglacial, but dropped straight back into ice age conditions again. The surface albedo of the ice was far too high for the interglacial to last.
What is required for an interglacial, is to make the ice dirty, to lower its albedo, and allow it to absorb more insolation. Fortunately, there are massive pulses of dust just before each interglacial, cause by CO2 being too low.
So interglacial warming has nothing to do with CO2 feedbacks. They are caused by high dust-flux lowering ice sheet albedo, together with a Great Summer in the northern hemisphere (a high Milankovitch maximum).
And every interglacial conforms with those proposed requirements.
Modulation of Ice Ages via Dust and Albedo.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
Ralph
60
Ralf stated
What do you disagree with. The data I show is from satellite records. It is clear that meltwater rapidly increases in temperature each year. Could not possibly show that rise if it was well mixed.
I did not mention CO2. You go off completely on some story about CO2 – why?
40
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S104061820600262X
Evolution of Eureka Flat: A dust-producing engine of the Palouse loess, USA
20
Rick,
From what Ralph says it is likely that the changes you are describing are a redistribution of water caused by the intermixing of layers without there necessarily being any gain or loss of energy overall.
40
This wasn’t clear. What I wanted to say was that I assumed the cold water from freshly melted ice would go into the idea, sink and push up the relatively warmer water offshore
40
(Keith)
Yes, Rick is demonstrating an annual climatic change, not a centennial or millennial change.
They are very different.
R
40
See my ‘May 16, 2021 at 6:59 am’ reply to Simon. el gordo is right.
80
Peter a lot of that has already been discussed on this blog, Vostock Ice Core samples is one example, https://joannenova.com.au/global-warming-2/ice-core-graph/
70
Peter Fitzroy is being coy about his discovery of Anti-CO2.
From those ice core graphs he has noticed that the cooling started at high CO2 levels and warming started at low CO2 levels; so his thought is that good times result in a build-up of Anti-CO2 which brings on bad (freezing) times, while in freezing times the Anti-CO2 somehow disappears and allows Natural CO2 to exert its effects. PROOF is that the current high CO2 levels haven’t lead to a rise in temperature over that of 1,000 years ago, so obviously Anti-CO2 is building up and pushing us into the next ICE Age.
160
Thank you! Saves me writing more or less the same thing. I wonder if at times of deep glaciation the spread of green plants is less, leading to less absorption of CO2, leading to a gradual build up of CO2 in the atmosphere while the land is covered in ice.
80
The physical evidence presented with physical data is far more compelling than theoretical modelling but where models can be dismissed through biased inputs to support a hypothesis the physical study of Nobel gases in old groundwater or CO2 bubbles in ice core stacks leaves only criticism on the quality or method of factual interpretation applied.
“Confirmation Bias is our most treasured enemy. Our opinions, our acumen -all of it, are the result of years of selectively choosing to pay attention to that information only which confirms what our limited minds already accept as truth.” – Ina Catrinescu
70
I wonder if Anti-CO2 has an antilog relationship with radiative forcing too? haha. yes, the cart before the horse thing has always presented a problem for people who want to seriously understand the relationship between CO2 and the global temperatures. If CO2 is given such power that it is the primary driver, then you just cant remove that argument when it suites.
you could say that it is the trigger and that cooling is triggered by other functions, but that is not what is implied by co2 being the control knob, it is supposed to be in the feedback as it is sold today, and if the function of CO2 in that feedback regime is given sufficient power (up to 6 times according to the current dumb thinking), then the triggers would never dominate over the feedback and we would never cool. the fact that we have, and by cycles, proves that CO2 is a bit player in everything. it can be seen on every time scale.
just imagine the ‘climate change’ scare 10,000 years ago when you could walk from the Australian mainland to Tasmania in one year and then a short decade later you would have to had swim, i mean there are periods there where the sea level change was 45mm per YEAR!. now that is climate change!
it has only been possible to attempt to truly understand the details of Earths climate system over the past 50 or so years since satellites and in that time we have been finding ‘problems’ with everything without a true understanding. ie ozone hole, climate change etc
61
Gee, the ice cores supposedly say it has been 280nor more for the last 500,000 years, or over four ice ages. Guess they are very wrong!
Nobody wants to admit we do not know.
202
“Nobody wants to admit we do not know.”
Or that they were wrong. But there would be more egg on face from that.
120
.
The ice cores do NOT indicate steady CO2 concentrations.
CO2 has indeed oscillated between 180 ppm and 280 ppm, over the last 800k years.
Ralph
41
So it changes 100 ppm or so completely naturally, but the roughly 100 ppm from 280 to 400 is completely unnatural. Plus I think the ice core numbers run at least to 320. Not likely, especially since these are all very low numbers.
Given that it takes hundreds of years for the snow to turn into ice I have no faith in those low numbers. My understanding is that stoma evidence disagrees strongly.
61
.
Unnatural? Man is a part of nature, and doing nature’s work.
We had reached the point where the entire biosphere might have been extinguished by a lack of CO2, ending all life on Earth (apart from fungi). Then man cam along, and released a lot of CO2 back into the atmosphere, saving the biosphere.
Three cheers for the oil and coal companies, for saving all life on Earth.
Ralph
70
I know this is probably a dumb question. How do they know the concentration of CO2 in ice cores when the very act of drilling would be releasing gas into the atmosphere? Which suggests that there was even more CO2 than is measured.
Also is CO2 in an ice core the same construction as CH4 clathates which form under the oceans where a methane molecule is surrounded by H2O molecules and frozen – thus created by cold and intense pressure of 1000’s meters of water above. ?
30
.
They look at small bubbles in the ice core.
The amounts of gas are small and compressed – but they do appear to give comparable and confirmatory results at different drill-sites, so we can be fairly sure they are accurate.
Ralph
60
Ralf, with respect, the NASA graph below cannot be believed. What do you think?
10
On the question of CO2 this needs to be debunked, something happens under ice to dilute the signal.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2535/satellite-data-confirm-annual-carbon-dioxide-minimum-above-400-ppm/
30
Fundamental error on that graph is comparing data from two very different sources..
CO2 estimates from “proxy” ice core data..vs
CO2 real time “measurements” from the atmosphere.
……how can any rational thinking person believe those data sets can be linked let alone directly compared ?
40
Exactly. In the real science world, that would be completely improper.
And self evidently silly as is proven from the graph, unless you intentionally wanted to create the impression that CO2 was skyrocketing where CO2 measurements show nothing more than a slow steady climb. And the official explanation for even this requires a suspension of the rules of physical chemistry. I declare fake science, courtesy of NASA.
