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Greenland by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
We may be living through some of the best weather in the last 100,000 years
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on a new paper showing the incredible extreme climate shifts of Greenland. During the depths of the last ice age Greenland temperatures would swing abruptly by 10 to 15 degrees Celsius (or 30F) in the space of 30 years. And we’re panicking at the moment about warming at 0.13°C per decade.
These Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) events occurred 24 times from 120,000 years ago until 11,000 years ago. There were no humans living there at the time, as far as we know. The best estimate is that people first arrived in Greenland 4,500 years ago. As far as we know, it’s only Greenland that was gyrating wildly in temperature but the bare truth about climate scientists is the expert models can’t predict or explain any of this. So the seismic shifts came and went and went and came, and it had nothing to do with whether you turned the airconditioner on.
If any poor sodding homo sapiens did manage to wash up on Greenland during the peaks 30 or 40,000 […]
By Jo Nova
Kap København is almost the closest point there is to the North Pole on dry land.
The survival of some DNA for two million years is astounding all of itself — breaking the record for oldest known DNA by nearly a million years. Before this, the oldest DNA was thought to be 1.2 million years — beyond which all the global DNA of all the species that ever lived was assumed to be dissolved into unreadable mush.
But now we have found enough of the ancient code to identify a whole ecosystem on the northern edge of Greenland that no one expected to find. Apparently giant elephant-like Mastodons were wandering the far northern parts of Greenland — practically as close as they could get to the North pole without swimming.
At the time, the world was not just 1.5 catastrophic degrees warmer than today, but a full nuclear 10 to 17 degrees hotter.
Strangely life on Earth wasn’t suffering the sixth mass extinction.
Discovery of world’s oldest DNA breaks record by one million years
ScienceDaily
The incomplete samples, a few millionths of a millimetre long, were taken from the København Formation, […]
David Attenborough thinks fossil fuels cause scores of walruses to careen off cliffs. The ABC is crying as it advertises the latest Netflix tear-jerker and WWF fundraiser.
In behind-the-scenes footage posted to YouTube by Netflix, producer and director Sophie Lanfear explained the events with tears in her eyes.
“It’s the sad reality of climate change,” she said.
“They’d be on the ice if they could be, but there’s no option but to come to land.
Actually though, it’s the sad reality of predatory polar bears
…
Canadian zoologist Dr Susan Crockford is all over it calling it Walrus Tragedy Porn. Apparently, the Attenborough footage is from 19 October 2017 in Ryrkaypiy, Siberia which was overrun with polar bears that terrorised the walruses. Five thousand walruses were herded to a cliff. Hundreds were driven over the edge to their deaths, and afterwards the polar bears feasted off McWalrus on the rocks. Apparently, it’s happened before and has nothing to do with sea ice: “We have records of walrus haulouts that are nearly a century old, including some from this part of the Arctic. The idea that walruses are being driven on shore by sea-ice […]
It’s not well known, but in the same way that climate change causes every hot weekend it also causes snow dumps, avalanches, and freak weather. The scientific link is just as strong and calculated the same way. Take a tendentious cross-correlation on free-range seasonal assumptions, and then pour Vodka in the Cray.
If only the Germans had built more windmills they could have stopped this. Chaos in ski resorts, people trapped, road closed, flights canceled
Three metres of snow fell in the space of 48 hours in some parts of the country and more than a metre is forecast to fall today and tomorrow. — The Times (paywalled)
Heavy snow paralysed much of Europe for yet another day, cutting off mountain villages, sparking avalanches like one that crashed into a Swiss hotel, and killing at least four people.
At least 21 weather-related deaths have been reported in Europe in the last 10 days.
—ABC
With three million dollars to spend today (like every day) the ABC found cute photos of white stuff on cuddly sheep and scooters to fit the deadly theme. Nice.
