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By Jo Nova
Every scientific curiosity becomes a climate prayer
A year ago, within an hour, 120 seismometers all over the world started to record a freakish shake every 90 seconds like a metronome. People watching the waves were baffled. And even more so that it didn’t stop within a few minutes but continued on all day and night, eventually ringing out for nine days.
It turned out to be a landslide in an oddly shaped fjord in Eastern Greenland. A 1.2 kilometre mountain of rock and ice had collapsed, sending a 110m wall of water 10 kilometers across the gorge to smash 200 metres up the other side of the fjord. The water then came back down and the return wave apparently kept slopping back and forward for nine days. Spare a thought for the fish.
Dickson Fjord before (left) and after (right) the landslide. From Scientific American andSøren Rysgaard (left); Danish Army (right)
Thus “10,000 swimming pools” worth of repeating tsunamis keep rattling seismic detectors for days and then kept 68 scientists busy for a year figuring out what it was.
Predictably, they say, it was caused by climate change, because rock slides and ice collapses […]
Photo taken by Ansgar Walk
By Jo Nova
The Experts thought Greenland’s ice has been there for the whole Pleistoscene era, or the last 2.6 million years. It was just another useless consensus, stultifying science — feeding the myth that the climate was perfect until Big Coal screwed it up.
Map adapted from Westoff et al 2022
Finally, 30 years after the famous GISP ice core was hauled out of the Greenland summit, someone has bothered to study the dirt at the bottom and found poppy seeds, willow twigs and insects there, where they were not supposed to be. They discovered a vibrant tundra ecosystem where there was supposed to be an ice-cap. The obvious conclusion is that cavemen didn’t cause it, and that there must be some huge other natural forces at work that we have no clue about. Our climate models didn’t predict this, because CO2 was low then and clearly, the models are hopelessly incomplete. We are babes in the wood on the third rock from the sun.
The captive science PR writers don’t tell us that CO2 might be irrelevant compared to the big mystery forces we don’t understand. Instead they tell […]
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, […]
One of the most abrupt climate change events in human existence was the Younger Dryas period about 13,000 years ago, and even though it was so sharp, and so severe, and so recent (geologically speaking) we still don’t know what caused it. A new paper argues that it is likely it was a volcano. But previously researchers have said “asteroid”.
The Earth was warming out of the last ice age, when it suddenly cooled, and stayed cold for twelve centuries, then warmed again, just as abruptly. This is what real climate change looks like, something we mere mortals are unprepared for and apparently have no way of predicting.
Spare a thought for the people alive at the time. They were subject to a fall of three degrees Celsius, apparently in the space of just one year, perhaps triggered by volcanic dust that darkened the sky. What is still far from explained, whether it was by volcano or falling rock, was why the coldness continued so long then so suddenly ended. The snap change wiped out some species, like possibly the last mammoths, and in some locations camels and horses.
The volcanic dust is thought to have fallen out within a […]
The coldest ever day recorded in Greenland stands at -63.3 C (minus 81 F). But on January 2nd in 2020, after Greenland suffered a century of global warming, the thermometer at Summit Camp sunk to at least -64.9C. I say, at least, because it may have been even colder. Sharp eyes of Cap Allon at Electroverse saw it hit minus 66C. Ryan Maue also saw it and predicted there would be cold as the Arctic Oscillation broke down.
4:13 AM · Jan 4, 2020
I sought confirmation at the time (among the Bushfire days in Australia). I looked for any official tweet even, but couldn’t find any. How’s that work — a new all time record for a whole continent for any month of the year, and no one who was paid to care about these things even writes a paragraph?
Good for Paul Homewood, who wrote to the DMI (Danish Met Institute) and has now confirmed that the NOAA GeoSummit records showed it got down to -64.9 C, an all time record.
John Cappelen: I have now had the opportunity to go through the American observations from NOAA GeoSummit from January 2, 2020 . […]
Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland Image: NASA
The Jakobshavn is the glacier that dumps more ice in the ocean than any other in the Northern Hemisphere. It made the iceberg that “sank the titanic”. It has been receding for years, and the losses were accelerating, but then it astonished the scientists.
“At first we didn’t believe it,” said glaciologist Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”
–ScienceAlert
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”
Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”
— Associated Press
But it’s OK, seriously, we’re all still going to bake in climate hell because all […]
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 […]
Don’t tell me that cold is nice and the climate was ever ideal
A few scientists thought that the climate was stable and well behaved during the Holocene until we invented coal power and the Ford Model T and everything fell apart “unprecedentedly”.
But 8200 years ago things apparently got pretty wild. See the GISP graph below where there was a three degree fall in temperatures suddenly (circled in red below). A new study found that at the same time China and California also cooled. Strangely, this cooling effect probably did not produce calm, happy days for the Californians at the time. Instead it looks like they got 150 years of intense winter storms and a lot of wet weather.