10
“As photosynthesis ramps up, plants breathe in carbon dioxide (CO2), and atmospheric levels of CO2 begin to drop. Then in fall and winter, when trees lose their leaves and foliage declines, CO2 levels begin to rise again. This up-and-down sequence creates an annual cycle of minimum and maximum levels of atmospheric CO2.”
That’s one of those zero proof assertions and may be wrong. Where is the proof? For example, look to a comparison of CO2 levels at Mauna Loa and Lower Hutt, NZ (?) to see that this story is the same from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere with a delay/phase change of 6 months. It has been established that the delay in CO2 moving across the equator is about two years so it should be obvious. If there is no clear phase change the explanation is wrong.
Then there is the point that perhaps half the world’s oxygen is produced by photosynthesis in phytoplankton and their distribution is critical and may not be very seasonal.
Plus I have a real concern about tagging ice records of CO2 onto instantaneous instrument records of the 20th century. Most importantly in the capture of gases in ice, surely there is leaching between layers and this may have a differential for different gases. CO2 has a great affinity for water molecules where oxygen does not. Consider that CO2 solubility at 0C is 3gm/kg where O2 solubility is 0.07gm/kg, a difference of 50:1 and ice forms at 0C, capturing the gas.
While the overall relative pattern of CO2 can be established, the time resolution would be severely degraded for rapid changes as CO2 escapes and O2 does not. CO2 spikes will likely be wiped out in the fossil record. Rapid changes in CO2 levels may well have been extremely common, but you would not expect to see them in ice cores.
And agreed, this makes a farce of bolting one method of measurement onto another. And this graph alone is the ‘proof’ of man made CO2? And it is absolutely contradicted by the C14 content of 95% of all CO2 which proves only 5% of aerial CO2 is man made.
50
Low carbon (sic) = ice age.
Oh dear.
The late Ordovician period, carbon(sic) levels were 4000ppm and it was an ice age.
Don’t worry about the science, it’s the vibe of it.
220
Ever hear of the Ordovician Period? CO2 levels were 4,000 to 7,000 PPM, and it was an Ice Age.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/ice-age-at-2000-ppm-co2/
Yes, the Big Yellow Thingy ™ , ie, The Sun, output dropped.
But that means CO2 is not the global climate control knob.
See: Big Yellow Thingy ™
190
Hi Lance. Same subject. More fundamental questions. And links to papers. I would like to take this problem on as a group. The key papers are now available to the general public.
Geology is sitting on a breakthrough that kills AWG and changes all of science. It is hiding in the geological record/analysis and in astronomic records/analysis. Physical mechanisms leave evidence. Weird unexplained cyclic massive events happen for physical logical reasons.
The puzzle solution provides the explanation for what moves the tectonic plates and why there is water that covers 70% of the earth’s surface now. Where did that water come from? Why was there an explosion in life 540 million years ago and the second start of plate tectonics? Why did/does the earth cool when there is a massive injection of CH4 into the atmosphere? Again and again and again.
The deep geological record shows there were a series of massive injections of primordial low C13, CH4 into the biosphere. (See paper below) This CH4 explains the massive hydrocarbon deposits (bituminous coal, ‘natural’ gas, and liquid/solid hydrocarbon deposits) on the planet and the fact that there are heavy metals in all of the hydrocarbon deposits. The amount of heavy metals in the hydrocarbons increases for more viscous, more molasses like, less hydrogen, crudes. This explains why there is helium in oil and natural gas reservoirs. The helium is produced from thorium and uranium that was carried from the core by the extrude CH4. The uranium and thorium drops out below the oil and natural gas reservoir. The CH4 continues to be pushed out of the core which keeps small passages from the deposited uranium and thorium up to the higher deposits of hydrocarbons. Over millions of years the radioactive decaying Thorium and Uranium produce helium which accumulates at the high point in the hydrocarbon reservoir.
The CH4 is extrude from the liquid core of the planet when it crystallizes. Metals at high pressure and temperature bond with CH4 and carried CH4 down into the core of the planet. The liquid core is saturated with CH4 so when it crystallizes the CH4 is extrude.
The metals in the mantel form a sheath around the liquid core extrude CH4 which creates a tube. The tube carries the CH4 and the force of the core to surface of the planet. This is the force that moves the tectonic plates. This mechanism explains why Mars and Venus do not have tectonic plate movement.
Because the earth was struck by a Mars size object, about 100 million years after it was formed, most of the CH4 that was in the mantel was lost to space as well as the early earth’s Venus like atmosphere. The CH4 in the mantle had to be removed to enable a sheath to form around the extrude CH4. Without a sheath the extrude CH4 from the core of the earth, would be lost in the large mass of the mantle. The CH4 must be protected to avoid chemical reactions with the surround mantle.
Fifty years ago, geologists assumed that explanation for surface heavy metals on the earth (remember the heavy metals fell down to the core of the planet when the earth was formed) was from a late ‘heavy’ bombardment of asteroids that came from a Mars size planet that was destroyed by Jupiter. Fifty years ago, science fiction stories had humans travelling to the asteroid belt to mine the heavy metals which it was assumed existed.
The point is a Mars size object is required to get concentrated heavy metals in the core of the planet. This hypothesis has been proven incorrect due to two analysis conclusions. Based on analysis of isotopes a late, large/heavy bombardment to earth after the impact that formed the moon, did not happen based on the isotope record which produces severe limits on the amount of the bombardment. And furthermore, based on analysis of meteoroids, it has been shown that there is no possible source of core heavy metals from a destroyed Mars sized object.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200916094247.htm
Modern theory from ancient impacts
Meteorite study calls into doubt a popular theory about the early solar system
The tube extrude core CH4 is what created the earth’s deep oceans and is what is pushing around the tectonic plates around now. The rate of crystallization of the earth’s core is what controls the rate of flow of CH4 in the tubes and the amount of force to push the plates around.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212134354.htm
Why deep oceans gave life to the first big, complex organisms
Why did the first big, complex organisms spring to life in deep, dark oceans where food was scarce? A new study finds great depths provided a stable, life-sustaining refuge from wild temperature swings in the shallows.