There is avalanche danger, blocked roads and floods in […]
This is Expertise the UN can bank on
In the GWPF 2018 Lecture, Richard Lindzen pointed out the genius of Arctic climate models
First, for something to be evidence, it must have been unambiguously predicted. (This is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition.) Figure 1 shows the IPCC model forecasts for the summer minimum in Arctic sea ice in the year 2100 relative to the period 1980–2000. As you can see, there is a model for any outcome.
It is a little like the formula for being an expert marksman: shoot first and declare whatever you hit to be the target.
Graph of the Year: Arctic sea ice predictions of the worlds top models in 2011. Spaghetti.
This will definitely happen according to the worlds top scientists at NASA, CSIRO, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab (NOAA), National Centre for Atmospheric Research, The Hadley Meteorological Centre, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology – Germany, the Institute of Numerical Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Tokyo, JAMSTEC (Japan), the Climate Research Division of Environment Canada, The Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Norway, the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), plus experts from Centro […]
Shipping tracks, cloud patterns over the ocean. | Photo NASA.
Ships leave a trail of sulfur dioxide in the sky behind them which seeds clouds and causes cooling. At the same time, black soot drops out on the arctic ice, absorbs sunlight and causes warming. So which effect is bigger? Scott Stephenson et al tried to figure out that out and the cooling effect won.
The researchers also factored in global anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gas concentration trajectories, adopted by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), at a level closely aligning with today’s trends, along with global economic output that will drive the transport of goods.
“We attempted to fully integrate the interactions between the various components of the climate system in ways that have not been done before,” Stephenson says.
The main result was that the cooling effect won out over the warming effect in the simulations, to the tune of about one degree Celsius.
Zowie. One real degree of Arctic cooling sounds like rather a lot — even undoing greenhouse gas warming as well as soot based warming.
The cooling effect stops if we clean the smoke stack and remove […]
Hands up who knew that Greenland has been pretty much the same temperature for the last hundred and forty years?
We know that there has been massive melting ice, shrinking ice sheets, a dark zone that is a huge problem, that the melting is accelerating, faster than at any time in the last 400 years. We all know “this is scary”, and due to climate change and could raise sea levels by 20 feet. And that’s just the news stories in the last two weeks.
At NoTricksZone, Kenneth Richards has found an up to date graph of Greenland temperatures buried in the supplement of a new paper by Mikkelsen et al., 2018:
….
So Greenland hasn’t been showing signs of warming since man made CO2 started rapidly rising after World War II. Indeed Greenland has been not responding to CO2 for 140 years or maybe a million.
Serious researchers have known this for years. It’s not like a flat trend suddenly popped up to surprise us.
Hat tip to Bob FJ for sending graphs and links of earlier studies last year. Even far back in 2004, it was obvious Greenland was not warming like it was supposed to. That […]
Advertising your virtues sometimes conflicts with advertising your social status.
Paul Joseph Watson never minces his words. …
The surprising thing is that these guys get away with it. Not laughed out of town for their grandstanding piety at awards nights.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
9.2 out of 10 based on 96 ratings
Sometimes an idea comes along that adds another chapter to the Book of Stupid. You might think windmills on land are an indulgent, pointless fantasy, but take that idea and make it worse:
(CNN) A team of scientists has a surprisingly simple solution to saving the Arctic: We need to make more ice.
A team at Arizona State University has proposed building 10 million wind-powered pumps to draw up water and spill it out onto the surface of the ice, where it will freeze faster. Doing so would be complicated and expensive — it’s estimated to cost a cool $500 billion, and right now the proposal is only theoretical.
It’s not like we have anything better to do with half a trillion dollars. Should we cure cancer or refrigerate one of the coldest places on Earth? Should we teach our kids about the fall of civilizations, or teach them to bow before prophets who keep predicting the end of the Arctic and getting it wrong?