UPDATE: This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the LIA. Obviously that red line would continue up further if it was drawn to the present.
Looks like real climate change….
The reason for the sudden snap is possibly that a couple of massive glacial lakes in North East America collapsed and suddenly drained out […]
Right now, the hottest year ever appears to be causing an extra 4 billion tons a day or so of frozen stuff on Greenland.
Thanks to Patrick Moore, @EcoSenseNow, who tweeted: “Holy Shomoly, look what’s going down on Greenland. Ice World” after Richard Cowley posted the DMI link.
Top: The total daily contribution to the surface mass balance from the entire ice sheet (blue line, Gt/day). Bottom: The accumulated surface mass balance from September 1st to now (blue line, Gt) and the season 2011-12 (red) which had very high summer melt in Greenland. For comparison, the mean curve from the period 1990-2013 is shown (dark grey). The same calendar day in each of the 24 years (in the period 1990-2013) will have its own value. These differences from year to year are illustrated by the light grey band. For each calendar day, however, the lowest and highest values of the 24 years have been left out.
Source: Danish Climate Centre.
Over the last decade the Greenland Ice Sheet may have been losing 200Gt per year, but evidently, this winter it’s making some of that back. The Danish Climate Centre describes the graph:
8.5 out of 10 based on 81 […]
…
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 […]
This new paper by Adophi et al uses beryllium, oxygen and carbon isotopes from Greenland ice cores right back as far as the depth of the last ice age, 22,500 years ago, and finds there is a link between solar activity and the climate. It follows these proxies of temperature and solar activity as the planet warmed to the start of the Holocene 10,000 years ago.
It is gaining attention in The Daily Mail, with the headline:
Is the SUN driving climate change? Solar activity – ‘and not just humans’ – could be increasing global warming, study claims
During the last glacial maximum, Sweden was covered in a thick ice sheet that stretched all the way down to northern Germany and sea levels were more than 330ft (100m) lower than they are today, because the water was frozen in the extensive ice caps.
‘The study shows an unexpected link between solar activity and climate change,’ Dr Muscheler said in a press release.
‘It shows both that changes in solar activity are nothing new and that solar activity influences the climate, especially on a regional level.
Dr Joanna Haigh, […]
A new high resolution ice core in Greenland surprises even me with the wild swings and detail. The authors are discussing wind direction and storms that occurred in specific years 12,000 years ago, which is extraordinary information if accurate. They use elements like sodium (from sea salt) to figure out how many storms have dumped salt on the ice and take bands so thin they identify each summer so long ago*. The slices are so thin, they claim to have hundreds of samples per year.
The message here is that the cold younger dryas period ended abruptly (within one year) and so did the storms. Naturally, they warn that the abrupt changes mean the climate is unstable, “be afraid” type stuff. My take on this is that if natural factors cause abrupt climate change, we need to know what those natural factors are. The obsession with CO2 is hindering that. Also if warming brings less storms, that’s probably not such a bad thing. The caveats being that this is only one site, and less storms over the GISP site doesn’t tell us if less storms occurred elsewhere. It could be that jet streams shifted and moved the storms to another […]
Qassiarsuk: This is the site of the Viking settlement of 972 and unlike much of Greenland, offers relatively sheltered grazing land for sheep. Photo: John McLean. (Click to see more images of Greenland).
For the first time temperatures over the last 5,600 years have been reassembled from the inhabited area of Greenland. (Other estimates were from ice-cores that are far inland.)
William D’Andrea, the paper’s first author says: “.. we can say there is a definite cooling trend in the region right before the Norse disappear.”
8.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]
A sample of recent scientific news from NIPCC * The Glaciers of Greenland were smaller 5000 years ago; * African savanna trees thrive with increases in CO2; * It was hotter in China a thousand years ago, and by a whole degree; * Marine-life-with-shells can’t agree on their favourite CO2 level and * Temperatures make no difference to the 5000 year record of hurricanes. […]
Greenland Interglacial Temperatures – last 10,000 years. Are we headed for an ice age? (See below for more detail.)
David Lappi is a geologist from Alaska who has sent in a set of beautiful graphs–including an especially prosaic one of the last 10,000 years in Greenland–that he put together himself (and which I’ve copied here at the top).
If you wonder where today’s temperature fits in with the grand scheme of time on Earth since the dinosaurs were wiped out, here’s the history. We start with the whole 65 million years, then zoom in, and zoom in again to the last 12,000 from both ends of the world. What’s obvious is that in terms of homo sapiens history, things are warm now (because we’re not in an ice age). But, in terms of homo sapiens civilization, things are cooler than usual, and appear to be cooling.
Then again, since T-rex & Co. vanished, it’s been one long slide down the thermometer, and our current “record heatwave” is far cooler than normal. The dinosaurs would have scoffed at us: “What? You think this is warm?”
With so much volatility in the graphs, anyone could play “pick a trend” and depending […]
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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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