In the beginning, life was small. For billions of years, all life on Earth was microscopic, consisting mostly of single cells. Then suddenly, about 570 million years ago, complex organisms including animals with soft, sponge-like bodies up to a meter long sprang to life. And for 15 million years, life at this size and complexity existed only in deep water.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631071303000117
A methane fuse for the Cambrian explosion: carbon cycles and true polar wander
1.3. Cambrian carbon cycles
As compiled here in Fig. 1, one of the most puzzling and as yet unexplained features of the Cambrian Explosion is the sequence of over a dozen accompanying oscillations in inorganic δ 13C values preserved in carbonate, with typical negative-shift magnitudes of – 4%/% Delta C13/C12 and sometimes larger [9–11,20,61,65,75,76, 91,107]. The composite record shows a large negative drop starting at the base of the first Cambrian biozone, coincident with the appearance of T. pedum [19,42], followed by a general rise to positive values of about +6%/% Delta C13/C12 near the base of the Tommotian (carbon cycle I′ [65]).
This trend is punctuated by several abrupt and sharp negative excursions (e.g., “Z”, etc.). The following series of oscillations (II through X) extend into Middle Botomian time and span the classic interval of the Cambrian Explosion. Several more oscillations including a sharp negative swing at the Early Cambrian– Middle Cambrian boundary and a large positive excursion punctuate the Middle and Upper Cambrian [79].
In all, the revised geologic timescale indicates that each of these swings lasts approximately a few hundred thousand to perhaps a million years each.
Frequently the excursions are asymmetric, with a sharp, ten -to ∼hundred-thousand-year negative ‘spike’, followed by a more gradual return to more positive values.
No other set of multiple, high-frequency carbon-isotope perturbations of comparable magnitude, frequency, and duration (∼15 to 20 million years) has been documented in all Earth history.
The dominant cause of most of these oscillations is as yet unknown; they represent one of the major puzzles associated with the Cambrian explosion.
We must emphasize here that the Cambrian carbon cycles are robust features of the geological record. After their discovery in the mid 1980s [75,107], they subsequently correlated stratigraphic sequences between various early Cambrian sections worldwide, thereby solving a long-standing problem of faunal provinciality that had inhibited selection of a Precambrian/Cambrian boundary stratotype [21].
20
Long, but interesting and coherent.
10
Have a look at the Carboniferous Period. ( have to enable TLS 1.1 because it is an older link, 2009 ).
https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
70
No.
Ice age is followed by low CO2.
70
Low CO2 = ice age? It is a question of cause and effect. People would have you believe that low CO2 (and low CO2 alone) is the cause of the ice age but consider for a second that the ice age is the reason for the low CO2. Which do you actually believe? And that is simple physical chemistry everyone knows. Your beer/champagne/soda water/lemonade does not go flat as quickly if cold.
130
.
It is quite obvious that an ice age lowers sea temperatures, which increases oceanic solubility, which lowers atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Climate ‘scientists’, in their zeal to elevate CO2 as the god of all climatic events, have the data and the theory arrse about face.
That is why the high CO2 Ordovician era was able to be so cold. That is also why atmospheric CO2 concentrations dropped 1,000 ppm during that cold era. The cold leads and causes the CO2 reduction.
And we know for sure that ‘scientists’ are incorrect.
To explain the decrease in atmospheric CO2 during an ice age, they invoke iron-seeding of the oceans – to form minerals and sequester CO2 at the bottom of the oceans. But we know this does not happen, because when we get to the next interglacial nearly ALL of that CO2 is deposited straight back into the atmosphere. That could not happen, if this CO2 had been deposited as peat, coal, or limestone deposits.
In truth, the 200 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2 during an ice age HAS to be due to oceanic solubility. Thus their calculations for solubility and/or oceanic overturning must be incorrect. They say 40 ppm is the maximum, but the oceans must be absorbing almost the full 100 ppm.
Ralph
110
As was mentioned upthread, the Hirnantian Ice age (end Ordovician) took place during a time of about (or more than) 4,000 ppm CO2.
Even more interesting is the Cryogenian, where (according to Geological Time Scale 2020, which I have just finished reading Volume I, and am currently in Volume II) atmospheric CO2 was anywhere between 4 and 13% during the Sturtian Glacial Event; dropping to 2% at the beginning of the Ediacaran Period (end of the Marinoan Glacial Event), so the relationship is ‘low CO2 = warm temperatures’.
Seems someone (or someones) has it slightly backwards … … … … …
50
Seems someone doesn’t take into account a whole lot of other things that were different back then.
14
Then please specify what was different.
10
‘Which do you actually believe?’
Ice ages reduce the amount of CO2 being liberated from the oceans.
10
Thanks El Gordo,
That is reassuring
10
Peter,
Actually, it’s the other way around. Ice age -> low CO2. In the ice cores, CO2 concentrations are mostly a proxy for the size of the global biomass. The size of the global biomass is mostly dependent on the available land. It takes centuries for forests to arise on land previously covered by ice and this explains the amount of delay between temperature changes and when CO2 concentrations change.
Ignoring/denying this delay is what’s confusing you into believing in an incorrect causative connection between CO2 concentrations and ice ages. When the ice core data first came about, the alarmist projections alarmed me too, until I applied the proper due diligence and discovered the alarm was complete BS based on confirmation bias supporting bad science for the purpose of equalizing global wealth by stealing it from Western democracies under the guise of climate reparations.
71
The oceans, phytoplankton? Sorry your are talking through your hat
210
Forests are the dynamic contributor to ambient CO2 concentrations. Phytoplankton get their CO2 from what’s dissolved in water and tend to sequester the carbon they accumulate at the bottom of the ocean.
More forests mean more biomass is decomposing into CO2 and methane which leads to higher steady state concentrations. Both CO2 and CH4 show the same delayed response to changes in temperature.
50
So you accept that C02 is absorbed by phytoplankton – and yet it does not play a role in C02 levels? It is ⅓ of the total biomass, you are still talking through your hat
14
Co2 is absorbed by phytoplankton and mostly sequestered. This does slowly reduce atmospheric CO2 and is an important reason why CO2 levels on million year time scales have been gradually decreasing. Burning fossil fuels is just closing the carbon cycle to restore this vital nutrient to the biosphere.
If the lunatics win and we get off fossil fuels, CO2 levels will eventually fall below the levels required to sustain agriculture, as they almost did during the last ice age. This is the only existential crisis related to CO2 that has any possibility of occurring.
In fact, mankind’s burning of fossil fuels will actually extend the viability of life on Earth which would otherwise end once all of the available CO2 has been sequestered. If natural releases were enough, CO2 concentrations would be much higher then they are and the long term decrease in levels would not be evident.
30
Phytoplankton are likely concentrated at the surface for maximum sunshine, their source of energy. And at the surface they would have direct access to CO2. And when they die, there is no rule which says the CO2 and CH4 from decomposition is not available to the atmosphere. Plus as a major food source for krill and krill for fish to whales, for the whole food chain, they are recycled. Life on earth is a duplicate of what happened earlier in the oceans.