Or we could add ice to the whole arctic for just $5 trillion
Tristan Hopper explains the beefed up plan would absorb the “entire steel production of the United States”, […]
Matt Ridley in The Australian explains how every man and his dog is forecasting the doom of the Arctic sea ice, and not only have they been wrong year after year, but they all assume that if the ice all melts it’ll be a global disaster. But Earth’s already been-there done-that, and for years, and it was no-biggie. Polar bears obviously got through it, as did seals. Humans without protective solar panels somehow spread far and wide, and generally flourished.
I suspect the main climate refugees from the Arctic would have names like Donner and Blitzen. This is the one thing Matt doesn’t explain — in 8,000BC when the ice melted, what the heck happened with Santa?
Ice scares aren’t all they’re cracked up to be
This was a period known as the “early Holocene insolation maximum” (EHIM). Because the Earth’s axis was tilted away from the vertical more than today (known as obliquity), and because we were then closer to the Sun in July than in January (known as precession), the amount of the Sun’s energy hitting the far north in summer was much greater than today. This “great summer” effect was the chief reason the Earth […]
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Here on the ball of magma called Earth, there’s a hot plume of rocks under Iceland that stretches right across under Greenland. Those hot rocks are melting the ice from below in a band 1,200 km long and 400 km wide.[1]
I don’t think solar panels are going to stop Greenland melting.
The main part of the plume has been progressing eastward over the last 120 million years, right under Greenland and now lies under Iceland.
Will the media take a million years to catch on?
Presumably, being world class journalists, from now on all ABC/BBC/CBC stories will not mention melting Greenland ice-sheets without also noting that geothermal heat may be causing it instead of your long hot showers.
But a similar study published in Nature Geoscience 3 years ago was the forerunner to this one with similar conclusions and the mainstream media don’t seem to have noticed yet.[2] No mention of magma, tectonics and hot rocks here: ABC — Antarctica’s melting ice alone could lift sea levels one metre by 2100, March 31st, 2016. Or here: ABC — Global warming melts last stable edge of Greenland’s Zachariae ice stream, March 17th, 2014. Or on the BBC – […]
Thanks to the Hockeyschtick for pointing us at a new study of Greenland ice cores[1]. For the first time, 12 ice cores drilled in the northern section of Greenland have been “stacked” and published. Curiously, these 12 ice cores were drilled from 1993 to 1995, so this is not new data– but it’s the first time that all 12 oxygen isotope records, which are a proxy for temperature, have been published together. The area represents about 10% of Greenland, and seems to behave differently to the southern part. The warm event in 1420 is described as a local effect. The researchers acknowledge that solar activity is important and solar activity correlates with temperatures. It must be growing more and more obvious to climate researchers that their models have to include the long term solar cycles.
The take-home messages for me are: 1/ Natural variability is big and unpredictable. 2/ When we get this kind of detail from all the continents and regions of the ocean we’ll definitely be in a position to start getting the big Global Climate Models to work. 3/ Until we figure out how the Sun causes climate change, the current models are useless.
… Click […]
Another excuse may be on the rocks. The Arctic ice melt has been a favorite clarion of catastrophists. What will they do if it stops declining? It is early days, but if the missing heat is hiding in the Arctic this pattern is not following the green machine plan.
Cryosphere
David Whitehouse GWPF
A New “Pause?”
Examining the sea ice extent data for the past eight years it is obvious that there has not been any statistically significant downward trend, even though there is more noise (interannual variability) in the data. There are interannual variations but they do not form a trend. For the 2002 – 2006 period the annual differences are mostly in the extent of maximum and not minimum ice cover. The period 1990 – 1996 displays much more interannual variability. The main difference between the ice-curves is that in recent years there has been an increase in the gradient around the beginning of June.
Of the general decline and the interannual variability how much is due to external forcing and how much to internal variability? Estimate from climate models give about equal measure to forcing and internal variability, Kay et […]
Adrift 2015: The official trailer From Treehugger (where else?) h/t Climate Depot
The man pictured above is Alex Bellini, a professional adventurer and motivational speaker who plans to live alone on a melting iceberg off the coast of Greenland for one year, to emphasize the urgent need for climate change action.