And the thin atmosphere is a small player in massive solar battery which are the oceans. And the oceans almost never go below zero, or you would see floating ice. Oceans drive our existence and our climate on land. There would be no water on land without the oceans. So called Climate Scientists would be better served modelling the oceans, not worrying about varying input in the short term of a human lifespan. Climate Science is trying to model effects to predict the weather when they should be modelling the causes. Atmospheric scientists like James Hansen who started this business have justified their own existence, nothing more. And they are wrong.
50
‘Likely”
02
Yes. What is your problem?
20
“Climate Science is trying to model effects to predict the weather when they should be modelling the causes.”
Yes, relative to establishing the sensitivity, both sides of climate science are too concerned with the low level mechanisms that contribute to it without considering how those mechanism interact with each other. Instead, they must consider the bulk climate system as one which is constrained by the laws of physics and thus by its nature is 100% predictable.
Ironically, they start with a sensitivity calculated with the SB Law applied to measured averages and then F it up by introducing non physical feedback mechanisms whose only purpose is to get around the restrictions of COE and the SB Law. When I mentioned to Schlesinger that his feedback analysis was violating COE by subverting the SB Law after enumerating the specific errors in his analysis, he got very angry, didn’t want to discuss it any more, got sick shortly thereafter and subsequently died without correcting the errors that precipitated the abject failure of climate science to get anything right.
Note that 0.3C per W/m^2 of forcing corresponds to the measured radiant surface sensitivity 1.62 W/m^2 of surface emissions per W/m^2 of forcing).
In fact, even the bulk response of the planet can be easily predicted once you understand that the measured surface ‘gain’ of 1.62 W/m^2 of surface emissions per W/m^2 of solar forcing is the golden ratio (the limit of the ratio of sequential terms in the Fibonacci series) and that this value emerges from the chaotic self organization of clouds. While this may seem to good to be true, and it did to me for a long while, but the simple fact is that the math can’t legitimately support any other value.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/chaos2gold.pdf
10
Peter
Having worked extensively with CO2 in industrial gases let me introduce you to a phenomenon known as solubility. And for Co2 its solubility increases as the temperature decreases. Known fact but seemingly lost by so many.
When it was much colder the CO2 gets held in the oceans over time, then when things warm up the CO2 is released. Actually much of the current day increase relates to CO2 being released as we slowly warm from the past Little Ice Age. We can see this cycle repeated over time, and this time is no different.
As to the warming ability of CO2 – that is actually in question as research has been done where the so called green house nature of it has in the two peer reviewed studies been shown to be negligible.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306270600_The_thermal_behaviour_of_gases_under_the_influence_of_infrared-radiation
https://www.scirp.org/pdf/acs_2020041718295959.pdf
30
“… proxy based on nobel gases …”
That should be “noble.” Unless you are talking about the gasses given off by dynamite when it explodes. 🙂
100
Prize winning gases? Given that climate science is mostly gas this might work.
171
From whence comes this spelling of gases with an extra s? Is it an unpublished ISO grammatical standard?
00
.
The Climap and Pmip paeleoclimate models contain a large error.
To ascertain tropical temperatures during the ice ages, they measured the treelines along tropical mountains. Knowing the minimum survival temperature for every species of tree, gives you an accurate ice age temperature at altitude. And then you only need to add 2 degrees per thousand feet, down the mountainside until you reach sea level – and voila, an accurate surface temperature.
What they did not understand, is that during the glacial maximum (LGM), mountain treelines are actually determined by CO2, not temperature. This is because LGM CO2 concentrations reduced to 180 or 190 ppm at sea level, with even less CO2 available to plant-life at altitude. So the treeline was much lower than if it had been determined by temperature alone.
Which means that their tropical surface temperatures are all too cold.
That is the problem with not including all the potential factors.
Worse than that, they don’t even understand the problem. The reviewer of my paper said that the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere, is the same at altitude as at sea level – and so I was completely wrong and my paper was rejected. In return I did ask the reviewer to climb Everest and see if they run short of oxygen – after all, the percentage of oxygen at the top of Everest is exactly the same as at sea level. But the reviewer did not understand, and still failed my paper.
See: ‘Modulation of Ice Ages via Dust and Albedo’.
(The largest global temperature feedback agent is sea-ice albedo)
(And ice-age dust production is inversely proportional to CO2 concentrations – because of those pesky treelines…)
Ralph
180
.
This is my graph of Dust vs CO2.
Note that Dust is inverse and to a logarithmic scale.
But they correlate very precisely.
https://i.postimg.cc/nr7SPm4R/FC9-D1-DF7-EBEF-4874-A10-A-475-F482-FE69-D.jpg
Ralph
40
Rats, and other expressions of annoyance likely to evade MOD’s all seeing censorious eye; you’ve just shot down my theory.
Based on the claim from NASA that their satellite measurements showed increased radiation into space in the CO2 bands, I took the simplistic view that an increase in energy radiating to space would mean rising CO2 was to blame, hence CO2 causing Global Cooling. Obviously this had to occur at the tropopause. I did think that the CO2 might absorb extra heat from the incoming solar radiation, but then found that this was mostly Near IR (which CO2 doesn’t “trap”) so it would pass through unaffected, meaning that there was “no change in the sun’s output” (NASA).
I now realise that “while the atmosphere is well mixed” (NASA) the absolute level of CO2 at the tropopause would be lower, so my theory is discredited.
I will now have to work out why the Climate is now cooler than in the Medieval Warm Period** (950-1250 A.D.) despite the increase in the CO2 level.
** as shown by numerous studies of tree lines then.
30
🙂
10
Ralph – can you provide a link to your paper?
20
Sure – if it is allowed.
Modulation of Ice Ages via Dust and Albedo.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
RE
50
Extensive ocean sediments have been used to infer the temperature of tropical oceans do not change much. Atlantic is the prime cause of glaciation. It goes cold. Equatorial Atlantic drops to as low as 26C during glaciation. Warm pools in the Pacific still regulate to 30C but they reduce in area as the cold water from the Southern Ocean coming up South America extends further west. Indian Ocean shows very little change during glaciation.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2000PA000506
As soon as any paper attempts to connect atmospheric CO2 to Earth’s climate, beyond the life it supports, then you know it should be consigned to the round filing bin. It is will be flawed “science” based on a fairy tale.
40
Mid May and here in south east Melbourne we burst through the 5C level to make it to 5.6C by 9am. I am too stingy to release my own CO2 to make the house warmer so it is just 14C inside. I did release some CO2 last night to warm the place up. It is times like these when I wish I had spent more on insulation when the house was built.
90
Photons recovered from the cooling towers of the local coal fired power station;
https://images.app.goo.gl/kWK8WveKmAjnzRgA8
KK
10
This post was meant to be at the end of the thread.
00
.
Not according to the Pmip3 climate maps.
Surface air temperatures over the north Atlantic are only 2 degrees cooler than normal.
http://pmip3.lsce.ipsl.fr/share/database/maps/lgm/tas_ann_piControl_diff_lgm_AverageModel.png
Note: Pmip3 overcame the CO2-induced treeline temperature problem, by assuming very high lapse rates. But this implied that the atmosphere was very dry, which it was not. So either the temperature ends up wrong, or the precipitation.
Ralph
30
They are climate model output – worse than useless. Climate modellers are so far divorced from reality that they only ever compare their model with other models to assess “accuracy”. They even adjust history to suit their “reality”.
This chart shows how far out the CSIRO ACCESS model gets the Persian Gulf in August:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aq1iAj8Yo7jNhD5U4NzaR6juhSXu
Persian Gulf is a unique part of the oceans. It is the only body of ocean water that does not regulate to the 30C maximum. In August the surface temperature exceeds 34C. Climate models are simply extended weather models and have no predictive ability beyond a few days. They parameterise clouds rather than using the actual physics of cloud formation so they produce meaningless results. Their limitations are easily demonstrated by considering areas like the Persian Gulf where the atmospheric physics causes a different result. The models also perform badly in regions where the ocean surface temperature cannot have a trend like the Nino34 region:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aq1iAj8Yo7jNhDUQqOpE7eGhDS4E
They either cool the past or warm the future, which eventually becomes the present. Models have one destiny – the rubbish bin. They will be viewed in the same light we now view Ptolemy models of the universe.
50
Fortunately, atmospheric CO2 will have no discernible effect on NGT paleotemperature reconstructions. There are other issues with NGTs, but they should be very good at measuring changes in temperatures over time, even if they might be biased high or low in a particular location. Their biggest weakness is lack of precision on assigning an age to the inferred temperature.
00
The LGM in Australia had two cold spikes, but in between it was humid and cool with more easterly breezes.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jqs.1186
30
If only they had a carbon (sic) tax … and electric cars …
“Between 10 and 6 thousand years ago the Arabian peninsula saw the most recent of the ‘Green Arabia’ periods, when increased rainfall transformed this generally arid region.
The transition to the Neolithic in Arabia occurred during this period of climatic amelioration.”
Monumental landscapes of the Holocene humid period in Northern Arabia: the mustatil phenomenon
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0959683620950449
60
The Climate Alarmists never look at any other climate cause other than CO2 because if they do, not only do they not get any money for their work but they are penalised and lose their jobs. If they were paid to look at anything other than CO2, they would be working on it 24/7.
160
It doesn’t end well for genuine scientists who question the political doctrine of anthropogenic global warming.
90
The fact is that most genuine scientists work either for government or big business and stand to lose their jobs if they speak out. That is why a large proportion of those scientists who speak out are retired, with the exception of Peter Ridd who was reaching retirement age anyway. Which was a good thing as he was fired for telling the truth. Telling the truth is not permitted by James Cook University. It is uncollegiate.
180
There was a glacial ice sheet over southern Australia 250 million years ago.
You can see evidence near Adelaide.
https://southaustralia.com/products/fleurieu-peninsula/attraction/glacier-rock
https://uwaterloo.ca/wat-on-earth/news/selwyns-rock
https://www.weekendnotes.com/glacier-rock-fleurieu-peninsula/
71
David , also 30 minutes south of Adelaide is Halletts Cove, where there is a polished and grooved sheet of rock , evidence of glaciation when southern Australia was adjacent to Antarctica.
80
Spent quite a few days of my childhood at Halletts Cove. And quite a few more at Victor Harbour, Granite Island, and Goolwa.
30
There is signs of Glacial activity near Marble Bar at a place called Carawine Gorge .
60
A little bit of history on Glaciation in the Pilbara .
https://library.dbca.wa.gov.au/static/Journals/080052/080052-21.034.pdf
30
Imagine if it were possible to totally debunk CO2 as a climate forcing medium, it wouldn’t be necessary to shut down coal fired power stations, buy electric cars or any other green mind farts, how good would that be.
120
Ronin, Debunking Religion is difficult. Believers Believe. For good or bad.
Climate models are, by definition, coupled non-linear differential equations. For a nonlinear DE to be solvable, ALL equations must have ALL initial conditions known absolutely prior to effecting a numerical iterative solution.
Firstly, that requires that ALL variables for the system in question are accounted for and defined.
Um, I’m kind of seeing only CO2. Albedo? Nucleation? Oceans? Cloud cover? Undersea volcanoes? Variable insolation?
A “one parameter lumped model” is inherently a crude attempt to define a system. Mathematically, it is no more reliable than guessing.
So. Don’t bother debunking CO2 as a forcing medium. Demand a list of all the system variables, their initial conditions, and the model parameterization of each variable, be fully defined and published and demonstrated to predict past history (because all of those outputs are known).
Otherwise, it is simply witchcraft, not science.
170
Does stopping climate change mean no more Ice Ages?
I notice that words change meaning fairly often nowadays.
Peer reviewed academics have determined that ‘inclusive’ excludes me.
And words are violence and what used to be violent is actually peaceful.
Doing my best to keep up.
90
Oh, your Drum Circle is simply too small.
With enough Gaia Harmonized Drummers, everything can be known through Knowing and Vibrations and Crystals.
Words are Peace and Violence. Lies are facts and truth. Being is simply knowing that others are wrong.
You will obey because you don’t want to be disliked. Liberty is simply a belief system of patriarchs.
If you imagine deeply enough, there are as many chromosomes as desired. Biology is fungible.
Truth is malleable and transitory, because boys can be girls.
OK. If you try any of this stuff on my property, there is a high probability of visiting my backhoe on the south acreage at midnight with no witnesses.
90
forgot the /sarc tag.
40
Lance,
I think you mean backsexworker.
30
The Environmental Religion
If one doesn’t worship at the alter of the environmental movement in this country, they are deemed unworthy to enter the glorious afterlife promised by this never fulfilling, environmental utopian end state which rewards all followers of the religious cult. The environmental mirage plays with the mind, undercuts rational thought, and promotes fanatical thinking which ultimately saps the pleasure out of living in the physical world governed by physics and reason.