Starting in spring of 2015, Bellini plans to find a suitable iceberg in the northwest region of Greenland, where he will remain for up to a year as it slowly melts. Provisioned with with 300 kilograms (661 pounds) of dried food, Bellini will shelter in a survival capsule, the Kevlar-reinforced kind used for ocean oil rigs, until it becomes too risky — at which point he will take to the sea in the capsule, floating adrift until he is rescued.
Treehugger asked:
“Crazy publicity stunt or stroke of daring genius? We’re not sure…
Jo says:
It’s neither and both — it’s a genius publicity stunt and a stroke of crazy.
The man is a motivational speaker. Assuming he survives, (I hope he does) this’ll set him up for five years of speeches.
(Unless, of course the world cools and everyone […]
Congrats to Emma Thompson, she knows the litany perfectly.
It takes an Oscar winning actress to keep a smug face while saying something this inane.
“Tony Abbott Climate Change is REAL I’m standing on it!”
…
I hope she sends another message when she reaches the place called “climate sameness”.
Something tells me this is a high-carbon-footprint way to send a message. Perhaps an email to Tony Abbott might have saved some fish from becoming reckless in 2050?
Waxing Gibberish sends an alternative sign:
…
There are more gems of wisdom from economist scientist-actress Thompson. She must have a Nanny McPhee trick or Sybill Trelawney divination up her sleeve: she thinks millions of letters can change the Arctic weather.
SBS
“Bear in mind that politicians often lose sight of issues that aren’t in front of them all the time.
“So we all need to be bold.
“If tens of millions of us wrote to our leaders demanding action on the Arctic and climate change, well – that could change everything.”
Royal Mail, a new climate forcing then?
In Thompson’s world, it’s all the governments fault. […]
For years we’ve been warned via the media that there was a risk of irreversible global catastrophe. Is the IPCC stepping back from those forecasts too? The words abrupt, irreversible, and tipping point didn’t make it into the Headline Points in 2013.
Reader Katabasis at Bishop Hill reports on the Royal Society meeting where abrupt and irreversible changes were discussed. Katabasis notes that in the IPCC Chapter 12 Table 12.4 many of the catastrophic changes being forecast are described as “unlikely” or “very unlikely” or even “exceptionally unlikely”. The only one now considered “likely” is that the Arctic might be ice free 40 years from now (which is a big step back from “ice free by 2013” as some commentators predicted). Moreover confidence is low.
Will IPCC authors now correct Gore, Flannery, or other commentators when they tell us that CO2 emissions will probably lead to abrupt or irreversible ice sheet collapse, or collapses of the monsoonal circulation or Atlantic currents. Note the IPCC is saying “low confidence” for long term megadroughts, and monsoon changes, which means, “we don’t know” rather than “unlikely”. But why spend billions to prevent something you have low confidence will happen?
Table 12.4: Components […]
This is a post for those who like the intellectual stimulation of unraveling the cause and effect links at the bleeding edge. It’s a weekend puzzle.
Frank Lansner (of Hidethedecline) wants to toss out his latest thoughts and findings for discussion. With a very simple equation he’s managed to recreate a curve just like Hadcrut temperature profile, using just the Nino 3.4 data (see Fig. 1). If it stands up, this would imply the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) pretty much determined a significant part of the climate — which is not a shock, but nonetheless there’s not a lot of room for CO2. The turning points do seem to match well (unlike the temperature versus CO2 “turning points”). As William Kininmonth reminded us, the oceans cover 70% of the planet, and are 4km deep, and most of that water is very very cold, even under the equator. If the surface of the central pacific cools by 1 degree does that drop global temperatures by 0.1C?
Of course, the mystery of what drives the PDO still stands. On that score, Frank looks at Siberia and Alaska, and finds an interesting correlation with the Nino3.4 when it is lagged by 15 -18 […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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