110
Nothing Green Ever Works … and makes you work instead
A flat battery in a normal car is no big deal. Simply recharge or replace it and you’re on your way. But a flat battery in an all-electric Tesla is a major issue, as James May is now aware.
Faced with an uncharged Tesla, the eccentric former Top Gear presenter was required to perform an act of automotive disassembly:
James May didn’t use his Tesla Model S for a bit, but left it plugged in, making the reasonable assumption that the whole car would stay charged while it sat parked. He was wrong.
As May explains in the video, Teslas have two batteries: the massive one underneath the car that is arranged like a skateboard and powers the wheels, and a regular 12-volt car battery that powers almost everything else about the car.
It was that second battery that was dead, after the car had sat for too long — apparently because the car’s charging system turns off when the big battery is fully charged, and, then, the big battery stops charging the smaller one, too.
Which is a problem because the small battery is responsible for a lot of systems, like, crucially, the locks. May can’t get into his car, and he also can’t open the trunk to access the small battery, either, because that is electronic as well.
Instead, he has to pull two emergency releases, and, after that, remove all manner of parts to finally get to the 12-volt battery itself.
130
I remember when real scientists were warning of the forthcoming glaciation and there were suggestions that glacial ice and even the poles could be melted by covering them with carbon black, maybe pulverised coal…
120
“And yet corals and rainforest survived. Plus turtles, whales, kittens — lots of things. And all without research grants.”
It is just possible to survive without research grants. But you won’t get tenure.
70
What a piece of junk, mind you there’s probably a paragraph about it in the handbook.
10
Its an electronic handbook. You need to charge the battery to read the handbook, and to unlock the bonnet and doors to access the battery so you can charge it so you can read the handbook on how you cant unlock the doors to read the handbook or charge the battery which you need to access the battery which …..
In the future they’ll invent a small piece of metal called a key that works without volts, and a handbook written on paper that you can carry and store anywhere and read without cumbersome volts. The future will be great when we can dispense with unreliable electrics.
00
What this research is looking at is changes over 10’s to 100’s of 1000’s years. So, in reality this is all very interesting but not relevant to anyone living today. What we need is reasons for climate changes over decades or hundreds of years. So we can use science to predict agricultural yields more accurately etc. We know the Earth warmed up from the Little Ice Age probably somewhere in the mid 1800’s. What caused that warming when CO2 levels were supposedly 300 ppm? Clearly it wasn’t CO2, because as the Earth then cooled slightly between 1945 ->1980 CO2 levels kept going up. The earth warmed (mid 1800’s) and this caused the oceans to outgas CO2 as a delayed response. Maybe mankind has contributed to the CO2 increase but it is insignificant. We keep looking to the atmosphere as the reasons for climate change. Perhaps we should be looking under our feet at geothermal reasons for Earth’s warming and cooling periods. In particular for the initiation of these events. Then some of these other factors then come into play – like cloudiness (albedo), Milankovitch cycles, solar cycles, cosmic rays etc etc. One thing I am sure of – it has nothing to do with CO2.
80
.
Well, we are due another ice age in the next 1,500 years, so that may be relevant to civilisation.
Luckily, this will be a mild ice age, due to orbital mechanics, and we can easily reverse it with a little carbon dust. So yes, carbon causes warming, but only in raw dust format and not in a gaseous oxide format.
R
50
G’day Ross,
This 20 minute video Dr Wiess shows the short period cycles which allow prediction of the next significant variation in world climate, an LIA like cooling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAELGs1kKsQ
I find his work compelling, and I’ve not seen any disagreement with it.
Cheers
Dave B
40
Should be interesting. Does it match Ralph’s prediction, is that LIA the big one or just another frozen Thames.
10
Don’t know how to answer that one K K, but if I remember his graph correctly Dr Weiss had the 60 year cycle bottoming out before the 200 year one, and I can’t remember his words. Cooling certainly in the short term.
30
.
My estimation is based upon the continued reduction in obliquity, and the emergence of the next precessional maximum. But this is all very uncertain, as the next northern Great Winter is very weak, and it is uncertain if it has sufficient power to force another ice age.
We live in a very stable period in the Earth’s orbital cycles, with the next deep Great Winter not occurring for over 100k years.
Ralph
21
G’day Ralf,
Seems to me that your focus and timescales and Dr Weiss’s are quite different, but complementary. His work is focused on the historical period of about the last 2000 years and demonstrated that all the significant changes in that time can be accounted for without any causal involvement of CO2. While those changes are significant within that period, to us, they probably wouldn’t show in any graph covering the major ice ages.
Thanks for your work.
Cheers
Dave B
30
At the end of the Eemian there was an aridity pulse which hung around for centuries and then the world slipped into glaciation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03905
So I put it to you that desertification happens before glaciation and also that Antartica didn’t receive dust from the Simpson Desert at any time of the cycle, because of the prevailing winds.
00
‘What we need is reasons for climate changes over decades or hundreds of years.’
That is true and we have to explain how the system works in simple language, to bring about a scientific revolution.
Looking back to Meltwater Pulses we may find a clue.
‘We identify nine MWPs, four of which occurred in three periods of rapid sea level rise (19.5–18.8, 14.8–13.0 and 11.5–11.1 ka BP). The rest are dated to the period during the Early Holocene sea level rise after 11 ka BP.’ (Harrison et al 2018)
00
‘Perhaps we should be looking under our feet at geothermal reasons for Earth’s warming and cooling periods.’
I like the geothermal theory, but without clear evidence we have no show. When talking of global warming we should discuss the Bolling-Allerod period, what caused it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bølling–Allerød_warming#/media/File:Ngrip_bolling_allerod_do18_1.png
00
It’s odd we are worrying about the next ice age. That’s most unlikely.
What is really wrong about the idea that CO2 controls our climate, to the exclusion of everything else, is that we do not control CO2. Under 5% of all CO2 is man made. So if that 5% was eliminated, what? CO2 is utterly outside our control. And if it affects the weather, what is anyone proposing. Windmills, solar panels and electric cars do not affect the weather.
So what do we humans control which could affect the weather? Nothing at all. And the solar system has only another 5 billion years to go. What are we going to do about that? Panic?
It was never about the weather. Surely that is obvious. It’s another UN scam. Like the Wuhan Flu.
51
.
Regards CO2 concentrations reducing to 180 ppm during the ice ages, this was quite a problem of the biosphere. Plant life and therefore animal life all depend upon CO2 – it is a basic fuel of all life on Earth (excepting fungi).
During the ice age maxima, the Earth had reached the point where the entire biosphere might have been extinguished. Then man came along, and released a lot of CO2 back into the atmosphere, saving the biosphere.
Three cheers for the oil and coal companies, for saving all life on Earth.
Ralph
70
Do not panic! If for billions of years all the gases (emitted by terrestrial and maritime volcanoes) were not immediately recycled, there would NEVER have been life on Earth!
40
thanks for the advice.
00
QUOTE
80
“Outspoken academics are punished”.
Didn’t we see that in spades with Peter Ridd, and it’s still going on.
40
The Climate sensitivity parameter used in IPCC modelling has been trending towards ZERO as shown in the graphs presented here.
https://notrickszone.com/2017/10/16/recent-co2-climate-sensitivity-estimates-continue-trending-towards-zero/
At the time of the Paris Agreement the “consensus” was a value of 2 (ie a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would result in global temperatures increasing by 2 degrees C).
Now the “consensus” value is closer to 0.5 and with many papers having a value close to zero
This paper has much higher CO2 levels leading to “global cooling”.
https://notrickszone.com/2020/03/05/a-nearly-zero-climate-sensitivity-paper-finds-a-16-fold-co2-increase-cools-earth-below-pre-industrial-temperatures/
10
Not only colder, but incredibly DRY times. Huh?
Low temperatures mean LOW evaporation.
Low evaporation means LOW precipitation.
So, where did all the surface ice some fro?
The oceans started freezing at the polar regions. Ice floats, fortunately. If water-acted like most compounds, ice would be DENSER than the liquid phase. Thus it would sink in the solidification process and this state of affairs would accelerate until there was little or no liquid water left and all life that may have existed would be gone.
Thus as the ice ground its way across continents, the planet’s albedo / surface reflectance percentage INCREASED, All that shiny white stuff all over the place. Nary a cloud in the sky because the water was too cold to evaporate.
This brings us to glaciers. These “move” because snowfall at the Neve (top of the glacier) adds mass that shoves the ice and accumulated rocks downhill. In the way of an enormous upside-down ice skate, a glacier melts from underneath. The constantly flowing film of water is what the glacier “glides” on.
No evaporation, no precipitation, no topping-up of the Neve, no glacial movement. HOWEVER, until the temperature REALLY drops, the glacier will still be melting underneath and this liquid water eats away at the face of the glacier. Glacial “retreat” has NOTHING to do with the glacier trying to back up the slope, but the face being eroded / collapsing / melted away.
The frozen water that carved out regions like the US Pacific North-West and vast swathes of Canada, not forgetting Manhattan Island, and the Great Lakes on the other side, did not fall from the sky,; it traveled overland.
And when the Sun eventually revved up a bit and the ice started melting, the subsequent flooding was pretty spectacular, as well.
10
Low evaporation, but what about sublimation?
10
Last time i looked, sublimation was pretty slow and it works better at higher altitudes ( higher than 8-10 thousand feet AMSL, with lower atmospheric pressure.
But, I’m not a professional geo-phys type, just an enthusiastic amateur who got hooked on vulcanology back in the 1980’s
There is an interesting series of “rock-doctoring” lectures and field videos by a bloke called Nick Zentner, who works out of the Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.
Start here: https://www.nickzentner.com/downtown-geology-lectures/
20
This is an off topic complaint. Yes, it hit a nerve.
The sentence above is insulting in a way that is all too common in the lay press. It also suggests that the author has no idea about scientific processes which I know not to be the case. Distilling years of research into “experts” and “told us” is lazy and, actually, incorrect.
Scientists doing research and coming to published conclusions is not someone didactically telling us what is what. And finding that old research turns out to be incorrect or based on poor assumptions or incomplete data (or whatever) is a great outcome for science.It is what science does and is the reason we keep doing it.
The old science, if looked at through a broader lens than just a subset of data, is likely to have contributed to overall knowledge and probably important to the research that finally found some of its conclusions to be wanting.
26
“And finding that old research turns out to be incorrect or based on poor assumptions or incomplete data (or whatever) is a great outcome for science.”
You mean this of course, only up until the point that the “science is settled”.
No?
It is my observation that scientific sacred cows keep walking for decades after they are dead.
80
I don’t understand your comment.
Look at the OP. It relates to new research which is done by scientists working with the latest techniques. Jo calls these same people “experts” when she wants to denigrate them when they are regular scientists with a lot of specialist knowledge and skills.
27
Leaf the problem is that the scientists are narrowly focussed on their particular disciplines and don’t comment outside of that. We need people to translate what the regular scientists are saying and someone with your skills, at splitting hairs over trivial matters, will be useful.
My question to you, what caused the Meltwater Pulses to bring the world out of glaciation?
10
Or were the meltwater pulses a result of some other factor?
10
The Meltwater Pulses must have had a trigger, possibly a binge/purge internal dynamic following on from orbital forcing.
00
Gee Aye,
You say,
I say,
In reality, the paper which is the subject of this thread
(a) considers the two stable states (i.e. glacial and interglacial) of the Earth’s bi-stable climate system
then
(b) stupidly assumes climate behaviours are the same in the two different states
and
(c) stupidly assumes climate behaviours are only affected by one variable (i.e. atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration)
then
(d) uses those risible assumptions to estimate the effect on global temperature of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
Were I to want to want to defend such “research” then – like you, Gee Aye – I, too, would not be willing to put my name to it.
Richard
40
Interesting perspective.
Condition 1. Interglacial, about 15,000 years.
Condition 2. Glaciation, about 70,000 years.
Total cycle length 95k to 110k years.
They are associated with warmth and cold respectively
Why?
20
Kalm Keith,
You ask me why the Earth has bi-stable climate conditions; viz. glacial and interglacial.
I answer that I don’t know because nobody knows.
The problem with the paper under discussion is that it uses ignorance of the reason(s) for the bi-stability as an excuse to pretend implausible assumptions are reality.
Richard
20
Yes. I think I was just summarising your post and agreeing with you.
00
Sorry Gee,
it is likely that you understand the technical details of this subject and science in general better, than
I.
I’m more of a cultural observer, kicked around by an academic/alleged scientific/political matrix that year by year has a slowly increasing deleterious effect on my lifestyle and psyche.
Reading the debate on this thread is like listening to theologians parse scripture.
My reaction is much the same as when I was coerced into church as a child having to listen to sermons that swirl in circular logic.
Does He exist?
Will the weather report from 15,000 years ago be scientifically and undisputedly determined?
And the atmospheric conditions that caused that snowy Monday 15,000 years ago?
There is science, and then there the Church of science of which those that wish to practice science must be ordained.
Loyalty to doctrine is enforced.
I see this all the time reading abstracts, where the poor initiates into the great Church report their results and then carefully construct a theological word salad to explain why their results do not necessarily challenge doctrine in their field.
Otherwise, goodbye tenure.
Global Warming/Climate Change (patiently await the next rebranding).
The greatest Giant Golden Calf.
20
Moderation?
… that’s interesting.
10
More like years of modelling and achieving consensus.
10
The debate on CO2 goes on and on, why?
WHY are sensible people arguing about photons.
KinkyKeith
February 17, 2018 at 9:20 pm
The illusion of debate is a good title to prompt assessment of the Man Made Global Warming Meme.
There is only one truth that needs to be substantiated and that should be obvious, however the waters have been muddied so much using irrelevant factors that most of the public and all of the politicians just don’t know.
The basic concept of CAGW, put out by the warming community, is that CO2 is a heat trapping gas.
The whole scam is based on one mechanism: the idea that carbon dioxide is a heat trapping, “greenhouse” gas.
I have said that twice for a reason: it is the core concept on which CAGW stands or falls.
IT IS NOT A HEAT TRAPPING GAS and must resolve to equilibrate with gases surrounding it: Instantly.
It is known and accepted by all scientists with basic university degrees, there is no mechanism by which CO2 can adversely affect the atmospheric temperature.
Why has this point never been examined in court?
We should no longer debate the warmer deliberations because we need to go to the core of the issue: that CO2 cannot act in the way they claim.
This is the scientific truth of the matter.
There never was and never will be any human caused Global Warming.
We need to start attacking this point.
Real science is quite clear: CO2 is NOT a heat trapping gas any more than any other gas and cannot be responsible for changes in Earth’s atmospheric temperature.
All other debate around global warming is irrelevant, pointless and deceitful when this fact is ignored.
Why is this fact not used as the basis of a court action against all of the “misdirection” of public funds justified by association with the CAGW scam.
Warmer advocats have avoided facing the question on the basic mechanism by endlessly debating non issues and have given the Illusion of Debate while hiding from the
real science.
KK
40
I understand the frustration and the total rejection of the scientific principles of proposition and rejection. Next time around maybe.
20
Graeme has given the real reason that CO2 absorbs IR radiation from the ground.
https://joannenova.com.au/2018/02/the-illusion-of-debate-a-history-of-the-climate-issue-part-2-2009-2011/#comment-1983370
00
Temperature fluctuations are over rated. 6 degrees just 25000 years ago. How did the aborigines survive? How did the Koalas survive ?
Green science (science with added ideological based opinion) is so often based on atrociously frail fundamental assumptions.
Another is biodiversity. Biodiversity just means excess species. I see zero ecosystems fail because of loss of biodiversity, zero loss of biological function.
In fact, to survive we must reduce biodiversity. We clear forests to fields. Massive decrease in biodiversity, more productive. Another ecosystem replaces the last one, immediately.
There has been a massive loss of species, extinct, gone. A tragedy apparently. But to this day there is no loss to the earth as a functioning biological system, zero, despite this huge loss of species. In fact it is running with the reliability and consistency of a tractor’s diesel engine.
Extinction is almost irrelevant to nature, it has no effect. If Koalas go extinct (no chance btw), it doesn’t really matter. The biological organ continues on, without the slightest hitch.
But Green Science begins from the place where concepts like these are vital, and fragile. But they’re not vital, and they’re resilient as all hell.
40
Yes, 99% of all species are extinct. It’s a tragedy if you think it is.
And humans as homo sapiens have only been around a short time, 100,000 years.
We alone presume this is our exclusive planet put here for our private pleasure and sustenance, but that’s what the dinosaurs thought and they lasted hundreds of millions of years, something we are unlikely to achieve.
We have had agriculture for a mere 10,000 years since the discovery in the fertile Crescent in the Middle East. We tamed horses only 6,000 years ago where the American natives from Asia ate them to extinction. Now they are used for racing, show jumping and fox hunting.
The aborigines in Australia wiped out our the mega marsupials in as little as 1,000 years after arriving with their fire and dingoes and regularly burned the place to the ground, halving the rainfall. Even Tim Flannery agrees and he is now a Climate Scientist.
But now we have Climate Extinction? Is someone kidding? Viral is more likely. Or nuclear war. Still it would be nice to save the black throated finches from the deleterious effects of coal mining. That would save them having to adapt like all the other life on earth.
And then we and the black throated finches can live happily ever after. It’s a Grimm fairy tale.
Damn that Carbon Dioxide, the greatest threat in history. Send cash.
40
I’m sure they’re right about the relationship between CO2 and temperature; they just got the polarity wrong. High CO2 when its warm due to outgassing and greater biologic activity, hence respiration. Low CO2 when it’s cold due to greatly increased solubility in sea water plus diminished biologic activity.
Yes, it really is that simple.
70
A cool summary!
10
I am indebted to you, Jo, for continuing the fight for humanity to get its perspective back in order, rather than the hysterical and juvenile insanity we have seen for much of the 21C. We know of many changes that have happened to our planet in the past that must have obliterated all life except for the survivors. Much of what we had to deal with of our own making in the most recent past pales into insignificance against what nature is capable of. We need leaders who are brave, courageous, and not frightened of their own shadows and not the weak minded idiots who seem to delight in making a mockery of everything good about our species. We are here until we aren’t anymore. All of us. And we are all equally important.
80
What can I say.
That’s a must read.
🙂
10
Oh well said!
10
The CO2 debate is all about politics, not science. CO2 levels have been seized on by intellectually challenged individuals (eg: Gore, Kerry, Flannery etc), in order to push their “New Capitalism” (ie; the Capitalism of the Left). Aside from wood and possibly water…there is no such thing as “RENEWABLE ENERGY”; maybe ‘Clean Energy’, but NOT renewable. The immediate future consists of Corporations grasping the good old “planned obsolescence” model WRT Solar, Wind and Battery technology. As such, it is merely a continuation of Capitalism (non-Marxist),which will continue well into the 22nd Century, and possibly beyond (until the REAL question of non-renewable resources is dealt with).
21
Global Warming/Climate Change (patiently await the next rebranding).
Catastrophic climate Change, ?? what comes after catastrophic.
10
https://electroverse.net/giant-late-may-snowstorm-to-unload-feet-of-powder-across-the-western-u-s/?fbclid=IwAR3mfq4OZRa15ZU6Dm2BwzKcAMEVrZGrxXCnTyEJSNGRNOnvqrzlvvTeiyo
00